[Music] foreign [Music] have you ever woken up in the middle of the night unable to move haunted by hallucinations or visions of a terrifying entity you're not alone there exists a scientific curiosity that explains why such a frightening event occurs so today we discuss the terrifying phenomenon of sleep paralysis this is red web force it is time sleep paralysis has been a topic we've talked about for a long time on and off on this show and today we're finally diving into the sources of it all the history of it and how it has entered the Zeitgeist welcome back to Red web I'm your host Trevor Collins with me with his own experiences on this very topic but hearing some of the origins of this for the very first time Alfredo Diaz so initially my motion was hell yeah because I'm sure we're gonna dive into some of the scientific reasons why yeah I'll get to know different experiences and the lesser extent our full extent of sleep paralysis um from other people's perspectives but then also the other half of me went oh I suffer from this yeah dude this is such it I'm so so stoked for finally talking about this this is just one of those topics that we've teased for quite some time and we decided to formalize it in a unique format you know we've dabbled with this format before when we talked about spontaneous human combustion so this is a little bit different we're going to talk about the historical origins of the sleep paralysis demons as they as they are yeah how culture has impacted those but also the scientific background as to what sleep paralysis is how it impacts people and why I'm assuming it's like in you're interrupting like a deep sleep state but I I honestly don't know much about it I just know I suffer from it and I go it's manageable the cool thing about it or the interesting thing I would say about super Alice is that's something that's so common yet not all at the same time like you'll run into people who also suffer from sleep paralysis and and they will totally be in the same Lane as you in terms of experiences and what happens and you can discuss and rant about it but then the people that don't experience it just go I've never yeah experienced this right tell me about it wow that's kind of terrifying yeah right literally we've had like when I described to you my experience as you go that's wild right spooky because I know your story yeah wild listen every single member of red web here at the production house in the in the headquarters has had experiences with sleep paralysis except for me from top to bottom I'm I'm the one going what come on I guess I got a little bit of fomo I just need the wild Christian had an experience when was your last experience Christian last night God last night oh my God we should definitely dive into them is it because I'm also curious this is because we researched this the person it might be honestly sorry Fredo oh no no I'm saying we should definitely dive into that in a bit um but also I'm curious to see what the percentage of people in the world suffer from right sleep paralysis yeah look that up the chair is typing away not in the outline but I can give you the answer I would love to hear it uh that's approximately seven or eight percent of the general population when I heard the seven or eight I was like 70 to eight wow that's a lot but you know I can get whatever it's gonna be like eight forty percent maybe even 30 and I'd be like let's see there's a ton of us seven to eight this is a bad draw suddenly red web there's something about it there's something in our Task Force Headquarters water I think we got to get our pipes checked possibly I'm reading more and that that number varies depending on the source you dig into that oh okay it's apparently very broadly speaking I think that smaller number is uh the percentage of people who experience it regularly in terms of people who will experience it at some point some people say as low as eight percent some people say up to 50 I thought it was like a majority of people at least experienced it once but without further Ado I want to dive into what sleep paralysis is to get this engine started all right so sleep paralysis is the phenomenon that happens during the process of falling asleep and waking up your body is sending signals to your arms and legs and the rest of your body telling them to relax it's a process called muscle atonia the reason why you experience muscle atonia while you fall asleep is because you want your body to be relaxed you don't want to act out your dreams during REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep it's a phase during your sleep it's usually the most active your brain is and it's usually where all your dreams stem from so it's another reason why you don't really remember your dreams very well unless you wake up in the middle of the night you might have interrupted the dream and then you're more inclined to remember it in that sense but otherwise the yeah your dreams are isolated to these little islands of heavy brain activity in the middle of the night see that's that's another piece of science because like I never remember for any dreams I know people that I remember dreams all the time I don't I very rarely interesting yeah I mean I either don't remember the dream or maybe once a quarter have a dream yeah or sometimes I get really unlucky and I drink too much liquid and then it's like I have the dream where you're pissing oh god I've had that dream like three times in the last week I've woken up dry so we're good I've moved on since the age of seven but so yeah oh man like when I sleep on my back I'm a light sleeper and that's when I feel like I dream the most but it's probably because I'm waking up a lot so when sleep paralysis occurs usually what's going on is you become awake you're consciously aware however your body is still in that muscle autonious state so you are unable to move your limbs your muscles and you feel very much stuck in your body you have this oh yeah paralysis as it is like this paralyzed feeling oh yeah now I could read off data here of the symptoms but since you and Christian have both experienced it do you mind sharing the symptoms you experience when going through a bout of sleep paralysis yeah it's usually waking up in a panic being completely paralyzed not being able to you can move anything but my eyeballs and then on top of that it's usually being short of breath too um and so you're not sitting there being able to really take in the full amount of oxygen you normally would so it's like shallow breathing it just feels like yeah shallow breathing and you can't breathe or utilize your lungs as much as you normally would so I think it's the diaphragm that that giant muscle that helps you breathe that's kind of honestly that's like you know certain muscle functions aren't on I wouldn't be surprised if there are muscle functions with with your lungs that just aren't activated because they're off and kind of that would make sense to me but yeah it's waking up in a panic only being able to move like your eyes or if that and and then from there heavy breathing and it's always in a panic yeah it lasts anyway naturally very scary yeah it lasts anywhere from like five seconds to like I don't know maybe a minute oh man this guy's he's reading the research outline ahead of me I love this damn exactly it's funny you say that you talk about uh shortness of breath because kind of what Trevor was talking about REM sleep in REM sleep I love sleep I talk about I like look at look up dream stuff all the time it's like fascinating to me during REM sleep you're breathing's naturally irregular and so that may be part of why you have that shortness of breath when you're coming out uh yeah from what I've read there's no scientific reason they're confident in as to why your breathing's regular but it's proven interesting but for for my experience I get it so often now that I don't even get scared when it happens I get annoyed that's you so you're okay we'll get to this the Shadow Demons here in a second but you you essentially just get annoyed at them at this point yeah like it it will happen to me it can happen when I'm falling asleep and it can happen when I'm waking up and yeah it's just the I can feel you're so familiar with the sensation it's like Alfredo is saying you can feel that you can't move but you're awake and all you can do is look around and in order to break out you just have to focus all your energy on moving like a finger it makes me want to take a lot of deep breaths right now I know I just imagine I'm going he screams with his eyes so it seems like this episode is going to be a unique one in the sense that we're gonna be breaking down the science we're going to talk about science which I'm super excited because I've had this for majority of my life and I know nothing about it I just haven't dove into any of it um but it seems like it's gonna be a lot of conversational pieces yeah there's gonna so then we're gonna talk about you know we'll talk a little bit more about the science here but then we're going to talk about the the sleep paralysis demons now this is something that's very commonly heard about known about one of the common ones is like a shadowy figure but we're going to talk about the historically popular ones that have actually had impacts on culture and show up in things like paintings uh in the 1700s Etc and also kind of riffing on the the idea of shared hallucinations and why that might be the case but we'll kind of get there I want to come back to the science though and thank you guys for sharing your symptoms because those are traditionally the common symptoms now it's interesting that you guys feel the the shortness of breath because one of the symptoms is feeling that heaviness on the chest which leads us kind of to the causes or at least some of the theoretical causes of sleep paralysis many of these will make a lot of sense and I'd like to hear kind of maybe your reactions to them but narcolepsy which is a situation where a person who is inflicted with narcolepsy might fall asleep almost spontaneously out of their control and it's something that they're plagued with for most of their life if not all of their life but also things like staying up super late or working night shifts so when you have a nocturnal schedule or when you're working through when your brain would otherwise want to be sleeping that carries into sleep deprivation can lead to sleep paralysis but interestingly with the idea of breathing in mind having obstructive sleep apnea can also lead to this feeling sleep apnea if I remember correctly is essentially shallow breathing or irregular breathing when you're asleep for other various reasons sometimes medically sometimes just how the person is like my father has uh symptoms of sleep apnea and it just interrupts his ability to sleep deeply or sleep for long periods of time yeah it's a it's a breathing disorder a sleep-related breathing disorder where for whatever reason your air flow is blocked occasionally during sleep I wonder if a very common thing with a lot of people a deviated septum like ooh also is parallel to that why would you say that uh I I will say nothing I'm actually thinking about it I have had far less sleep paralysis I would say events after I had my uh doesn't balloon sinoplasty oh yeah yeah or they corrected my deviated septum correct so after their lives that you guys are breathing like this good air yeah yeah I was sitting here yeah we've been breathing good dude I'm glad you joined it's a common thing yeah the number of people want to have talked about they're like yeah I you know I can't breathe that's so interesting consistently and I breathe out of my mouth when I'm sleeping and that kind of stuff and so now I just haven't experienced it as much but that's really that's and I kind of think about it maybe yeah Task Force if you have a similar experience I'd I'd love to hear from you all but as you were saying in your symptoms Fredo episodes of sleep paralysis can last anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes Ah that's a yes you're like so scene terrifying minutes I might add yeah now oftentimes when someone experiences sleep paralysis they will also experience hallucinations which manifests itself into sleep paralysis demons that's what they are referred to colloquially as these hallucinations now you might ask yourself why very good question these hallucinations occur because the serotonin release that occurs because your brain is trying to get you out of REM sleep and it makes you more aware similar to that of taking hallucinogenic drugs serotonin triggered hallucinations tend to trigger extreme fear reactions as well so what is theorized here that's that's oh extreme fear reactions not extreme happiness reactions right right so basically what's happening is that as your body is regulating your sleep cycle to knock you up into a lighter level of sleep away from REM for whatever purpose we're still as humans trying to understand it pumps you with a little bit of Serotonin what could happen is maybe you get too much and it pushes your awareness to away but not your body so your body's still asleep your mind's awake and now you have this heightened fearful State and those chemicals are just creating these hallucinations but other sources in addition to that say that hallucinations are actually caused by being partially awake during otherwise your REM cycle so your brain is still kind of lulling behind your Consciousness it's still in a pseudo-dreamy state yeah and so your dreams impress upon the real world and impact kind of your surroundings I mean I believe it because I just feel like coming out of REM and just getting jolted out of it I'm sure there's a lot of systems in your body that are just not online yeah we're just like oh we didn't switch that on before switching that on that's off and and so everything's out of rhythm it feels very much like you know there there is a show or a movie that's a perfect comparison but like Westworld where you're behind the scenes right the robots are downstairs looking at other robots be operated on and the humans think they're humans because they're just consciously walking around but you're actually behind the scenes of it all like you're not supposed to be here you're not supposed to be seeing this yeah so the fact that your eyes are awake and your brain's kind of awake your body's going whoa you're not supposed to be here right now what are you doing and so yeah it's just like you're really off kilter yeah I mean I've talked about my experiences before but I mean like in the moment waking up and I very rarely uh maybe once or twice out of my whole life of maybe having this happened to me like 50 times like that's still a lot yeah um maybe once or twice that I've seen like a demon but in that moment it's so rare it's so vivid yeah and I'm I'll gloss over this because I mentioned this before but you know the one instance I got up I was able to have motor functions got up shoved the demon against the wall I was gonna just wail on it and then turned to my brother and was my brother waking me up so not only can it be let me realize not only can it be like this imaginary figure yeah but it can also project itself onto an actual person that's so scary dude which is just like it's such a like interesting jump yes that you just never think of your brain is live rewriting reality yeah like as you are kind of awake you're up you weren't physically up yeah your brain was rewriting the reality that was hitting your eyes that's so spooky yeah it was a fascinating it was a surreal experience it was it felt legit like a movie yeah in the sense of like the way the demon faded away my brother appeared I was like this is some visual effects stuff and then and then you start to go like no wonder they came up with that idea for this movie you know real experience in this way and with that said we can go into more detail with your store if you want but at the end of this episode we're going to talk about you know your traditional stuff with the sleep paralysis demons here in a second but I also if you guys are comfortable with it we have cat and we have Jillian's experience our some of our research team and then Christian has some of his experiences so at the end of this episode we're gonna cap off with some personal anecdotes to kind of expand on this but it's either that seven percent number is just the low balling it harshly or the task force just attracts sleep paralysis members and and freaks that want it I picked for the team and everyone's going I hate this team now the last piece of sign that I wanted to cap off and I think this is so it I mean it's all been fascinating but this is so interesting to me love the brain love dreams now other research has shown that during sleep paralysis there is an error in how the parietal lobe processes your body's functions and for example movement I I looked a little further into the parietal low because that's what I do I pull things apart and this is the part of your brain that helps you understand the world around you it assembles all of the input that you get from like your touch from your body just existing and turns it into useful information that you can then interpret the physicality of your world and so when that is either acting up or it's being interfered with you can imagine now how that might cause you to as we were saying rewrite the reality you're actually experiencing which we could do a whole spin-off episode on that I mean when you see like glitch in The Matrix sort of stuff which we've talked about in the Mandela effect episode but also just like the idea that what you're seeing can you trust it can you trust senses that's spooky because that's all you got oh things that people experience way more than sleep paralysis Deja Vu that is another really interesting Fascination like is there any science behind that you know what I mean or is it really just I think I just saw this before and I'm just my brain is just piecing this together yeah I did and really I didn't that there's two schools of thought and this is just me having looked into that very phenomenon and experiencing it very vividly a lot recently it's one do you just relive your life on repeat true that would be I don't know good or bad I don't know there's a lot of repeating functions that you do on a daily basis and then two well I just mean like when you pass away you get born again as your same exact self oh and so you can remember situations or you know using karmic ideology like are you born as somebody else who then went through something similar or an a more scientific and grounded perhaps angle to look through the brain would be it's actually a small glitch in your brain where as you are coding memory it is actually tickling your like Consciousness in a way so basically as you're seeing something happen it is triggering your memories in a very poorly phrased way basically your brain is feeling live input as a memory and as live input at the same time which is just confusing you into going this is I've seen this before but you're actually just experiencing it via some small minor Twitch in your brain essentially interesting so your brain's essentially going your body's experiencing it live but there's the glitch in your brain going memory memory memory yeah oh that's yeah jarring yeah so that's the what makes the memory side more interesting is I remember learning this back in college is that supposedly when you have when you're remembering a memory your brain is not actually going back to that point in time your brain is accessing the last time you remembered that event oh and so that's why it's said that memories get fuzzier over time because you're slowly oh it's a game a telephone yeah yeah but also gaining distance from the actual event I've never blew my mind yeah so then if you I mean I guess yeah repetition when you're studying for a test or doing anything else like in your profession that's how it becomes second nature is because it's become so repeated that telephone relay is so strong there's more points between you and when you first learned yeah oh that's cool and I've wasted so much of that on FPS College damn all right now with some of the signs under our belt of course this is the study of the brain there's still so much to be understood so much left to properly figure out but these are the leading theories but with that said I want to move now into the more interesting side of things which is the sleep paralysis demons because the hallucinations that we talked about regardless of the origin regardless of how and why they are there oftentimes people experience hallucinations during sleep paralysis and they often include an entity or a figure of some kind that is usually dubbed the sleep paralysis demon many people who experience this condition reportedly see the same air quotes demon in different instances of sleep paralysis and when describing their personal demons many online users have found that they actually see the same entities that when they describe these figures they go wait a minute wait a minute I've seen something very similar and it's not just this vague oh humanoid outline of a shadow we'll get into exactly what the common ones are but they're usually a lot more descriptive really yeah because I thought the the through thread here would be because for my again my personal experiences you're waking up in the middle of the night it's dark [Music] um for most people and so it's a dark figure you can't really make it up so I'm very like baffled to find out that no there is detail Within because I've just never experienced or seen any of that detail I'm also interested to see how they're experiencing that detail of I'm assuming a lot of but let's say most people sleep in a dark room as opposed to like I leave a light on or leave the TV on I think there are pieces of the human biology that are naturally scared of certain things the dark would be one of them Heights is another natural thing like that and they all have you know their basis or you know Origins and evolution but yeah I think the brain on the whole is just attaching to whatever's immediately in front of you which usually is dark but what's interesting is that and some people have kind of theorized that these sleep paralysis demons are shared because they were a reflection of the Zeitgeist the cultural fears of the time because when you look back over the centuries like you can see kind of that Trend and some people even theorize that the modern version of the sleep paralysis demon is actually alien experiment phenomenon people being inducted researched on I mean that's where the whole joke around like if we joke about it like the probing and like looking at the human parts and poking and prodding and being in these cold dark scientific rooms and a spaceship some people theorize maybe that is today's version of sleep paralysis because this last century has been so obsessed with space and flight and looking outward beyond the stars oh okay I mean I I feel like the masses and this is just my own thought here I feel like the Masters would like conjure up maybe like the re the girl from The Ring or is that you just said that right like why I feel like that's more widely known in fear yeah you just said that and I immediately thought if I had sleep paralysis right I'd see what I'm seeing uh you know a fuzzy TV girl crawl out of the well and under my floor and like up onto me oh that's what I feel like I would see but you know I guess when you average it across everybody right right you kind of start to identify some Trends yeah I mean I I just would have thought that experiencing something like I don't know whatever Modern Day horror pop culture demon thing would be something that's an easy uh Parallel Lane as opposed to a bigger jump of like aliens sure yeah yeah I mean I guess like the whole Space Race in the 60s really punched that into the cultural mindset but to your point I mean why not in the 80s like why wasn't Freddy Krueger like a very common sweet paralysis entity you know yeah true especially because it was his whole lore is based around exactly sleeping nightmares don't fall asleep yeah yeah huh that's a really interesting point but with that said I do want to talk about at least two of the or three of the Common forms that these sleep process demons come in and I I'd be very interested Christian and Alfredo stop me if any of these kind of match your experiences I know maybe the second one might but with that said let's dive into the old hag as she's called also sometimes referred to as the night hag this is a sleep paralysis demon that has crossed many different cultures over many many centuries and while the creature takes a slightly different form in each culture the common theme is that of a small I'm reading it straight off my outline freakish looking creature and I love that the use of that word freakish looking creature that sits on your chest making it hard to breathe and rendering you immobile and so now you can imagine when you're experiencing those symptoms that pressure on your chest your brain is immediately finding a solution what is it well it must be this creepy entity in the room it's sitting on me honestly I feel like that's low-key more terrifying than a demon figure like this it's too close to reality is what it is I can separate you know if there's a shadow person right I can go well I I can get past this if it's like I don't know an old lady I'm like that's that's real yeah I've seen I've seen the visit yeah I don't need this thing sounding after me right exactly it is creepy because because this is the you know mystery Pockets about movies it just kind of Jarred no the movie podcast about mystery movie podcast about Mysteries are you talking about like a small like creature on your chest just like jolted my mind to the William Shatner uh Twilight episode where he's on the plane something on the wings yeah there's something on the wing something and there's like a little like Gremlin tearing up the wing and no one else is seeing it and no one else is believing him that's a good one I would hate that so stories of an old woman sitting on one's chest during sleep can be found across many different cultures as I mentioned the old hag and sleep paralysis as a whole may actually have some connection of origin to the word nightmare so we all say Okay nightmares is a bad dream a scary dream you're trying to run away from something and like the ground is rolling under you so you're not moving or you know you try to Sprint but you actually end up crawling really slowly like that kind of stuff traditional nightmare now mayor mare is an Old English term with roots in Slavic and Germanic folklore it's described as an entity that sits on the chest of people while they sleep leading to frightening dreams I was a majority of the people in the world don't know that I had no people don't know that yeah and now you now I start to question the seven to eight percent because nightmare essentially its etymology is that of sleep paralysis or at least the physical entity that you see during sleep paralysis it's one of those questions where to me and I was trying to like clarify before and look things up to me it's like a chicken or egg situation I don't know if it's a nightmare nightmare is caused by you know the old hag sighting or if it was already a phenomenon and people started seeing the hag and then well the thing is like back then there was like witches were feared and you know believed in and so I feel like that would be the same thing that like it translates over right if you're gonna talk about nowadays we're seeing aliens and stuff like that because that's just more modern yeah hype or thought or mainstream back then that was the mainstream thing yeah what kind of was I mean that was if during a time period not to be too silly but that was their Freddy Krueger I mean we just have a lot of scary media with different and they went as far to kill a lot of innocent people absolutely the belief that they were one absolutely and that's a good point too Christian is like was it an old woman that they saw because of the name of nightmares or did the name nightmare come along because they wanted a quick way to say oh yeah I saw the old woman again she sat on my chest again terrible night I love that now interestingly enough and it sounds like we went even deeper on the word Mayor because before the word Mayor was around you have the word Mara from Old Norse which itself came from the proto-germanic word for Maron I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly which that refers to goblins or succubi that sit on the chest of people at night and that is such a strong idea that there's actually a painting it's Henry fusali's painting of The Nightmare that's what it's called and this stems back to 1781 and it could be one of the earliest depictions of a sleep paralysis demon and shows a creature sitting atop someone's chest alright I'll let you see it here that's that's a thick demon that's a thick little demon that's a I mean look that thing is one terrifying it looks it's got like a an old person's kind of like face to it smiling a little like little like Elvish ears but I mean like that looks like it weighs a good 60 70 pounds yeah I mean it's really cool when I first saw this painting and had it connected to the idea of sleep paralysis demons I was like that's so cool but now that like that's kind of the end of the idea of the old hag we'll move on now to shadow people but this just goes to show like whether it's caused from the word itself mayor or created the word Mayor the point is what's going on in society really comes out like this is just a vessel for people's fears to be expressed upon them and so you can almost it's almost like a litmus test for what the fears of a century or of a of a peoples might be yeah exactly because while they might see demons or goblins or an old hag you know if I hate pie and I see a giant pie I'm not gonna be into it uh well the thing is like it's weird because I guess like in a way a generation can manifest right off of what is pop culture or what's popular in the media but I guess in a sense you can't manifest your own intricate like demon but you're right but like people come into it it feels like it's all feeding into like these buckets right as opposed to I I hate running so I had a fear that someone's running on me or whatever it is you know what I mean yeah or it's just like couldn't it be like no jokes like someone's gym coach that they just I literally don't like physical education yeah don't like this professor or this teacher and then they're the ones that shows up task force let us know if you have sleep paralysis and you have very bespoke very specific experiences I'd be very curious yeah so shadow people I want to talk about that now because that is the one I've most heard about as somebody who hasn't had it and it does sound like you've seen a demon in your experience that's That's My Boy the shadow man is your boy okay that's what I thought now this is another common entity scene during sleep paralysis they're just commonly referred to as Shadow People the outline figure of a person with basically silhouetted in the dark can't really see details these types of figures have been seen in other situations involving drugs or sleeping medications following sleep deprivation or in hallucinations related to people with mental illnesses so this is not just something specifically seen by those experiencing sleep paralysis it has a wider reach as a hallucination and those are some of the other origins of these kind of Visions they are even seen sometimes in everyday life you talked about this you asked earlier is it because most people sleep in the dark is that why they're seeing it well some people can see them out of the corner of their eye late at night or sometimes just in the midst of the day they see they they look and something catches their eye and when they look it's gone but they otherwise saw a shadowy figure I've that happen but I feel like that's just the human mind seeking patterns yeah yeah I would say it's a patterning thing right like I I've there's definitely been times when I'm home alone and I'm like okay you know whatever and then I'm walking along or like I look down the hallway in a weird way and I'm like what was that and then I look and then when I actually look at there wasn't anything there but vividly out of the corner of my eye it looked like there was definitely a dark figure blocking what would have been behind it right so that that's interesting that this the Shadow People idea can be seen during the day or night yeah for for me and the for any like because I looked up because I forgot the name but like any anime nerds out there uh my hero Academia um has a villain called uh girl Geary and it's essentially like what I saw which is like just like like take out the fact that you're wearing a suit here maybe but it's it's just like that oh just kind of like floaty demon like Mist I don't know my Goose to that yeah so uh yeah that that's kind of yeah karogiri is kind of like a long villain design I don't want to wake up what I've seen wow yeah so some other details with regards to the to these shadow peoples that they seem to move quickly especially if you're looking for them as I was just kind of indicating they move quickly or they disappear now some believe that shadow people are demonic in nature but others believe that they could be Time Travelers or even people from other dimensions which dovetails nicely into the ideology around ghosts and some of the many theories that cover those and so there is something of a Venn diagram here where shadow people and ghosts could have an overlap so two things in my response to that why are you time traveling to when I'm sleeping right like why is it consistently that why is it consistently when I'm sleeping sure maybe there's like we can only the short presence when they're coming out of this sleep cycle two let's go back to uh just real quick they're only in tune with our wavelength when they're just waking up exactly maybe that's it maybe I just solved my own question while you're saying that and I do want to get to to the Hat man that is another common piece of iconography around matter the Mad Hatter no the uh the Hat man is what he's referred to it's very similar to a shadow person but it's like a silhouetted masculine figure with kind of like a flat brimmed hat but before we get there I had another theory as far as what you're kind of expounding upon why do we feel these entities at such weird moments one of my personal head cannons that I dabble with is like what if when you pass away you spend your afterlife watching your life like it was a movie and those entities shadow figure or otherwise is just you jumping into your timeline and you're like that's me down the hallway and they're like oh I almost got me all right well I'm gonna table that thought because I do want to get to the Hat man but that's something I think about a lot when I feel like an odd presence I go don't do anything future me would be embarrassed by my biggest fear is when you die is just complete nothingness yeah but if it's nothingness but it's like you wouldn't you don't it's there's no input oh for sure so it's just kind of yeah you always wouldn't know but the thought of it heavy how do you experience nothing yeah exactly all right the Hat Man the hatman is a name coined for a shadowy figure that many have seen during their sleep paralysis episodes the hatman has also been reported when people have taken various sleeping medications or Benadryl Benadryl I think is an antihistamine that has very heavy drowsy side effects in the last year many people have reported seeing the Hat Man and even more people have created memes joking about going to visit the hatman in their sleep some say he is a shadowy figure wearing a wide brimmed hat with no distinguishing features While others say that he had glowing red eyes some consider the hatman a specific type of shadow person so what's the time period of this because this is just Men In Black a kind of yeah like if this is during like what 60s to 80s uh we've got we've got experiences with the hat man as recently as the 90s we've got a 2008 story we're going to talk about here yeah I mean if it kicked up more recent in terms of like the 70s I mean that that's a good that to me screams like you know the fear of what the government you know during those times like what's the government doing yeah the Hat man has also been described as being very tall wearing a trench coat and once again a wide brimmed hat in 2008 Timothy Brown Jr created a blog post called the hatman project where people would share their experiences with the hatman in the blog Brown details his own experience with the hatman which occurred in 1994. brown was living with his grandmother and great-grandmother at the time and recounts a night where while drifting in and out of sleep he saw a dark shadowy man with no distinguishing facial features wearing a long trench coat and a wide brimmed hat moving about his room after he believed the hatman had gone he woke up his grandmother and his great-grandmother and told them his story both women also shared stories of seeing a similar shadowy being to the one brown was describing just years prior to this event while his blog began in 2008 Brown describes collecting stories since 2001 after hearing a radio segment discussing the same shadowy figure that brown had seen back in 1994. his blog still accepts submissions with the most recent being published January 1st 2023. oh so that's such a cool idea of a website but it took him over a decade to finally be validated in his experience so he he woke up in 94 saw this figure his family's going oh we've seen this figure before in our lifetime just years prior and then finally he hears it from someone randomly on the radio and he's like okay well then there's got to be a lot of other people out there submit your stories here but that's the shadowy man with the hat what I really like about this and what makes it so unique is I mean it's quite obvious is the fact that like this is something that I can speak on that I can really relate to I go into these blind but I still for the most part have that in the sense of I'm learning so much about something that's a part of my life didn't know there were different demons that were common demons and and then you know kind of the science behind it all I mean I can only imagine I can only imagine because I you know loved as a kid to scour the internet for creepy stories so I tumbled down the rabbit hole of sleep paralysis demons very early on but I can also imagine somebody who experiences this has no idea that this is a common thing and has this throughout their life with no one to share this with and so as soon as suddenly you're like oh my gosh somebody else has this wild you saw the same thing that must be so validating but also kind of relieving I would imagine uh I yeah I mean feels a little less personal hardly enough like when it first happened I went oh where I just I just kind of chalk it up to waking up in a panic you know and then this happened to me when I was probably late teens when it started and so I was like oh I guess I just woke up in a panic yeah I mean I'm stressed out about a test or a girl or something you know those big problems those were massive world problems back then you know and just like would I get to have those problems right oh my God but yeah I just chalked it up to like just a panic attack and then when I did do they did have the demon experience was which was very rare um probably my early 20s at that point I just said oh I guess I just hallucinated because I was waking up right like mid-cycle or something you know it's interesting I you know I've talked on and off about my desire to lucid dream and practice the idea of controlling your dreams being aware while you're sleeping and one of the methods is to elicit sleep paralysis to create that get comfortable with that idea so that way you can then once you sink back into the cerebral dreaming you are you maintain a level of Consciousness so I've throughout my life have attempted to initiate sleep paralysis and it is a difficult process to do so I envy the potential of initiating that so you can lose a dream and have a good time I do not envy that it is something that you kind of succumb to and that you can't control and that on top of that you Christian and Jillian and Cat behind the scenes end up with very scary stories [Music] well hello there task force this is that intimate moment in the mystery that I get to talk directly to your eardrums and I say my name but I won't do it this time because you know who I am and this is red Webb welcome to the Gap in the mystery this is the time for the red web housekeeping so let's get into it hey we had such phenomenal success thanks to you the task force around the sippy cup of knowledge with our live shopping stream we're going to do another one we have our tin foil hats ready to go it's a really cool baseball hat with a silver inner lining to give you that protection that you need when you're out there with the aliens flying around and you know when you're conspiratizing that's what I'm going to verbify doing things with conspiracies and I'm leaving this as a one take ad read so that's the word now but yeah we have the silver lined tinfoil hat it isn't actually foil but it's you know it's very close and then we also are going to be selling a box full of goodies it's got a shirt it's got a black light in it and it's a full kit but uh that live shopping stream is going to be May 4th so if you missed out on the sippy cup of knowledge because it did sell out in 30 dang minutes that I encourage you to come hang out with us we provide some content talk to you guys along the way but also we'll be selling the items it's a nice little kind of you get some we get some situation where uh it's just really cool to sit down with the task force and just talk a little bit we haven't really figured out what the creative behind this one's going to be but I bet you I'm going to be reading about conspiracy theories and maybe doing a little game to see is this a real conspiracy or something that Fredo made up you know the man never makes up anything he's always facts never lies but if you got a sippy cup you might know the truth there but anyway that's happening on May 4th and again we've got the Hat with the Silver Lining within it also the red web evidence box which has a pin a shirt and a black light and it comes in this really cool thematic box but again that is May 4th it's all coming down the pike so put that on your calendar excited to see you all there oh real quick actually go to rtxaustin.com if you want all these details but hey red web is going to be at RTX this summer July 7th through the 9th make sure to put that in your calendar as well and man I feel like we should have a red web calendar at this point but if you want to come hang out with us here in Austin we're going to have an escape room which is going to be super cool and themed around Cryptids I don't want to give too much details around that but it is included with the RTX pass we're also going to have some other red web stuff happening at RTX so don't worry it's not just an escape room we're going to have I hope we're gonna have a panel I hope we're gonna have our case files set on the floor but these are things I can't promise because we're still figuring it all out but stay tuned for more news on what red web is doing at RTX here in the little break and maybe on social but with that said let's talk about some of our fantastic sponsors this episode of red web is sponsored by betterhelp we're always growing and changing and because of that getting to know ourselves is a lifelong process and sometimes it's hard to know what we want and why we react a certain way sometimes for a lot of people therapy can deepen awareness and understanding of themselves because it helps to talk through our thoughts and emotions during those moments to learn more about what's going on better help can connect you with a licensed therapist who can take you on that self-discovery journey betterhelp is entirely online and it's designed to be convenient flexible and suitable to your schedule you just fill out a questionnaire and better help uses that to match you with a licensed therapist and if that first person isn't right for you they're 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click and save and it's super awesome because again I remember the history of the internet and I remember scouring all these bad websites for coupon codes just hoping for a morsel of savings but again honey does really make it easy and I really do enjoy it honey works on your desktop and your iPhone as well just activate it on Safari on your phone and save on the go if you don't already have honey you could be straight up missing out and I don't want you task force I don't want you to be missing out and by getting it you'll be doing yourself a solid and supporting this show get PayPal honey for free at joinhoney.com redweb once again that's joinhoney.com redweb and with that said let's get right back into the mystery [Music] that's it that is sleep paralysis on a scientific level on a cultural level how it's impacted people in in some of the shared forms that it takes but now I would love to open it up Christian to you Fredo if you'd like to expand on the details of your personal stories we also have jillians and cats stories as well that I'll read through on their behalf and just to reiterate I would love for the task force to tweet us at redwoodpod about their experiences and like what do you guys see you know what I mean and does this line up with your experience 100 and if you have a little bit more detail than a tweet can fit or whatever feel free to email us as well redweb roosterteeth.com maybe we'll do a Case Files where we cover some of your sleep paralysis experiences and let us know if it's cool to use your name if we make an episode like that but um Christian do you wanna you want to crack open your your story sure yeah it's it's kind of funny I have never seen the Hat Man or the the old hack I've never seen the common ones I see ones that are very specific to me and I see bizarre ones oh and yeah I this happens to me all the time it happens the frequency will vary but once a week once every other week and like I said I I'm used to it it makes me annoyed more than anything else at this point oh terrifying yeah it's rough like basically anytime I sleep on my back I'll get it yes yeah yeah pretty much any time again I dream very vividly when I sleep on my back I think that's just a light sleep sort of situation for me personally maybe you share that yeah it's supposed to be uh related to your sleeping position it's called I think the Supine position I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly yeah actually supinated it's a piggyback off that as far as I can remember I'm a side sleeper yeah but I wake up on my back when I have sleep paralysis do you think astronauts have weird sleep paralysis because they're in zero g and kind of upright I'd really love to explore that but anyway Christian your experience see I experienced it a lot but uh in terms of seeing things it's only happened I think five times yeah I had it last night and I wonder if it was because we were coming into the recording today but I had this is the the one of the ones that's specific to me I was laying in bed and my mom came over and she started walking up the stairs to my room and I could hear the heavy slow footsteps coming up the the stairs it didn't really bother me and then I see my mom come with the stairs and I'm talking to her I can I can talk while I'm having this but I can't move or anything and then she starts coming to the room and comes to give me a hug and as she gets close to give me a hug I realize it's it's not my mom I don't know what tips me off but just like it's like a subconscious thing oh it's not you you just gave me chills straight up my oh and I told her I was like get away from me I don't I don't know who you are and then she just keeps going and as she's leaning towards me she starts morphing like her jaw unhinged and she started like changing shape and then she started basically like smothering me yeah and then I I I've like I said I've had it enough times I can recognize what was happening and I pulled myself out right you feel that the chest get off me fake mom yeah my God go sleeping nice and peaceful wait do you sleep with the door open no oh oh okay how about I say I I don't do that no yeah like that was like part of the dream part of it because yeah then I woke up and doors closed the the light was off because when I had it it was daytime too but then I woke up it's night time doors close though it's just like part of kind of what you're saying with your Shadow Demon it's just like what your brain is seeing is real and then it wakes up fully and goes back to I know it's so much different yeah yours is very like Vivid and descriptive mines has always ever been if there is a demon it's right there in front of me in my face and then it's gone no I always say it's quick yeah I've had like auditory hallucinations the really creepy ones are always about my family I've had two with my mom I've had one with my sister being involved that's somehow so much worse yeah where it's somehow like they're trying to interact with me or approach me and then I can realize that it's not them and then it just gets dark from there like realizing something evil is happening and then I've had some that are very stupid in hindsight at the time it was terrifying I had one a couple weeks ago I woke up and I looked at the foot of my bed and the way my room is laid out I have a the closet doors at the foot of the bed they're white doors and for some reason I woke up and I see the closet doors and I thought it was a figure the easiest way to describe it is it was like a giant headless Oogie Boogie from Nightmare Before Christmas oh wow it's just this giant white figure with no head just standing there and then that one was like a blink and I was awake and I was okay there was one uh the first hallucination I ever had I woke up I was laying in bed woke up looked at the foot of the bed and there was a figure standing at the foot of the bed seven maybe eight feet tall was this giant just standing there looking at me was this giant Ku Klux Klan member oh daring at me and I was the first thing I'd ever had first time I'd ever had it and I remember I turned I could somehow turn my head and I shut my eyes and screamed and then it was like a weird sensation I don't know if you ever had it Alfredo we're like how would you describe it like you can feel the noise building in your head and then it's just like just like that you're awake and you look around yeah sometimes it's like a ring yeah yeah like a ring yeah um I would say you seeing a KKK member is the most terrifying yeah especially as you're fortunate one yeah unfortunately most realistic thing the worst part about your stories is that you can maybe build the Habit which you seemingly have but you can build the Habit to go when I see shadow person it ain't real that can trigger your ability to wake up and get out of it but yours is all so heavily based in reality yeah it uses reality to Anchor its way into your mind and get you to buy into it just long enough to turn on you that is it's almost like spooky my brain has adapted to the fact that I have it from the beginning yeah it's like oh so you have this happen so much so it's gonna be harder to get You Ah that's that's yucky yeah I'll tell you that at least for me it's like oh that's not real for you I mean like it could be it could be a burglar and you just go that sleep paralysis and then go what the wait he's taking all my stuff I guess he's not getting the hint right right no no I've said I don't believe in you anymore like you can disappear now right go back to sleep kid burglar hearing yeah you could leave now but the burglar's like I'm a sleep process demon I don't know bye yeah yeah that's weird all right let's talk about Jillian's story this is all quote from her luckily this has only happened to me twice but the second time was pretty recent I woke up to one of my partner's grandparents at my side only I don't know how I thought it was them because I couldn't turn to look at them and what I could see didn't look anything like them the little face I could make out was void of any features and had Darkness where the eyes should be to be fair I saw skinamarink the week before it was kind of like the face in that movie if you've seen it it's the one at the very end and Fredo you've seen that movie unfortunately I've seen that oh my God I'm sorry I'm sorry this is a horror movie it's very experimental I understand it's not for everybody but it's like two hours long and majority of the shots are the of the corner like the ceiling the door frame the rug yeah and just noises happening in the background but when he says stick a knife in your eye what'd you do then just scared too scared it's like everything's all grainy I could barely see anything and now you're gonna cut two Legos on the ground for a minute while I hear noises it was real analog horror for sure Jillian there was a face at the end so I I I do know the face that yeah Jillian's speaking of and so yeah I mean the again what I'm starting to notice is a lot of this I always thought people see some type of like shadowy figure but what I'm realizing now is that even though we have these three kind of like main primary demons figures that for the most part people just see what they experience and know yeah so Jillian is basically saying like they know just like a dream you kind of know things you don't know why so she's feeling the presence of their partner's grandparent behind them they don't really know why they thought that they just did now suddenly it's devoid of features on the face dark holes where the eyes should be now this is where she continues and says quote for whatever reason the grandparents start pouring water on me and I can't get them to stop and I can't wake up my partner something about it just felt awful and oppressive it sucked but I finally woke up no I did not pee myself the weird part was that the grandparent had recently passed away and the next day the team showed me a picture from a creepypasta of the rake and I was like dude I saw that entity last night that's Jillian's story oh we'll pull up a photo of the rake for you Fredo so you can see what that thing looks like or Christian can now task force as always those images go up on our social so that way you are not out of the loop I'll just say this it's not great viewer discretion is kind of advised if you uh don't like creepy things I don't think it's as bad as Jeff the Killer but sure oh okay that's where my mind went Freda saw it turned around and went hmm yeah it's um like as like a I wouldn't say skinless it's kind of like a just hairless all skin human being kind of reminds me a little bit except for Less detail in the face of the um the creatures or the people in the movie The Descent oh that's a great comparison yeah it's like Nosferatu a little bit it also reminds me of the guy kind of a spoiler alert but for quarantine first up in the very very top of the building in the Attic that you see at the end yes I didn't rewatch that that was a good movie have you seen wreck I think I would say Rec it's the original version yep there's two of those all right let's talk about cat's story now this is what she said while I've only had a few sleep paralysis situations happen to be the most terrifying was the first ever one that I had had a few years ago it happened in my family home where we had lived for 11 or so years at this point I had always been fully convinced that my room was haunted I had no reasoning to back that up other than I had always gotten a bad vibe from that part of the house and the weeks leading up to this sleep paralysis incident I had been having frequent nightmares which was very unusual for me on this particular night I had been having yet another nightmare when I opened my eyes I saw a shadow we figure floating directly above my head I remember having Hollow eyes almost like a skull I was scared out of my mind because I knew I was awake but this was something straight out of my nightmares I couldn't scream couldn't move couldn't do anything then I felt like I was floating above my bed parallel in the air just having a stare down with these skull eyes my rational brain knew that being suspended in the air was impossible but my rational brain also knew that the feeling of what happened after was absolutely real one moment I was suspended in the air the next I was dropped back onto my bed and specifically remember my head slamming into my pillow the shadowy figure was gone and I could finally move my limbs again I turned to my bedside lamp texted my mom that I had just had the craziest experience and attempted to go back to sleep it was close to 4 AM and thankfully sleep came easy I've rationalized with myself now that the feeling of floating and falling back onto my bed was the thrashing I was trying to do while in paralysis while I don't believe it 100 it's the only logical explanation I've come to hey I'm not even paralysis that's a possession happening that's what that is being levitated and that's a possession it's literally like a silent exorcism yeah that's spooky I feel what she's talking about though when you when you have a very Vivid feeling and her feeling being I fell back onto my bed my rational brain knew that this was like all weird but that must have happened and I can see that though if you're trying to wake up and you're and you can move a little bit maybe she was able to lean up and then fell back down and then felt that sensation but that is spooky I I will say like it's very much like as much as you are awake it's still very much feels like kind of floaty dream state-esque in a way yeah and like your your senses do react sometimes different sensors in different ways okay so a tap might feel like a hit or yeah yeah and like like the demon experience like I I felt like this ringing noise so you know my hearing sensors were being triggered not like this hearing noise that was like slowly ramping up as a situation got more intense and and then from there I could almost almost feel like it was tingling towards where I was grabbing like my hands being tingled yeah as I was grabbing the demon but I mean again it's because I'm grabbing a person so I I do see like how she could think like or feel like oh my goodness like I felt like I was hanging the pillow or like I was floating and I just dropped yeah but I feel like your senses are just in a in a tail spin I mean 100 that fits in what we were talking about before and that's just another spooky layer to all this is that everything we know and experience that is reality is our senses and the interpretation of them and it's just weird to realize that when you're sleeping your brain can misinterpret or reinterpret the stimulus that your eyes your hands are having and give you a whole different reality I I will say this and like I talked about this before but like spouse Jackie and I developed the system where I just try to breathe like when I'm waking up from sleep paralysis I try to breathe as like loudly and as heavy as possible to wake her up because she's a light sleeper doesn't work half of the time but it's just a way out but it's it's a way to try and find a way out but what I didn't say is I do that with the hope that she then you could just like hey when that happens you notice that turn around I'm having a sleep paralysis episode shake me so I could like start functioning and moving I have the hope of that but really I do that mostly for Comfort to know that like she's awake she's with me there because of the fact that even I would say majority of the time when she shakes me it still doesn't get me out of my funk like I she doesn't shake me and I go I can move and my motor functions are activated it most of the time doesn't work so it actually I it's more so for just the comfort of life you have company I have company and you're with me yeah like you know you're not seeing you're just calming me down yeah um as opposed to shaking me out of it yeah which is you know just a weird thing that like I I guess I can't be shaking out of it most of the time well how do you get out of it Christian is it just something where you kind of just have to wait for it to end or no I've gotten to a point where I just need to focus all of my energy on moving any part of my body a finger a toe a hand and as soon as I can move something I'm out of it okay that is true yeah yeah the minute something goes everything else goes with it interesting but yeah it's like it takes all your concentration it takes all your effort it's like a Herculean task to try it really does feel like you are trying everything possible physically and mentally to move just even like a pinky yeah wow and even then it's just it's a it feels like and is a long shot yeah goodness yeah feels hopeless I feel like no joke I have to sleep with a whistle I mean honestly you just roll with it that's the only thing you just kind of go just get used to it I just gotta roll with it terrible well that has been our episode on sleep paralysis demons again task force I would love to hear from you whether it be on social or email let us know what your experiences are [ __ ] Feast on your story pieces on these stories man this is such a morbid curiosity well first I just I love dreams I love the idea of dreams and interpreting them but also the science of the brain is just so interesting and and then how it can misfire in such unique ways that create these circumstances come on I know it's like a lot to go through but as a scientist I gotta put my emotions inside Flex my muscles and get in there you know what I'm saying I'm trying to buff up well from the brain stem uh there's an attempt [Laughter] all right folks with that said Fredo I will see you right back here next week we're yet another mystery [Music]