0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

Pascual Romero: And welcome back to Squaring Strange. We are here at episode 21. I am your co-host, Pascual Romero, and with me as always is…

BR: your co-host, Ben Radford.

PR: My co-host. Thank you. So this week we’re going to be talking about something very interesting and something that I’ve had a good amount of experience with, and that’s sleep paralysis.

0:00:57
I’ve spent a number of years of my life experiencing it, and as a skeptic, there’s a lot of interesting angles I can throw out there. And, Ben, you’ve done a good amount of research, so we’re going to be talking a little bit about the science behind it and the psychology as well.

BR: Yeah, yeah, it’s a fascinating topic. It’s one that I, of course, have come across over the years. There’s so many skeptical angles to it. Alien abductions, night terrors, psychology, things like that. And I’ve actually only rarely experienced them. I had a very vivid one last year, and I remember it very clearly. So I haven’t had nearly as much experience as you did, but it will be fun to talk about.

PR: Great, great.

0:01:36
So let’s talk about a couple of things before we jump into our sort of skeptical of segment. We wanted to bring up our theme music. That’s something we haven’t really talked about on the show, but it’s a little bit appropriate right now because the artist is on tour right now.

BR: That’s right, that’s right. For those wondering who composed our awesome theme song, it’s the British band Shriekback, perhaps best known for their 1985 hit Nemesis.

0:02:00
PR: Yes, as an 80s head, when we first talked about this and you’re like, I’ve got Shriekback to do the music, and I was just like, this is amazing.

BR: As you know, I’m a huge fan of 80s music and more modern stuff, the 80s especially, and everything from Wall of Voodoo, Andy Preboy, Shriekback, I mean, I just love that stuff. And of course, one of the reasons I love Nemesis is for their ability to use the word parthenogenesis. To the best of my knowledge, that’s the only song ever written.

0:02:38
PR: Interestingly enough, I never used that word in a song, but it is in an album title of a record I did.

BR: Awesome.

PR: It’s called Buttered at Birth, and it was a joke record, but we were talking about parthenogenesis in that there were gummy bears out of the gum of the bears.

BR: It reminds me of a Warren Zevon song, another favorite of mine. He used the word brucelosis.

0:03:22
Yeah, I have this thing for sort of weird, offbeat, cerebral 80s pop. Anyway, yeah, and I actually have a reference to that song in chapter four of my book, Tech and Chupacabra, for those amateur sleuths out there who are curious about it. But anyway, Shriekback recently regrouped after 30 years to tour and they’re currently playing some select dates in the UK and if the response is big enough, they might actually come to the States. And in which case, I may be gone for a week or two following them around doing the things. So anyway, if people are interested, you can find them on Twitter at Shriekback Music. They’re also on Facebook and elsewhere.

0:03:39
So it’s, you know, I love their stuff. You might as well.

PR: Totally, totally. And yeah, we’ve got a good amount of UK listeners, so there’s no excuse, guys. Go check them out.

BR: So, Senor Pascual, what are you skeptical of recently?

PR: Oh, a whole lot of things, but one in particular is an ad that I saw saying, now I don’t know how to pronounce this, so I’m just going to throw it out there and then someone will correct me by email because I didn’t bother Googling it.

0:04:13
The word is Arumites, A-R-U-M-I-T-E-S.

BR: Sounds like something from Different Strokes.

PR: The top of this flyer says, experience the positive and healing energy of Arumites. So of course I have no idea what that is. And the person who probably made this, I’m not sure they know what it is either. It uses a lot of those words that we see in the Wu world that are kind of vague.

BR: Vibrations, energy, auras.

PR: Yeah, so it says, Arumites are beautiful but powerful little gifts that improve your health by creating a balanced flow of positive energy around you.

0:05:03
And it’s a handmade piece. Someone makes it. It says, based on organite that was discovered around 1935 by Dr. Wilhelm Reich. So there’s a name that fans of Woo might be familiar with.

BR: Good old Wilhelm Reich. In fact a friend of mine, Matt Crowley, known as Matt the Tube, who used to travel with the Jim Rose Circus, he has a website, or at least he did a while back, it was Orgone Research. He’s deep into that stuff. It’s fascinating stuff.

PR: Anyway, so just to kind of give a breakdown, they have a few bullet points. They say the combination of materials used in the arumites has the following strong effects.

0:05:45
Cleaning, balancing, and harmonization of parentheses life energy around you. I don’t know what the parentheses are for.

BR: As opposed to heat energy or energy that physicists might know about?

PR: Sure, sure. Transformation of negative energy into positive energy. Now this is, here’s the part where my real bread and butter of this Sueso is, it’s neutralization of harmful radiation from cell phones, Wi-Fi, computers, TVs, etc. Now keep in mind, etc. is a weird word to use when you’re talking about neutralizing specific radiation.

0:06:21
Etc. is not a very good term to use.

BR: The color from, you know, from different cheeses like hamburger cheddar and trees…

PR: And then it’s neutralization of geopathic stress revitalization of your living space surrounding atmosphere. I’m guessing some kind of feng shui thing. So basically and then there’s a picture It’s a it’s just like a little stone pyramid looking thing that you just set somewhere, and there’s a bunch of arrows pointing to it and then some little plus signs in the air that I suppose are, you know, I don’t know if they’re talking about like ionization or something like that.

0:06:57
BR: Take my money!

PR: Yeah, exactly. So the plus signs, I guess, are just promoting positive vibes in the air or something. But to speak to this, you know, I don’t know much about life energy and turning negative energy into positive energy.

BR: Nobody does, but go ahead.

PR: No, but in reality, I just don’t really have a way to approach those because what are you talking about?

0:07:16
But cell phones causing cancer, that’s one that as a former communications technician, I’ve actually got a great deal of experience with when it comes to radio frequency RF transmission, which in the cable world where I worked is just running radio frequency along the surface of a copper conductor through a wire. Now this radio frequency is essentially the same kind of frequency you see transmitted from a cell tower, from a Wi-Fi router, from even a microwave uses a certain high frequency of that.

BR: So, this is technology that is not exactly new?

PR: No, no.

0:07:52
I mean, we’ve been transmitting radio frequencies since the earliest, you know, long-distance communications. When we talk about radiation, there are two different types. There’s ionizing radiation and there’s non-ionizing radiation. Now these are important distinctions to understand because non-ionizing radiation is like I said like cell phones, radios, walkie-talkies, Wi-Fi. And then ionizing radiation is basically anything like x-rays or the UV rays that come from the Sun.

BR: Hold on, are you saying sunlight is dangerous? Is sunlight a carcinogen?

PR: I am. I am saying it.

BR: Wow, you heard here first, folks!

PR: And not to get too deep into the science of it, but basically what that means is it’s a difference between a type of radiation being able to split an atom apart, essentially, or the whole problem with ionizing radiation is that it causes the atoms to basically mess up, and that’s what leads to not just cancer, but radiation sickness, all these other things. In fact, much more immediate things than cancer, like when you’re exposed to radioactive fallout or something, which basically is your very atoms that your body is comprised of are just falling apart and your body functions cease because of it.

0:09:08
BR: Meanwhile, you’ve got bigger problems than cancer.

PR: Exactly. Way bigger. You’re lucky if that’s your problem in that situation. But non-ionizing radiation basically just bounces around you. At its most concentrated, non-ionizing radiation essentially can heat things up, and that’s about it. So like a microwave uses it, it concentrates it, and it uses a ton of power to focus it into a small space that’s enclosed, and that’s how it heats up your food.

0:09:36
BR: And it heats the water molecule.

PR: Exactly, exactly. So it kind of like boils the water within the object that it’s… So sure, you don’t want to be in a microwave, but being near it isn’t going to hurt you. And again, it’s because that’s non-ionizing radiation. When it bounces out of the microwave, it’s fairly harmless. This isn’t a scientifically accurate description of how it works, but this explains kind of how it acts in the air. When radio frequency is transmitted into the air, it just acts kind of like sound waves.

0:10:02
It just, it ripples through the air and it kind of bounces off of things or penetrates things that are, you know, that aren’t made of lead or heavy metals or anything that’s not absorbing it, like antenna and, you know, steel beams and things like that. You know, it’s not going into your cells and causing any disruption in body functions. And that’s, I think, the biggest misunderstanding when people talk about Wi-Fi and cell phones causing cancer and all that, is that they’re under the impression that the radio waves through the communication frequencies, which are a fairly narrow band of frequencies that are known to be safe – they they don’t penetrate your body in that way. They don’t pass through you constantly bombarding you. You’re not really being bombarded not like you are with with UV, you know

BR: And just cosmic rays. Walking outside. Absolutely. Come on.

PR: And the very dirt you’re standing on emits radiation that actually is ionizing radiation. You’re around it all the time. It’s just that humans have evolved in a world where radiation is present and we’ve managed to survive without any major effects. But as we know, the sun still does cause cancer if you’re overexposed to it.

0:11:15
It’s because it causes repeated damage to the cells and to the very atoms that you’re comprised of and it causes mutations.

BR: And that’s sort of similar with the altitude. I mean, it was interesting, I was reading the other day that as much as people who complain about the TSA and all the airport security, they complain about the backscatter machines, which, to be fair, they do give off some radiation, that’s absolutely true. But the fact is that actually just simply being at altitude in an airplane exposes you to actually more radiation, I think it’s over like an hour and a half or two hours, there’s a certain threshold when actually just being in that plane by itself is exposing you to more radiation than going through that x-ray machine.

PR: Absolutely. And there are countless examples of interesting things that are irradiated and have the kind of radiation that are dangerous.

0:12:08
Bananas, they are radioactive.

BR: The atheist nightmare.

PR: Yeah, not only the atheist nightmare, but the woo peddlers nightmare. So I feel like that’s a real niche thing. It is, it is.

BR: Chiquita, pay attention.

PR: So, but again, a banana is not going to cause irreversible damage to your cells, you know, because the radiation is low. And mind you, this radiation is still more dangerous than radio waves in the air. So, if you really take seriously what this little ad is throwing out there, you should not even be within a thousand feet of a banana because that’s more radioactive in the sense of ionizing than any Wi-Fi or anything.

0:12:50
And I spent a lot of time, because most of my work was up in Santa Fe, which as we’ve said before on the show, is a very new-agey kind of town and a lot of hippies, and I was installing a lot of internet in people’s houses, so naturally I got a lot of questions about Wi-Fi. And a lot of people who are very adamant that they didn’t want Wi-Fi, which gets a little tricky when they’re complaining that their phone isn’t on Wi-Fi and things like that.

0:13:13
And the fact that they have a phone in the first place. And so it was always a lot of educating. Sometimes I think people were fairly, I did a pretty good job of explaining that it really wasn’t anything to worry about.

BR: Of course, they probably used a shill for a big cable, right?

PR: Like, hey man, we need you to stay on this million year contract, man. I don’t need you dying in five years from radiation. I promise we have your best interests at heart here, but at least in terms of radiation. But, you know, it’s just a little, you know, it’s a little funny getting into those conversations and especially, you know, when I’m talking to people who have, you know, cordless phones, I’m like, you know, that, you know, 900 megahertz or 2.4 gigahertz cordless phone, yes, it’s a landline, but the communication between it and the base is still radio frequency.

0:14:02
And regardless of whether or not you have anything in your house, you know, electrical or otherwise, you’re still in it. I mean, the radio frequencies are still passing around you at all times, and a lot of them are actually coming from space even. So you’re, you know, you’re just, you can’t escape it if you’re on the surface of the earth. You maybe could line your house with lead, but I wouldn’t recommend that for other health reasons. But, you know, it’s unavoidable and I really hope that people can put themselves at ease about it because it’s starting to become a little bit like the vaccine debate where there really is, the only debate is that there is someone who is peddling complete falsehood and someone who’s just trying to keep the information clear about what’s actually going on and Wi-Fi, cell phones, nothing to worry about.

0:14:53
You know, I mean, there are other reasons to worry about cell phones and that’s driving while using them, but I wouldn’t worry about the radiation and you don’t need to buy a little pyramid in your house.

BR: Those crystals though, those work, right?

PR: Oh yeah, well yeah.

BR: Well, there’s that.

PR: Yeah, as soon as they start sponsoring us.

BR: That’s right, that’s right.

PR: If you haven’t heard, our patrons at the $5 and up level are now receiving a Skeptic Crate every month delivered to their homes.

0:15:19
What is a Skeptic Crate? Well, like other crate subscription services, it’s a package of curiosities that’s sent to your door every month. What makes Skeptic Crate unique is that it includes skeptic themed items, science items, weird fun things from our own collections, or just some random unique doodad that we think you might like. Each crate, or padded envelope to be factually accurate, is curated by your hosts and the Squaring the Strange crew.

BR: So, Ben, what are you skeptical of this week? Well, you know, I had a I had a strange email a couple days ago and as listeners of the show know, I I get odd emails. Some of which I share with readers some which I can’t share with readers but I I wanted to share this one because I thought it was it sort of encapsulated a common theme that I get from people and and you’ll see why in a second. I’m not going to read the whole thing, I’ll just sort of touch on a couple parts here.

0:16:29
It’s a… Hi Dr. Radford, I’m very… Oh, okay. Thank you, sir, I don’t actually have a doctorate, I have a master’s degree, but thank you anyway. It says, I was looking for something else and tripped over your article, Are Ghosts Real? The evidence has not materialized. I have to say, I’m not sure, I was looking for something else and I found your article. What were you looking for? No, I’m curious now, like, this is gay porn or like ghosts or what? I was looking at something entirely unrelated and I found an article on ghosts. Anyway, he says a few years back I decided to see what there was regarding this topic and he’s referring of course to ghosts and EVPs.

0:17:06
And did EVPs from the comfort of my apartment living room recliner, he says. To keep this short, which he did not, I did get responses. So I meant to stop there for a second. So this is a common theme that I get in ghost hunting where in one of my books I talk about how the ghost hunters TV show has sort of democratized ghost hunting. It used to be this idea that only egghead scientists are smart enough to figure all this stuff out, but then the TV show Ghost Hunters basically said, hey man, do you do you like ghosts? Hey, we do too! We’re plumbers by day. You can go look for ghosts just like we do. So among the other detrimental things that Ghost Hunters TV show has done is it sort of, the message is, you don’t need to know science, just wander around. Get a camera, get an audio recorder, That’s all you need, man.

0:18:02
Don’t worry about this methodology. Research design, that’s for the wimps, man. I don’t know. So this is exactly what he did, right? He’s like, well, you know, he said, oh, I saw this stuff. I want to decide what I’m going to do. And as often happens, when lay people, and I’m not knocking, just people who don’t really understand research design, investigation, and that.

0:18:23
Like, oh, they see this on TV. They’re like, well, hell, I can do that. And so that’s exactly what this guy did. So and he says he says when people ask to hear EVPs I tell them do it yourself because that’s the best data you can get. No no no that’s not how that works. So he says anyway again this is EVPs in case and you know that would these are electronic voice phenomena these are alleged voice of ghosts that people ghost hunters will go in location and spend sometimes hours or days recording all sorts of audio stuff and again this this goes right into you. One day we’re gonna do an in-depth show on that.

PR: Yeah, I’d love to. I’ve got all kinds of opinions on that stuff.

0:18:59
So they record all these things and they hear these sort of vague murmurs like just like they turn up the audio they just they just basically they’re looking for something that sounds like like some response they’re getting so they’ll go into a room and say, is anyone here? And they don’t hear anything. If there’s a spirit here, say something. And they don’t hear anything. And then they go back and replay it. A couple days later, it’s like, oh, did you hear that? If we turn it way up, we heard like a vroom. So he says, the psychological picture regarding whatever they are, is identical to people we meet in our daily lives. Attitudes, language, usage, colloquial expressions, including swear words are also common. And here, here he’s saying that when he talks, when he talks to ghosts or empty rooms, depending on how you look at it, and gets responses back to him, they’re like, yeah, they’re just the conversations I would have with people every day. Like, yeah, that’s because that’s your psychological perceptions interpreting them.

0:19:54
That’s, that’s how that works is you’re, you know, so you’re, it’s a, it’s a version of confirmation bias, right? Because if you think about like if you’re speaking to some some dead entity, some person who’s no longer living and they say something and you believe it’s to you like this is not just sort of like some if you’re if you’re beginning with the the assumption that it’s not just some sort of random sound which you should not be. Then again, you’re going to you’re going to interpret anything as a personal direction or contact with you.

0:20:28
You’re like, oh, how can I? Oh, they said in this case, the guy’s name is Jim. And he’s like, oh, hey, Jim. So that’s what he thinks he’s hearing. So again, the fact that he’s he and again, this is the reason that I’m talking about this email is because this is very common. Like all the aspects here I’ve seen dozens of times before. And I think it’s worth touching on.

0:20:52
For example, as I mentioned, he says that he, because his name is Jim, he says something and he heard, hey Jim. And my question to you is, how do you know that, for example, the ghost isn’t Japanese? And he was actually saying, hajime, which means beginning, instead of hi Jim, right? Because keep in mind that the sounds are so faint, they’re so ambiguous. So he hears what he thinks is hi jim. And could it be hi jim? Sure. Could it be any number of things?

0:21:22
But he’s interpreting a certain way. So then he goes on to give me a personal story. I won’t read the whole thing, but it’s, he says, he goes from talking about EVPs to a personal mystery that he considers to be baffling or ambiguous. I went to Walmart and bought a package of insole cushions. If you’re wondering where this is going, so was I. I thought it was a two pack, but it turned out it was a four pack.

0:21:45
I put two cushions in each sole and they would need a little glue to hold them in. That was what happened. A couple days later, as I went to put on my shoes, I looked down and noticed the right shoe insoles looked like they had been pulled back. I reached down and straightened it out. I thought I’d checked the other shoe and the insoles of the left shoe were gone. Yeah, I don’t know what that means. Yes, it’s a whole So he’s interpreting this and again I wasn’t sure what the connection is to EVPs, but apparently he’s assuming that whatever spirit he was contact through the EVP was messing arpund with his shoes.

PR: I just have one question for Jim Why did you put two pairs of insoles in your shoes. That was sort of, did I gather that right? It sounded like, he’s like, well, I bought four, so now I need to put four insoles in my shoes.

0:22:32
BR: I put two cushions in each shoe. Yeah, I don’t know. I just, I don’t know, dude.

PR: We gotta reel this back. Okay, EVP, sure, but Jim, don’t put two insoles in your shoe, man, it defeats the purpose. Yeah, that’s not, yeah, so. Anyway. Anyway.

BR: So then he goes on, again, I’m gonna summarize it, because I already had to read it once and I’m not going to do it again.

0:22:51
He says he’s going to talk about other experiences he’s had which he relates to ghosts and and ambiguous phenomena. He says I’ve gotten knocks on the downstairs blackboards. I walked by I walked and they’d knocked back nothing happened I chuckled and walked away it happened again. The other person was beginning to freak out. I just thought it was cool I walked back a second time as I walked away it happened again. The other person was ready to run. I just smiled because I knew it was a game. So again, we see the consistent idea that a person who believes that they’re in contact with some disembodied spirit, you hear this all the time, like, oh, the ghost is playing tricks with me. It’s being mischievous. It’s like, oh, it’s being cute. Oh, it moved my keys. You hear this over and over again. People who report these ghostly experiences, and instead of thinking that maybe they’re misinterpreting something or maybe they’re sort of either they’re imposing and seeing patterns where they don’t actually exist, it’s a game.

0:23:47
Like, oh, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it doesn’t. Oh, he was messing with my insoles. But it really gives some insight into the worldview and the psychology of the beliefs. So I replied with a few thoughts and gave him a couple paragraphs on EVPs from my upcoming book Investigating Ghosts, which will be out in a few months by the way. And again, I I was trying to help him out I don’t I don’t have time to respond in depth to everybody writes me, but if I can if I can give somebody some guidance just you know in a few minutes I was like okay. Here’s what I think’s going on. Here’s a couple ideas. You know here’s go go with it. He wrote back. It says Dr. Radford. Thanks for writing back. Thank you. You’re welcome.

0:24:29
Again, he says, hi, Dr. Radford, thanks for writing back. I definitely agree with you that the interpretations of EPs can vary from person to person. Yes, that was part of my point. But it was interesting because he agrees with what I’m saying, but he disagrees. I see this all the time, I’m like, yeah, I see what you’re saying, but that doesn’t apply to me. You know, I understand, okay, the apophenia and seeing patterns, I get all that, but not my case. My case is different. My case is special.

0:24:59

Again, he goes, I wanted to try this for myself. Again, amateur investigation, people just trying to say whatever they’re going to do. So he says, I want to try this myself. And then and then, of course, he says, there is much deeper story to all this in my life. And he goes on, he goes on to discuss that. And again, this is another common issue, particularly when you’re testing psychic claimants and others. They want to tell you their life story. And Jim Underdown, who’s the director at the Independent Investigations Group in Los Angeles, and he and I have had, he and I have tested claimants on various things for many years.

0:25:42
And this is one of the hardest things too, so people contact you, oh you know, I can find water. Like okay, so you’re a dowser, okay. You’re like, yeah but before we test, I need to show you, see, here’s what happened. Like I was in the fifth grade, like no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, we don’t need to get into that. Either you can find water under controlled conditions, or you can’t.

0:26:02
You seem like a nice guy. I’d love to hear about your grandma and, you know, the weird experience you had when you were 14. Not relevant. Don’t have the time. Not relevant. I know you want to tell your story. That’s wonderful. Write a blog about it. What we’re doing here is testing you.

0:26:17
What we’re doing here is it’s trying to, you know, bring some investigative acumen and research designs to proving your claims. And that’s one of the hardest things is is getting people to identify and focus on the testable claims. They want to tell the story and I get that. You’re like, oh, you know, I had this weird experience and it’s like, I’m sure that’s cool and I’d love to hear the whole story. You’re like the fifth guy that talked to me this month. Let’s just focus on the claims.

0:26:45
So anyway. So then he says, I’ve gotten various EVPs like hi and hey Jim are easily verifiable because they’re not multi-word sentences No, that’s that’s exactly the opposite because Because the ambiguity is even higher of course with small…

PR: The fewer syllables We have the less we can you know the less we have to really pull from because a complex sentence is a little harder to Debunk you know…

BR: So yeah, already, again I’m not making fun of this guy, but it’s just these emails really give insight into the worldview. So anyway, he’s wrong about that. Then he says, he says, he says, by the way, my mother didn’t die, but it could be referring to her life in the nursing home where the family doesn’t bother with her because of her history. So it says, so it was more figurative. Okay. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is another red flag, right?

0:27:54
Because what happens if when you, when you take it from, and this actually goes back to the episode we did a couple, a couple episodes ago on being pedantic. This is why being pedantic is important and crucial for skeptical investigation. If someone makes a claim, you say, what can you do? And they tell you what you can do, and then they don’t do that. Like no, I didn’t mean that literally. I meant sort of like metaphorically, like I can find water, like kind of. Like no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s not how science operates. Science operates on specificity.

0:28:26
And so, this is exactly how psychics do it. They, you know, once you open the door to, well, you know, you give them the wiggle room, like, well, okay, I said there was a missing person, I said they’d be found near water. Well, you know, there was a Coke can nearby, and Coke is mostly made of water. I was right. No, no, no. So, again, it goes back into retrofitting and psychology and stuff. Anyway, so then he says again he’s referencing what I sent him about whether about how important it is to be sure that that the interpretations are correct. I point out to him, you’re hearing inherently ambiguous phrases and phonemes, just sounds. That any normal people can hear any number of interpretations. And that undermines the whole idea because if you play the same sound for 10 different people and each of them believes that is a sound that is relevant to them personally, like this is a ghost of a dead person talking to me personally. If you tell them that and you psychologically prime them, then that’s how they interpret that. So one person may say, hey Jim, maybe a Japanese person is hajime, beginning of a new era in your life, who knows what that means, right?

0:29:40
So you have to question those assumptions. His point was that whether you like it or not, these R’s tend to communicate. R, of course, meaning all caps. Even if what you said was wrong, how hard is it to understand, hey Jim? Well, as we discussed, it’s actually not as easy as you think it is, Jim. And he says, if we take it one step further, what if it said, it’s him, doesn’t matter? No, no, no. It does. It absolutely matters. It absolutely matters because you’re telling me that a ghost is contacting you and you don’t know whether the ghost is saying, it’s him, hi Jim, lobim, zzz.

0:30:19
Yeah, that goes to the core of what you’re claiming. It’s not irrelevant. Sorry, I’ll be okay. Anyway, so he sent me an EVP. It says, I’ll attach the Hey Jim EVP and you can make up your own mind. So, let’s play it.

0:30:44
There you go.

PR: That doesn’t sound like much. I’ll be honest.

BR: It doesn’t sound much to me. Again, it goes, but keep in mind that that’s the psychology of the ghost hunters and particularly the EVP believers. You know, over and over again, I’ve talked to ghost hunters who, they have tears in their eyes because they sincerely, fervently believe that their dead grandfather or some disembodied entity is reaching across the you know the the death door divide to reach them yeah and to them it’s like wow this you know they’re they’re touched they’re they’re people crying like oh my god I had experienced this right and you know I I don’t want to be mean it’s like I did this there’s nothing there I mean I feel bad for you but scientifically there’s there’s nothing there.

PR: When I listened to that I You know, the first thing I noticed aside from any noises within the recording was that the compression is extremely high So when you talk about digital compression, that’s basically when you record anything through a computer or you know well through a computer whether it’s a phone or a Digital recording device or you’re just transferring it to digital to email to someone.

0:32:04
What’s happening is you’re compressing the file, which means it’s basically what it’s doing is it’s trying to pack the entire file into the smallest size possible, which I had, we were just talking, our friend Sharon Hill had been talking about digital audio recording and EVP and things like that, and we got on the topic of how compression works, and I said that, you know, it’s like you’re trying to pack a 64-ounce box of corn flakes into a 32-ounce box, you know, and you’re trying to lay it out as flat as possible and make sure the flakes lay as, you know, perfectly as possible to get it in half the space. But at some point, you’re still going to smash it down and you’re going to get crumbs. And those crumbs are the little artifacts of noise that you hear.

0:32:44
Now, in this very highly compressed audio file that I’m hearing, you kind of hear almost like a little jingly sound in it, and it’s a, you know, everyone’s got their own name for it. I call it sparkle. You can hear just this twinkle kind of high-pitched artifact. And now the existence of that doesn’t really speak to what he heard, but the fact that it’s in there tells me that it is extremely compressed, and anything you hear in there is not going to be representative of what was recorded in the first place, especially when it’s something where you’re cranking up the volume as much as you can and you’re just listening to the hiss of the air in the room you’re recording in.

0:33:20
Digital, if anything, and if you’re out there hunting EVPs, go analog. I mean, it’s 100%. If I see someone looking for EVPs with a digital recorder, I’ll tell you right out of the gates, you’re gonna have a huge problem because you’re dealing with audio artifacts, no matter what, no matter how good the quality is. And again, analog means you’re gonna be walking around with some hulking tape recorder, most likely, and most people probably wouldn’t even think to use that.

0:33:50
And also, you’ve got problems with that, too, because there are motors in them, and there’s things that make noise, and the hiss of the tape. But at the end of the day, the digital recording itself makes it really hard for me to even say what I’m hearing is not just an artifact of The actual compression of the audio file.

BR: Yeah, and again, which which you know is essentially noise. I mean just there’s again. I There’s there’s no there there.

PR: No no and I yeah from my ear all I picked up was was just something that sounded maybe like a like a increase in the noise level of the ambient noise, but maybe it could have sounded like someone took a breath in or something, but it just was really not very compelling.

0:34:33
I don’t want to dwell on it, I just thought it was an interesting email that opened some windows into the mindset of many ghost hunters and paranormal believers.

PR: It’s always fascinating to look into that too. As much as I have never seen anything too compelling in that world, I always enjoy looking into it and seeing what people think they’re seeing and hearing.

BR: Yeah, and that’s one of the keys of doing investigations is a lot of times you have to work backward from the claimant. It’s not what I think is going on, it’s what do they think is going on and why. And so you have to meet them halfway and try, okay, why do they think this? And it’s instructive not only to help them understand where their thinking went wrong, but also as an investigator, it gives you more experience and knowledge in dealing with other people.

0:35:24
Like wow, okay, there’s a theme here, and that’s when you can really help people, is try to not talk down to them, not make fun of them, just say, I understand, I know exactly what you’re saying, I follow your reasoning, here’s where it goes wrong. Good luck with that, Jim.

0:36:02
Sleep paralysis was first described in the medical literature in 1876, actually, by an American neurologist named Weir Mitchell, although the coin wasn’t really termed until the 1920s. Originally, it was interesting, it was thought to be a version of an epileptic seizures they during sleep. They realized that that was not actually what was going on. It was not it was not a seizure. And anyways, that’s it’s interesting history to it. So again only a little over a century old in terms of sort of being something that is known to happen, right?

0:36:42
Although you know, it’s possible that during the Salem Witch Trials, some of the experiences that were reported as being witchcraft may have been sleep paralysis.

PR: I could believe that.

BR: What you find is that different culture—it’s a very culture-specific phenomenon. And each—different cultures have different names for it. They interpret it differently. For example, in Newfoundland, they have what’s called the old hag syndrome. In fact, a colleague of mine, David Hufford, wrote a book called The Terror That Comes in the Night.

0:37:21
He wrote about that about 20, 30 years ago. It’s an interesting book on experience-centered studies of the old hag, which is this creature that’s said to come at night, sort of the old succubus creature. We’ll do a show on sexual interactions with ghosts and demons at a later time. So we’re not gonna get into that now, but I promise we’ll get to it. But you know, of course it ties in with the whole succubus thing. And also other aspects that are familiar to skeptics.

0:37:53
UFO abductions, for example. There’s some research that suggests that abductees are more likely than average to have sleep paralysis. People who claim to have been abducted and brought up into spacecraft. And Bud Hopkins, during the 1980s, he was collecting a criterion that he felt distinguished abductees from other people. And he included sleep paralysis as being part of that package of phenomena that indicated that someone may have been abducted. This later led him to the since discredited and widely mocked, unrightfully so, statistic that he at one point put out saying that 2% of Americans had been abducted by aliens.

0:38:37
That’s nowhere near accurate, but again it sort of shows you how a person trying to force fit an agenda, well you know, hey, if you’re paralyzed in bed, what about aliens, right? Like, well, okay, there’s other neurological explanations for this besides aliens. Maybe it was aliens. I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens. So, you know, there’s lots of contributing factors to alien abduction stories, and again, we can talk about that on our show. But certainly, sleep paralysis is sort of a common theme that’s claimed as being one of the criterion for it. There’s also an angle in terms of ghost reports. I think we talked briefly on a previous show about a case I investigated where there was a sleep disturbance that was interpreted as being a ghostly presence. It was a guy who had restless leg syndrome and I talked about that one in my books. This was absolutely a sleep disturbance and he absolutely interpreted that as a ghost. So I have personal experience with some of these where you have this bizarre, poorly understood, certainly in the general public, phenomena that people interpret in a number of ways, aliens, ghosts, whatever else.

0:39:50
And again, it’s one of those things where among psychologists and doctors and skeptics, sleep paralysis is not unknown. And even that’s one reason that the documentary was interesting, was there’s so many people out there who, they don’t know about sleep paralysis. All they know is they have this terrifying thing that happens. And unless they hear a skeptic talking about it or they see the documentary, The Nightmare, or something else, they probably just continue to just wonder what’s going on.

0:40:14
Maybe they think they’re plagued by demons or something. Who knows.

PR: So we recently watched a documentary called The Nightmare. And it is a very, very cool documentary, kind of scary, kind of presented like a horror movie and it’s a story about, or it’s a documentary about sleep paralysis and it’s told from the perspective of people who’ve experienced it. So it’s not a really a narrative story about sleep paralysis but more first-hand accounts of it, cut to reenactments of the the events and the people in the documentary kind of run the gamut from those who understand the psychology of it to those who strongly believe that there is something supernatural to it and even alien. And so I thought we’d just jump into it by kind of talking a little bit about it casually and then we’ll get into the science of it after we kind of go over the the more casual interesting aspects of it and especially the experiences we’ve had.

BR: Yeah, I’ve only had sleep paralysis once or twice in my life. I had a very vivid experience about a year ago actually. And I know you’ve had far more than I have. So I’m more interested to hear what yours are, but I’ll just briefly recount mine. I was in bed and it was, I think it was, I remember looking at the clock it was like 2:14, 2:15 or something. And it was, and again, keep in mind that I you know as someone who knows about sleep paralysis This was weird is like you know I sort of like I know what’s going on, but I’m scared shitless! This is not this is not this ain’t right. So it’s like so I kind of In the back of my head. I kind of knew that was that’s what it was, but it still was terrifying And I just remember sitting in my bed, and I was I was awake I mean I could look around the room and I could I could see that I could see the red numbers on the clock.

0:42:05
But I couldn’t move. I didn’t feel like there was anyone in the room or anyone in the house. I was getting scared because I couldn’t move. I thought that, I was like, did I have a stroke? Am I having some neurological seizure? Why can’t I move? And it was really scaring me. scare me and I just remember panicking like immobile and like I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing I can do. It’s this helpless, just terrifying, just you know being unable, you know locked in your body just being paralyzed. And eventually it seemed like it went on for you know five or ten minutes. It was probably 45 seconds or a minute or something, but it was genuinely terrifying.

0:42:53
And after I woke myself up, I knew that’s what it was. But again, I was fully awake. I could look around the room as much as my eyes could move. But that was the experience that I had, and yeah, it’s crystal clear in my mind. What’s going on with you?

PR: So my story is a pretty long one, but I’ll keep it brief, but just give you a little background. Growing up, I had a lot of sleep issues. When I was a child, I had night terrors, which was waking up in a panicked state and being inconsolable.

0:43:25
I used to sleepwalk up until probably puberty. And so I always had kind of a history of sleep-related issues. Now, my dreams and things like that were pretty run-of-the-mill. I never had any major issues with nightmares or recurring things until I was a teenager when I started experiencing very sporadic sleep paralysis. This is the kind that was very visual as well as being physical. Now, as a teenager, I don’t remember these situations as well, because it only happened a few times, but it was waking up, not being able to move, and just looking towards the door and seeing a figure in the door.

0:44:12
And it was just kind of like a shadow, and usually it just kind of passed, and then I’d wake up. Now, cut to about 10 years later, it had mostly gone away into my early adulthood, but then when I was about 25, I had moved into an apartment with a roommate, a friend of mine that I went to school with, and this was an old 60s apartment in LA. And just to kind of speak to, because I have a suspicion some of it was the changing environment, as it started happening when I moved into it and I would go to sleep normally and then I would wake up in a way that it felt like I could see through my eyelids.

0:44:59
So it was like whether or not I tried to close my eyes or not, I’d just be seeing, I’d just have my vision intact and I’d be looking into the room. And the weird thing is that the lights would be on in the room. I’d be perceiving the room as if the lights were on, and I’d see the shadowy figure in the doorway just standing there.

BR: And creepy as hell.

PR: Extremely creepy. And no matter how many times it happens, it’s still, it’s extremely unsettling because you’re so, you become very lucid and even though you’re, you know, technically half asleep, you’re still experiencing it in your conscious mind. So you’re seeing this thing and it happened frequently, very frequently, for about two years.

0:45:46
I’d just pop awake and I’m just looking through my eyelids at the room with the light on and I see this shadow figure in the doorway.

BR: That’s what surprised me in watching the documentary, The Nightmare. I had done some research in sleep arousal. I mean not not in-depth But I mean, you know come across in various contexts, but one of the guys was talking about how it happened so often I mean, it was just a regular thing. And I can’t imagine I’ll be I’d be scared to go to sleep I mean if yes, and it was it was weird seeing him talking like yeah, you know So even though I had experienced the same thing the night before the week before It was like oh here it is again, and I’m still scared and it’s just I that’s got to be just terrifying.

0:46:29
PR: Yeah it’s pretty freaky and the the the problem is it sort of feeds into itself because you start getting kind of anxious about sleeping and then your sleep kind of degrades and you sleep less and then it happens more often because you’re becoming sleep deprived and it’s creating weird crossover between your conscious and subconscious because your brain is just, the wiring is kind of shorting out because your brain needs the sleep and your body needs the rest. And because it’s a very brain-body thing that happens where the part of your brain that’s responsible for putting your body to sleep essentially is missing a signal when you wake up. It’s essentially just every single time it’s terrifying and it only makes itself worse by you, you know, just it becomes like the movie Nightmare on Elm Street where you’re just like you know when you fall asleep it’s gonna happen and you don’t want to fall asleep but you can’t do anything to stop yourself other than delay it and make it worse every single time.

0:47:39
It was tricky and it eventually just kind of went away on its own. I started getting better sleep. Exercise may have had an effect on that. I think it was around the time I was getting a little more exercise. But it was very recurring and very pervasive. I mean it was just really looming every night when I went to sleep for, I think, almost two years.

Celestia Ward: Hey squares and hey strangers, Celestia here with another skeptical fortune cookie. Let’s crack it open. Failure is a stripping away of the inessential. Reminiscent of Occam’s razor, this comes to us from one of the most successful authors of our time, J.K. Rowling. The admired creator of Harry Potter and the best-selling book series in history, has introduced skeptical thought via many of her characters, particularly the level-headed and hard-working Hermione.

0:48:51
The UK-born author has a background working for Amnesty International and a rather celebrated rags-to-riches story of her own. Perhaps because of these experiences, Rowling has never been shy about tweeting her thoughts on everything from the Westboro Baptist Church to current politics to random critics who feel that fictional books on child sorcerers are a threat to Christianity. In this quote about the value of failure, she was describing her own process of failing over and over in her own writing journey as she began to realize she must put all her energies into the work that mattered. But while she was talking about distractions and work ethic, this mantra also applies quite well to the scientific method. In science, failure is a stripping away of the inessential.

0:49:39
And in this way, experiments are refined, confounding factors are identified and stripped away until the only thing that matters to the test remains. Likewise, stripping away the inessential is a necessary part of investigation. Following a lead that goes nowhere could be labeled a failure, but it takes many such failures before we can see the forest through the trees, or the true source of a mysterious sound through the audio artifacts.

0:50:05
Mysteries are often the elevation of the inessential, and the work of skepticism is to strip these away. So, like Rowling, we don’t look at this process as a failure per se, rather it’s successfully getting at the meat of the issue, without distractions, noise, tainted samples, or even your own methodology and work ethic. Now, let’s get you back to Ben and Pascual.

BR: It’s interesting you bring that up. You know, I was doing some research on it and I was looking and I came across a 1999 article in the journal Consciousness and Cognition by, it was a guy named J.A. Cheyne, C-H-E-Y-N-E, and two co-authors. And they had identified three factors of sleep paralysis. And what they had done is they had identified the factors through experiencers and then looked at it from a neurological point of view.

0:51:02
So, okay, well, this is going on, what factors, you know, what’s going on in the brain that might evoke those? It’s interesting, I’ll just touch on it briefly. The three factors being, the first factor they called the intruder and that was a sense presence and of course fear and hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, that sort of thing. And their take on it was that that was caused by the activation of the amygdala which is often simulated in REM dreams and involved in emergency flight or fight responses, which might explain the perception of threat. Because if you’re stimulating the amygdala and that’s normally when you’re like you’re panicking like you know I need to react is something’s going on there’s a threat but you’re there’s no threat because you’re in bed right and you’re kind of kind of a kind of asleep and so that was that was their that was their their interpretation was that it was it was doing part to that. The second aspect is they call the incubus, which is the pressure on the chest. I’m always reminded of the Henry Fuseli painting, The Nightmare.

0:52:20
PR: The famous demon sitting on the chest.

BR: Yeah, I actually saw that. I think it’s in the Detroit Institute of Art. I just love it. I love Fuseli. It’s just so evocative. It’s just this creepy gnome. The reason that it’s sitting on her chest specifically is because there’s the report of the pressure on the chest.

0:52:32
So, you know, it’s difficulty breathing, that sort of thing. And it’s related to the intruder phase and they suggest that people may try to control their breathing while half awake and feel like they can’t because of course their autonomic nervous system is kicking in. That’s the reason you can’t hold your breath until you die, because it kicks in. And so the idea is that when people are experiencing this, they may try to, because they can’t control their arms and legs, one thing they can control, at least they think they control, is their breath.

0:53:05
Like hold your breath, draw in a quick breath, but of course they can’t do that, because they feel like they should be able to do that, but they actually can’t, because again, the breathing is not under their conscious control. And so, Cheyne and their co-authors think that they may be sort of an inability, they interpret the inability to take a deep breath, for example, as a sensation of pressure on the chest or choking.

0:53:31
And then the third is what they call unusual bodily experiences. And this, you know, it’s the typical things you think of, you know, out of body experiences, out of body projections, a sensation of floating, falling, things like that. And this, if you think about it, these are sensations that are related to the body’s orientation, right? Feeling out of place, not feeling, you know, like we know where we are. And you know, when we’re conscious, our cellular, our cellular, our cortical and other systems keep us continuously oriented to an environment.

0:54:05
So we, we know where we are because our visual, you know, we, we navigate chairs and desks and tables and beds and every, every waking moment we have these processes that are telling us where we are in relation to everything else. Doorways, you know, driving, markets, whatever else. And in the context of, of being sort of half awake, half asleep, we don’t have that feedback. When we’re in bed, we don’t have that feedback. Those systems aren’t orienting us in relation to anything else because we’re not moving. We’re in bed.

0:54:39
So when we’re in bed and immobile, it may feel like the bed is moving or the room is spinning. If, for example, you’ve ever had a bit too much to drink, you know the sensation, right? Is the room spinning? I think it is, but it’s not. So anyway, that’s their explanation. I think it’s actually pretty solid. You can argue with some of the aspects of that, but I think it’s certainly a good stab at just trying to quantify the neurological aspects of the sleep paralysis phenomenon.

0:55:08
PR: Definitely very believable from my perspective. I have experienced various levels of that through my own sleep paralysis. The thing that I’d really picked up on in trying to figure it out was that your brain shuts down your conscious ability to move, which is why you don’t run in bed when you have a dream about running. When those wires get crossed in one direction, that’s why I used to sleepwalk, because the motor functions were not properly shut down and my dream self and my physical self kind of crossed into each other. And then, of course, in situations where you feel like you can’t move, I think it’s believable that there’s a good chance that your brain is just not able to wake up those functions in your body and you feel stuck there because you’re now aware of what’s happening and you know you’re very lucid and it becomes kind of a scary thing because your brain’s just like, no, you’re asleep.

0:56:09
BR: No, I’m not. Yes, I am. No, I’m not. Yes, I am. The dark figure in the corner says you are. Well, you know, there’s a really good book I would recommend to skeptics and anyone else. It’s titled Anomalistic Psychology, Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience and it’s by Chris French and Anna Stone, a couple brilliant colleagues in the UK. And in one of the chapters, they have a brief section on sleep paralysis.

0:56:33
And I’ll just briefly read it. It’s actually interesting, he sort of sheds some light on it. He says, the vast majority of us are subject to sleep paralysis virtually every night, albeit that we are not consciously aware of it. The normal sleep cycle involves gradually passing through different stages of sleep, each of which are characterized by changes in brain waves, breathing rate, heart rate, and so on. Part of the cycle is referred to as REM sleep, or rapid eye movement, and this is the phase of sleep that’s associated with vivid dreaming. During REM sleep, the muscles of the body are actually paralyzed, presumably to stop the dreamer from acting out the actions of the dream. As you said, you don’t actually run in bed while you’re thinking. Of course, you’re not usually aware of this paralysis because you’re only conscious of what you’re dreaming about.

0:57:18
But sometimes the mechanism that controls the cycle can go slightly awry and we regain something like normal wakeful consciousness while still in the REM state. So that sort of gives an overview of the process.

BR: Yeah, that pretty much sounds like what I had kind of gathered and I do think that that really lends a lot to the explanation, especially speaking as someone who experienced a lot of other sleep issues before that. I did a sleep study once and they hooked me up to a bunch of machines and had me take a nap.

BR: Sounds very relaxing.

PR: It actually was. It was.

0:57:54
They were looking for anomalies in my sleep patterns as I was going through the cycles. And it was very interesting kind of to come out on the other side of that and they’re saying, well, you know, the reason you sleepwalk is because your brain forgets to tell your body not to move and you start acting almost autonomously. And so you are conscious of your movement in your dream or in your head, but you’re not actually awake. So you’re not aware of your surroundings, which can be very dangerous. As a kid, I never had any major incidents, and I think I became aroused enough by just the act of sleepwalking to wake up while I was doing it. But I’ve heard some pretty, you know, crazy stories about, in fact, there was a guy who, that was his defense for murdering someone.

BR: I recall that.

PR: And I believe, am I not correct in saying, I think they did actually…

BR: As I recall the case, it was somebody who had drowned someone in a pool. And his defense, rightly or wrongly was that he did it while sleepwalking.

0:59:07
And I believe he got off.

PR: Yeah, I think I want to say that’s what I recall about that. So I would and I remember hearing that and just being fairly frightened of the fact that I were having a history of these things I was like, what will I you know, what could I end up doing in my sleep? You know, I walk on what I haven’t done it in a good 10 years or so…

BR: Well was it because I think I wrote about that that case has been many years But when I was researching it, I was talking to sleep experts and I was told that that people there have been cases of people driving in their sleep. I mean, even though driving, we think, is a very complex set of motor skills, in some ways it is, but of course, we do it all the time.

0:59:51
It’s routine, right? You have the keys, I mean, you’re not trying to solve a crossword puzzle. So even though it’s a very complex set of skills, the gas and engaging, these sorts of things, you know, people can drive in their sleep and it’s rare, but it does happen and it’s bizarre.

PR: So now that we kind of have a pretty good psychological and scientific understanding of sleep paralysis, what are some of the markers for it?

1:00:20
Yeah, there’s about four or five of them. We touched on them before. One of them is auditory and visual hallucinations. Which you and I both experience, you more than me. And one thing that I think people need to keep in mind is that hallucinations are by definition realistic. You know, if you have a hallucination and it doesn’t seem realistic, it’s not a hallucination. And I often like, well, you know, it can’t be a hallucination because it was so real. Yeah. That’s what that means.

1:00:55
PR: That’s literally why you can call it a hallucination. That’s exactly what that means, that it seems absolutely real.

BR: Yeah. And I hear this all day, well, it couldn’t have been that because it was real. Yep. That’s how that works. So you have hallucinations and often accompanied by intense fear. Not just the fear of, you know, something in the room, which can be scary on its own, but an additional layer of dread and fear and threat that is in some ways independent of whether there’s a dark shadow in the corner.

1:01:26
And you talked about that. Also there’s what’s called a sense of presence, which may be a dark figure in the corner, it may just be a feeling of being watched. It may just be some external presence is in the immediate vicinity and it knows I’m here. It’s not playing video games in the corner, it’s paying attention to me and I can’t move. And this sucks. And also difficulty breathing. You know, again one of the sort of classics, the nightmare, the pressure on the chest, that sort of thing. And it’s interesting, apparently 10 to 15% of the population report having hallucinations that occur during sleep, going into or out of sleep.

1:02:11
So it’s actually fairly common, I mean, not super common, but it’s more common than you might expect. And what I suspect happens is that, some people recognize them as being hallucinations, some people just forget about them. I mean, I’ve had that where I had something weird and like, oh, it’s oh, this is vitally important. I’m gonna go to sleep… I have to remember this is terrifying and I’m just so tired… Never mind, if there’s some maniac with an axe in the closet, you know what I’ll deal with it tomorrow morning. I’m just And I’m sure you’ve had that too. But there actually are a couple commonalities in terms of preventing sleep paralysis, oddly enough.

1:02:50
One of them is that the research shows that sleep paralysis is more likely to occur if you sleep on your back. I’m a side sleeper usually. I have a cat that makes sure that I do that. She always makes sure that I’m taking up as little room on the bed as possible. So, but yeah, sleeping on your back tends to increase the chances of sleep paralysis occurring.

1:03:13
Did you?

PR: Yeah, historically I’m more of a back sleeper. I sleep on my side nowadays since I’ve been married, well, since I’ve lived with my wife, and just as a matter of practice when we were still sharing a queen-size bed. But yeah, no, I generally prefer to sleep on my back and so that definitely, that one checks the box for me.

BR: Yes, yes, and it also better just for for sleep apnea. You know just I mean There’s a variety of reasons that I think it’s sleep apnea is tied in with you know difficulty breathing I mean, these are all tied together. And the other factor that came up was anything that interferes with the sleep cycle Which is predictable right? I mean, I say you stress jet lag overwork things like that Anything that’s gonna the anything’s gonna screw with your circadian rhythms and the sleep rhythms are more likely to increase the likelihood of sleep paralysis.

1:04:06
PR: Yeah, I can, again, I can believe that. That was a period of my life where my sleep was incredibly inconsistent and I stayed up very late.

BR: You’re a musician on the road, man. This is not…

BR: Yeah. Amazingly, it didn’t ever happen to me on the road. Really? But it…

BR: Probably just because you’re so exhausted.

1:04:25
PR: I think that, yeah, it must just be, yeah, at that point. But my sleep habits are very, they vary. I mean, now that I have kids, it’s stabilized a little bit more. I just, I can’t stay up. But the situation I was in when it was happening the most, especially when it started happening as a teenager or when I started remembering it happening, that was a period of time where I’d be up late, talking to friends, hanging out with friends, going out, sneaking out of the house, whatever, and then getting up in the morning and going to school and operating on three to four hours of sleep max.

1:05:01
And then when I was about 25, this is when I had just moved in with a roommate who he and I were just keeping very weird hours because we didn’t have a schedule that had us up early in the morning. and same thing, it was like the sleep schedule was just getting weird and inconsistent and bedtimes varied by several hours in any given night. And so I can definitely see that as being a huge contributing factor. And also why when I started getting more exercise, it got better because my sleep kind of started to correlate with my expenditure of energy and everything.

1:05:34
So it’s good to know that it can be avoided.

BR: It’s certainly minimized. But, you know, again, it’s more common than people realize. They just may attribute it to a nightmare, which we all have on occasion. And again, it’s ambiguous, right? I mean, you know, you may wake up for just a brief moment and you’re paralyzed, but you don’t know you’re paralyzed because you’re sleeping. But anyway, this is a fun topic, and it was really cool hearing your stories.

1:06:00
I’m actually curious to see if any listeners have any scary stories about sleep paralysis. I’d be happy to hear from people.

PR: I’d be willing to bet some of you are people who’ve experienced it. We’d love to hear your stories. You can just email us at squaringthestrange at gmail.com and let us know about your experiences with sleep paralysis and how it went for you.

BR: Or for that matter, if you happen to have any romantic dreams about me or Pascual, or both of us, send those in too, we’re cool.

PR: We would like to thank our sponsor level patrons Amy Freshour-Kelly and Dr. Angela Mattke.

1:06:50
If you’d like to find out what that is and how to become one, head over to patreon.com forward slash squaring the strange. Patronage starts at just a buck and there are a lot of perks and bonus content just for our patrons.

BR: If you’d like to lend your moral support you can head over to iTunes and give us a review. Every five-star review gets us a little more visibility on the iTunes podcast charts and brings a smile to Pascual’s face.

PR: So that does it for us this week. Next week we are going to be at Bubonicon here in Albuquerque, the Sci-Fi slash Science slash awesome nerdy convention. So as of this recording we haven’t gone yet, but by the time you’re hearing this we will have. So hopefully we saw some friendly faces there and yeah, we will have recorded a bunch of fun stuff. And the theme this year for Bubonicon and for our episode is time travel.

1:08:06
And I think we’re going to have a lot of fun with that, talking about all the science of it and the paradoxes of it and how much Celestia and I can nerd out about it. She’s going to be our guest for the next two episodes, actually.

BR: Yes, yes, absolutely. I have to admit, and this is no secret, I’m actually not a big fan of time travel in books and films. I just, maybe I’m just jaded, maybe I just saw I just saw one too many where it was just this cheat. I’m like, really? That’s, oh, you just solved the whole movie?

1:08:38
Okay, I just, you know. So I mean, there’s some that are done well. I mean, I liked, Inception was good, 12 Monkeys was okay. But on the whole, you and Celeste are by far the bigger time travel fans. And Time Bandits! I like Time Bandits. And my favorite Time Bandit scene was the dwarves and the one who was picking his nose and he rubs it on the… remember that?

PR: I gotta refresh myself. Go back and see that. Time Bandits. There’s one scene where there’s like I don’t know seven or eight dwarves and it’s just a little side business of the actor and he just picks his nose and wipes it on the other guy’s cap in front of him. I don’t know why, like, of the entire film, that scene jumps out at me, but that’s what it was.

1:09:22
PR: Awesome. So, until next time, we’ll see ya. Squaring Strange is a production of Kronos Creative LLC. Copyright 2017. Theme music by Shriekback. Additional music by Memory, Guitared and Feathered, and Pascual Romero. Content Producer Celeste Ward. Audio Engineering, Producing and Editing provided by Pascual Romero at Acronis Creative Studios. Additional Support provided by Ashley Romero and of course our listeners and patrons. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of Squaring Strange and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Acronis Creative, Center for Inquiry, our advertisers or any affiliated organizations and employers.