Does Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis Involve More than Cognitive Neurosciences? By Jean-Christophe Terrillon and Sirley Marques Bonham

 John Anster Fitzgerald: The Stuff that Dreams are made of, (1857-58), private collection

To conclude, we can honestly say that most aspects of sleep paralysis, of RISP in particular, are still largely not understood, partly because of a lack of research of the phenomenon and also partly because of its "unsubstantial" nature. It is true that sleep paralysis has received increasing attention in the scientific community in recent years, particularly by psychologists in various universities or research centers, such as the departments of psychology at the university of Waterloo in Canada [21], at the university of Edinburgh in the U.K. [57], or at Fukushima university in Japan (Fukuda et al., [3-6], [33]), to name a few. It is also encouraging to see that the connections between consciousness and such states as lucid dreaming, or fields such as transpersonal psychology and parapsychology have been addressed recently in the Second Tucson Discussions and Debates on consciousness by world experts [66], although sleep paralysis has not (as yet) been included in the discussions. Also, the public at large in the United States was recently sensitized to the phenomenon of sleep paralysis as well as to other sleep disorders through a special television program entitled "Sleep Files" [67]. Therefore the tendency to explore in more depth such puzzling phenomena as sleep paralysis and their relationships with consciousness seems to increase. It is the hope of the authors that serious multidisciplinary research will in the near future unravel some of the mysteries of sleep paralysis and help develop better coping strategies for uninformed individuals whose lives are negatively affected by a phenomenon they perceive to be terrifying and that they cannot explain.

This paper is the result of personal research by the authors and the first author officially declares that the subject matter of the paper has no relationship whatsoever with his research in the Human Information Processing Research Laboratories of ATR in Kyoto, Japan, and that his opinions do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

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