Case

I currently have four cases in my essay, but for this post, I will be focusing on one case, and that is the case featuring people who see their sleep paralysis as related to UFOs. The case I found comes from an article titled, "Sleep Paralysis, Sexual Abuse, and Space Alien Abductions". This article mentions that for this study 10 people who believed that they were abducted by space aliens were interviewed. Apparently, many abductees experienced similar features common to sleep paralysis. Such as feeling electrical sensations, seeing strange visuals in the bedroom prior to waking up, some were laying on their back, and some mentioned feeling paralysis throughout the experience. Of course, these strange visuals included seeing specifically aliens, which the brain is definitely capable of forming during sleep paralysis. The abductees were tested based on different scales and it was found that their scores indicated that these people tend to be easily be absorbed in imaginative experiences and they tend to believe in phenomena relating to magic or the supernatural. Furthermore, in the study, they also played back a script of the abduction story to each of the abductees. What was very interesting was that "The physiologic responses of abductees to their traumatic abduction scripts were larger than the responses of PTSD patients to scripts of their traumatic experiences"(Mcnally, 117). This situation indicates how powerful the "nocebo" effect really is. Because of the abductees' firm belief that they were abducted, this resulted in a negative physiological response. 

Adler, Shelley R. Sleep Paralysis : Night-Mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection . Rutgers University Press, 2011.

MCNALLY, Richard J., and Susan A. CLANCY. “Sleep Paralysis, Sexual Abuse, and Space Alien Abduction: Sleep Paralysis.” Transcultural Psychiatry, vol. 42, no. 1, Sage, 2005, pp. 113–22.