As part of my second year on the creative writing degree, I had to conduct a research project and tie it in with a piece of creative fiction. As I was starting to write the first Louise Miller book,
Dirty Little Secret, I figured I'd hit two birds with one stone and do a research project on a particular aspect of that.
I've kept the references in but any others such as Appendix entries, won't be displayed.
When
I got the original idea for the book, Dirty Little Secret, I wanted a
reason that someone would think there was another person in their room but not
be worried about it. Reading several articles and medical studies, I found the
reason in the phenomena of sleep paralysis. This is an illness in which the
sufferer finds they can’t move their bodies, and sometimes struggle to breathe.
Sleep is a period of unconscious mystery, a time of peace and content, and yet
some find themselves in the grip of such a terrifying experience. Stoker
commentates as such,
though he refers to the deadly curse of Dracula rather than the terror of sleep
paralysis.
My
novel opens with the character of ten year old Joanna suffering from an episode
of sleep paralysis which ends with devastating consequences and I thought it
would stop there, but the more I looked into the topic, the more I discovered
in relation to how stories change and adapt to fit the culture and/or society of the time. (for an example of how this research was
used, read the opening chapter to the novel as Appendix A).
In
this research study I’ll be looking at the myth/legend/tale of the shadow
person, an elusive being that appears to those who suffer sleep paralysis and
how it has changed over many centuries, as it is a strong foundation of the
novel I’ve written. I’ll look at the early origins and some of its journey to
present day representations, including how it has affected some aspects of
language itself.
With
the notion of sleep paralysis, I started to look back to its origins and
discovered that even the early Egyptians had stories about being visited when
sleeping, and their souls becoming wandering deities. In fact, the Egyptians
belief system was heavily centred around the concept of the soul, breaking it
into nine separate entities, each one overseen by its own god. In his book
Temple Of The Cosmos, Jeremy Naydler commits two chapters to this subject; The
Soul Incarnate and The Soul Discarnate. One such aspect was that
of Shut, the shadow or silhouette of the soul. In the opening commentary to The
Egyptian Book Of The Dead (an ancient Egyptian funeral text), Egyptologist
Ogden Goelet, Jr. described how the entombed would leave their shrines to
wander as a formless shadow, and it is from this
initial tale that I believe all the future stories would be formed.
In fact this would be further
expanded upon by Dr Kasia Szpakowska, in her detailed study The Ancient Egyptian
Demonology Project: Second Millennium BC.
This study gave deep analysis of the iconographic, archaeological and
philogical aspects of every demon found in many texts, decorations and papyrus
manuscripts, such as The Book Of The Dead. It is during an interview with
Ancient World Magazine, where she discusses the Pavor Nocturne (night terrors)
and from the Ramesside Period the Papyrus Leiden I, 348, an incantation against
sleep paralysis.
An example of the way in which these stories are adapted
and changed can be seen in the collaboration with Dr Szpakowska’s academic
study and the modern dance of choreographer Betsy Baytos, in which she
discusses the connection to Egyptian iconography, and this modern form of
storytelling.
From this research I was able to include some details for
further rewrites of the novel, such as the introduction of scarring on the body
of Egyptian symbols of shadow deities as well as more detailed dialogue between
characters as to the nature of sleep paralysis origins.
But as the story developed, I felt that there was more of
a deeper evil lying beneath the surface. This was where I found the Japanese
tales of the kanashibari intriguing, as these would add more of a layer
of horror to the tale, creating a unique horror/crime hybrid. Lafcadio Hearn
(Koizumi Yakumo) explored many such occurrences in his collection In Ghostly
Japan, most notably in the story A Passional Karma, where the main
character is visited by nightly terrors in the form of two women. The subject matter of the
nightly terror has now changed with the Japanese culture, moving away from the
deity to be worshipped, to the demon to be feared. A later work, Kwaidan:
Stories and Studies of Strange Things would explore this topic further, and
later be adapted into the 1965 anthology horror film, Kwaidan.
It would be in his book, Kanashibari:
True Encounters With The Paranormal In Japan, that Thomas Bauerle would
examine encounters with sleep paralysis entities. One such occurrence he
describes in detail.
The book then goes on to detail the shift from historic folkloric tale to
recent mental health diagnosis studies. This obvious shift in tone poses many
questions ripe for further study: How did the storytelling change from ancient
Egypt, to feudal Japan? Is this a societal shift or one of cultural difference?
As this is beyond the scope for this report, one such starting point would be
the excellent blog post Culture Change: The Waves of Storytelling.
A pattern was
beginning to emerge of women representing the shadow personalities; the
Egyptian texts refer to Shut in the feminine, while the Japanese shadow demons
always took the form of women or old hags. The stories were changing again and
as the Gothic tale now began to emerge with writings such as Walpole’s novel The
Castle Of Otranto, or Radcliffes The Romance Of The Forest, so too
did the tale of the shadow person evolve once more. Gothic fiction blends
pleasure with terror, emotion and romance and some saw the appearance of the
shadow person as the embrace of a lover. In her article Your Dark Side:
Shadow Aspects of the 7 Feminine Archetypes, writer Ayesha uses the word
shadow to describe the flip side of feminine personalities, tying several into
Greek myth
– I look at the subversion of the language surrounding Shadow people later in
this report.
In Appendix C, The Nightmare by
Henry Fuseli (1781) is a further example of the Gothic imagination as
previously shown in literature, with the fair maiden lying prone while she is
dominated by the repressed desire of the male. Poking its head through the
curtains is a literal depiction of the title, a dark horse, or night mare. Yet
again this is a classic example of the heavy feeling victims of sleep paralysis
feel on their chests. It has now become a trope of the tale, and I have further
interpreted this to express the repression of women; my novel is set in 1987
when women in the Police Force were looked down upon and shunned by their male
colleagues. That it still occurs to this day is obvious and abhorrent, but in
the time I set the book, it was even worse. And this all ties in with the
progression of the shadow people tale, not only as the sleep paralysis but the
repression of the female characters.
As the twenty-first century arrived,
the tales of shadow people had morphed once again, moving into the realm of
outright horror, most notably depicted by the Slender Man. The very act of
storytelling itself has moved from ancient Egypt where everyone told stories,
to the Japanese lone Rakugo, wandering from village to village and now to
modern day, where the Slender Man version began on an online platform called
Creepypasta.
Here, it was acknowledged that several different countries all had the same
story, each one derived from ancient tales of the shadow people, but now it was
used for pure entertainment as opposed to furthering either religion or
community. While the site is entertaining, none of the stories have any way of
being verified as factual or based in reality and to that extent it can only be
shown as how the tales have transitioned into modern day as pure entertainment.
However,
a troubling side effect has been the effect on mental health, especially of
young people who read these stories and take them on face value. I will briefly
touch on how medical studies have been carried out into the phenomena of sleep
paralysis later, but there is a more deeper potential study to be found here
into the effects of mental health on the development of story, but that is
beyond the scope of this report. I will add that in the case of CreepyPasta and
the Slender Man story, this led to the attempted murder of Payton Leutner in
2014 in Wisconsin, where her two friends led her into the woods and stabbed her
19 times – she survived this – done to appease Slender Man. A documentary on
this can be found here.
What
is central to this study about the tales of shadow people and sleep paralysis
are the medical studies conducted on those who suffer sleep paralysis – because
in our modern society, those who tell such tales are not to be taken on their
word but instead studied and probed to find whatever infliction there is that
causes them to think such things. I created a character who is a psychologist
to explore this topic in more detail (and offer readers another possible
suspect).
It
was Shelly Adler in her book Sleep Paralysis: Night-Mares, Nocebos, and the
Mind-Body Connection who describes in clinical terms the stages that those
who suffer this affliction go through; not in terms of myth or legend, but
actual physical occurrences from first hand witnesses. Now, sleep paralysis is
no longer simply a tall tale told around a campfire, but an illness that
required treatment. Further studies into this phenomena continue to this day,
the most recent being a paper about the effects of sleep paralysis on a sample of
Polish students, in which fear and visual hallucinations were reported.
Even
the use of the word shadow has changed over time. The ancient Egyptians
called the soul, the ba or shadow of one’s self. Today, we have the term
shadow governments, policed by shadow men as discussed in the book Shadow
Men by Anthony Napoleon, PH.D. The term shadow people is also used to
describe those who fall beneath societies norms, especially people addicted to
methamphetamine; ironic as that is one of the drugs used to treat sleep
paralysis. Huey Lewis sings: “She’s shadow boxing and losing the bout!” in his
song Stop Trying, implying the woman of their affacetions is swinging at
nothing but their own fear (and losing).
The
tale of shadow people has been used to explain sleep paralysis through the
centuries, the stories adapting to fit their time and culture, and yet they all
retain central themes: a strong, unseen presence; the feeling of weight or
being held down; unexplained noises and smells. Modern day culture has seized
on the supernatural aspects of the story, expanding the horror to better
entertain. The ailment has developed into an area of medical study that now has
its own research departments in hospitals across the world, all of which stem
from the first telling of the shadow of ones soul in Ancient Egypt. It is a
fascinating subject and one I have only scratched the surface of in my quest to
find a suitable narrative hook for my own novel with many diverging branches
including the evolution of language, religion, physical and psychological
doctoring and, of course, the campfire tale.
