Sleep Paralysis

Ghost are an apparition of a dead person that is believed to appear or manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image. A ghost is thought of as a disembodied soul, a soul of a dead person inhabiting the world. One case of ghosts was with a Greek philosopher Athenodoros Cananites, who saw a haunted house and started watching it at night since he was interested in what was going on. He said one night an old man, bound at the feet and hands with rattling chains, appeared to him and beckoned the scholar to follow him. The ghost then disappeared and Athenodoros had the spot where he vanished dug up, shackled bones were found and they had a proper re-burial and the haunting then ended (Krystek). There are many cases like these but they don’t …show more content…
Like for instance when you wake up and you feel like something is over you or you actually see it, and you’re not able to move. You feel like you’re stuck and being held down by some sort of force like a ghost. I admit it is scary, but it is not a ghost it’s actually sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is when you wake up and you feel as if you’re glued to the bed and can’t speak or anything, you just see something over you like a person. Geoff Hutchison is a miner who experiences sleep paralysis. He describes an experience and says "It was just a man with a big black coat and a big wide-brimmed hat. He just stood there bent over me. I couldn't move my arms or legs and had to lie there”(Ghost). I see why people can create a connection and think it’s a ghost, but it’s actually sleep …show more content…
It’s like our brains have “explanation models” that make us believe everything even when we don’t have all the actual facts. For example, we’ll see a picture, and think there’s a ghost in the background but it’s actually just a blur or something flying by. Or we’ll see something half asleep and think it was a ghost but it was actually just us not being fully conscious yet. This kind of thing ties in with how our brain fills in missing details, like it creates false memories. People will believe they encounter a ghost, but they later on won’t really remember and just try to fill in the pieces. Making it seem like they actually encountered one, and creating sort of a fantasy of what happen. There are actually fantasy-prone personalities, which are people who tend to mix their fantasies with memories of real events and construct new memories which seem real but are not. This process is called memory confabulation, and we all dolt to some degree.) Fantasy-prone people are in no sense crazy (Thomas). This goes to show that we’re not always right, and we can have misperceptions of things we