"Your body can feel like it's getting pushed or crushed. Worst of all, the sufferer, despite being unable to move, feels fully awake throughout the entire episode.
They can also experience intense fear, chest pressure, hallucinations and difficulty breathing. (Estimates for exactly how many people are affected by sleep paralysis vary widely, but Hufford said he believes roughly 20% of people have experienced it at some point.) Because of a physiological mechanism that prevents sleepers from acting out their dreams, those who experience sleep paralysis are left paralyzed (hence, the self-reports of being "frozen" during ghost sex encounters). Sleep paralysis is thought to be the result of someone waking up before their REM, or the rapid-eye-movement sleep phase, cycle is finished. It's normal and it's common, much more common than people thought that it was." "Other people mistook it for psychosis - schizophrenia, for example - which it's not. "When I first started working on it, a lot of people thought it was a cardinal symptom of narcolepsy, which it's not," David Hufford, author of The Terror That Comes in the Night and one of the first researchers to begin studying spectrophilia, told Mic. "You feel like you're going to die." But even though ghost sex predominantly has its roots in mythology, modern-day researchers now attribute the phenomenon to a very real, very common condition: sleep paralysis. They include reports from ancient Greek medical literature, a tale from the Old English epic poem Beowulf, an account from the prophet Mohammed and 16th- and 17th-century witch trials. The book Sleep Paralysis: Nightmares, Nocebos and the Mind-Body Connection further recounts the demonic predators and spectrophilia-like experiences that have appeared in the more than 4,000 years since the tablet was etched. "This is something that's gone on - truly written in every culture, in every philosophy, in every religion - since the beginning of time," Patti Negri, a psychic who conferred with Blasick after her experience and who served as a paranormal expert on the Travel Channel special Ghostly Lovers, told Mic. On the tablet, the demons are described as visiting men and women nightly to either become pregnant or to impregnate humans with hybrid spawn. Grim grinnin' ghosts: Despite the elbow-nudging and eye-rolling the idea of ghost sex can evoke, eerily similar experiences of supernatural sex or spectral rape have been reported in one form or another since at least 2400 B.C., when demons Ardat Lili and Irdu Lili were described on the Sumerian King list, the tablet that gave the world the epic of Gilgamesh. "The touch itself like that, it's kind of human, like, you know, hands. "I just could feel this presence coming closer and closer and then I start feeling the actual touch without being able to see much," she told Mic. Natasha Blasick, an actress best known for the film parody Paranoid Activity 2 , had a similar experience that went viral after she revealed it on a British talk show last year.
"I used to think it was my boyfriend, then one day I woke up and found it wasn't," she told FHM magazine. The phenomenon has come to be something of a punchline in recent years, thanks to a rash of sexual supernatural encounters reported by celebrities like Lucy Liu, Ke$ha and, famously, Anna Nicole Smith, who claimed a ghost would crawl up her leg and have sex with her while she was living in Texas.
(It also, curiously, is used to describe sexual arousal derived from reflections in mirrors.) Unbeknownst to Joy at the time, she was experiencing what paranormal investigators and parapsychologists have deemed " spectrophilia," a term that encompasses both the actual act of alleged paranormal intercourse with ghosts, spirits or invisible lovers and the fetish for paranormal intercourse. It was almost like I was in a real relationship with a guy." " used to have visits from strange spirits or whatever and actually have sex with them," Joy, who did not want to reveal her last name, told Mic. But when she became an adult, the ghost continued to visit her - and it became something of a familiar friend. At first, this specter inexplicably terrified her. Ever since Joy was a little girl, someone or something has stalked her bedroom late at night.