Nightmareland: Travels at the Borders of Sleep, Dreams, and Wakefulness

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Nightmareland : travels at the borders

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TRAVELS AT THE BORDERS OF SLEEP, DREAMS,ANDWAKEFULNESS LEX “LONEHOOD” NOVER

Tavgpits, REE tinarey

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Check Ona. Sleep Paralysis 1.

Chapter Two. : Parasomnias

29

Chapter Six Hypnagogia

Chapter Seven Psychic

143

173

Attacks

Chapter Eight 195 The Alien in Ques

Jason Jam portrays the unbridled terror of sleep paralysis in his 2016 drawing On the Ceiling.

Not surprisingly, the master of melancholy and the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe, incorporated the SP phenomenon in his work as well. Here is an excerpt from his “The Fall of the House of Usher”

(1845): SLEEP

PARALYSIS

9

—

NN

is the poisoned éclair! There are a hundred and thirty on there. Spin, spin, spinnnnnnn... spinnnn the Lazy Susan! —“FOOD

ROULETTE”

TRANSCRIPTION

In the preceding

story, McGregor

BY DION

MCGREGOR;

BY STEVE

manically

spews

VENRIGHT

a black-

humored account of hundreds of people standing in line to get a crack at “winning” a poison éclair from a giant spinning turntable. After all the participants have gotten their eclair, they bite into them simultane-

ously, and you hear McGregor happily chewing his. Suddenly, there’s a horrible scream. Apparently McGregor himself was the “winner.” In another piece, “Our Town,” McGregor reveals the secrets of a

small town, including a mortician who was so proud of his work that

Dion McGregor, a

one-of-a-kind somniloquist. Illustration by Kerry Zentner, 2013

(reference photo: portrait from The Dream World of Dion McGregor,

Bernard Geis Associates, 1964).

PARASOMNIAS

41

At : ene

t

Though the prosecution presented a strong circumstantial case against Tirrell, Choate engineered a canny two-pronged defense: impugning the character of Maria Bickford and arguing that if Tirrell did kill her, it was while he was in a somnambulistic state—“the

insanity of sleep”*—and thus not responsible. Twelve witnesses testified to Tirrell’s sleepwalking spells, which were said to have begun at age six and increased in frequency over the years. The episodes reportedly involved violence—smashing windows, forcibly grabbing people, and even threatening a cousin with a knife, all while he spoke in a curious trembling voice that was unlike his waking cadence. One witness, Mary Head, who lived near the crime scene, said

Tirrell rang her bell the morning of the murder, making an unusual

ME

ROSTON

TRAGEDY.

The murder of Maria asin

q

fis ZAANM ZN Fn "i ;

Bickford and the

NS

subsequent trial of Albert Tirrell received sensationalized

\

coverage in the press. From the April 1846

issue of the National Police Gazette. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

TIRRELL

DURDSRING

WHILE

tN A STATE

MARIA

A. BICKFORD,

OF SOMNAMUBLISM.

NIGHTMARELAND

Fe

meteaemaveene ™

Dead-tired drivers,

when you see the black dog “you’re at the end.... It’s either get off the road or the

black dog will take you.” Drawing by Jason Jam, 2018.

Like Cerberus, perhaps these phantasmagoric hellhounds are liminal guards, keeping watch for when a driver along the interstate slides into the dream lane.

CRUEL

AND

UNUSUAL:

SLEEP

DEPRIVATION

AS TORTURE While a phantom dog sighting may be enough to scare you awake, the all-too-real practice of sleep deprivation as a form of military and political torture is horrifying enough to lose sleep over. It’s even been employed as a form of execution. In a harrowing account reported in the Louisville Semi-Monthly Medical News in 1869, a

SLEEP

DEPRIVATION

99

Fever dreams are often marked by a delirium of scale. Drawing by Jason Jam, 2019.

“T remember one particular afternoon,” Canterbury, who’d been

sick with the flu and stuck in bed all day, recounted.*° In the dream,

“it was broad daylight and the sun was shining. I had a terrible

THE

NIGHTMARE

REALM

129

Faces fleeting, shifting, and distorted may spontaneously emerge in the hypnagogic state. Photograph of masks, Lonehood 2016.

faces ... [and] tell it was a friendly family.” Though they were all skeletons, it wasn’t at all frightening, he said.’ Scary hypnagogia usually causes the person to snap back to the fully wakened state.

From trolls to supermodels, faces conjured in half-sleep are not just confined to human or semihuman form. “I had images of bright green frogs that appeared to leer at me,” said one eighteen-year-old

HYPNAGOGIA

147

An eerie message

imparted by the uninvited. Move over, Chucky. Drawing by Jason Jam, 2019.

IMPLANTING

IMAGES

Negs, according to Robert Bruce, gain access to people’s minds through openings or holes left by traumatic memories or “core images.” Perhaps even more alarmingly, they can implant ghastly core images. This was vividly demonstrated to Bruce one afternoon dur-

ing a spontaneous OBE. He saw his projected astral double pulling something out of his physical body.

“He lifted it and showed me what looked like a length of black rope,” Bruce said. “He pulled on it and a horrifically clear 3-D vision

appeared before my eyes. I saw a close underwater view of my two young sons drowning in a swimming pool. Each had a foot tied to a

heavy weight lying on the bottom of the pool.” As the boys pleaded NIGHTMARELAND

188

; i|

|

|i

Apples and oranges? Michael Pacher’s 1471 portrayal of the Devil

(detail from Saint Wolfgang and the Devil) seen in the upper right (courtesy Wikimedia Commons) compared to a “modern” alien, drawn by Jason Jam, 2018.

“daimonic”

reality, an elusive zone

that incorporates

both the

material and immaterial. Before the Christian era demonized the daimonic realm, such beings were not considered exclusively evil. “They’re not good or bad but both,” Harpur said. “Sometimes malevolent, sometimes benign. Always tricking. At best mischievous,

at worst life-threatening. There are no boundaries they won’t cross.” Jacques Vallée, the astute French-American author and ufolo-

gist, writes of a place called Magonia or Elfland that constitutes a

parallel realm coexisting with our own. Like the interior of a UFO, “it is made visible and tangible only to selected people, and the

THE

ALIEN

IN

QUESTION

203

just a false awakening. But when a series of six more false awakenings cascaded like an infinity loop, he was thoroughly rattled. “Where was my world?” he asked. “It felt as if 1was bursting through

probable worlds as layers kept giving way! At the final apparent awakening, my mind swirled... grasping for an actual actuality!... After seven, I told myself that whatever reality I might encounter in the hallway, I would accept—that’s how shaken I was—any reality was fine, as long as it stayed put.” The experience took a toll on Waggoner and for the next two years he no longer sought out lucid dreams. “Maybe like some inner Icarus of the dream world,” he wrote, “I had ventured too close

to the enormity of the unconscious, only to realize my humanness and fall back.”

When the line between dreaming

and waking becomes blurred. “The Splintered Man,” photograph by Lonehood, 2019.

LUCID

DREAMING

257

FROM A COAST TO COAST AM INSIDER, A MIND-EXPANDING EXPLORATION OF SLEEP DISORDERS AND UNUSUAL DREAM STATES—THE SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATIONS AND THE PARANORMAL POSSIBILITIES. he sleeping mind is a mysterious backdrop that science is just beginning to shed light on. It was only some sixty years ago that researchers discovered REM, the rapid-eye-movement cycle associated with dreams. In Nightmareland, Lex “Lonehood” Nover travels into the eerie borderlands where: the unconscious, dreams, and strange entities intermingle under the cover of night, revealing broader and hidden aspects of ourselves, from the savage and.frightening to the astounding and sublime.

Encompassing everything from accepted medical iene such as sleep paralysis, parasomnias, and Ambien “zombies,” and those who kill while sleepwalking to supernatural elementsike the incubus, alien abduction, and psychic attacks, Nover brings readers on an extraordinary journey through history, folklore, and science to re us understand what happens when we sleep. ; “An excellent exploration of the darker side of the dreamscape... A must-have book!”

ROSEMARY

ELLEN GUILEY, authorof.

The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology

“A potent mix of modern media reports... and bone- -chilling lore worthy of John Keel and the Brothers Grimm.” —GEORGE

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K NA PP, coauthor of Hunt forthe Skiawatker

LEX “LONEHOOD” NOVER Kasbeen the ae preducer for Coast to Coast AM, America’s most popular overnight radio show, since 2002. His work is considered a valuable resource for anyone —_studying the paranormal, fringe science, and alternative prcoties.

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Cover design: Linet Huaman Velasquez

Cover image: GeorgePeters/ DigitalVision Vectors / Getty.Images

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U.S.EE $18.00 » CAN

Photograph of the author © Cristina Favretto

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