Alien DNA after sexual encounter

And then the other thing, have you ever dreamed that you were dreaming and woke up but were still dreaming? One morning I was three layers deep before I finally did wake up for real.

Or did I? (just a joke :) )...

Lucid Dreaming is not bunk. I've done those too.
I was really in to lucid dreaming for a time and have remained conscious as I intentionally went into a dream from a waking state, a term known as "wake-induced lucid dreaming," or WILD. I also experience sleep paralysis whenever I doze off in the bath, and both of those experiences offer sensations very similar to abduction accounts.

When I am in unintentional sleep paralysis (not intentional lucid dreaming) I experience the following sensations:
  • feeling "stuck" in my body, cannot move, sensation of being out of control or controlled
  • mechanical sounds: buzzing, drills, whirring, heartbeats, whooshing
  • voices speaking in languages I don't understand
  • see abstract shapes and electricity/flashes in my vision (I keep my eyes closed so I don't hallucinate hags/ghosts/sexy aliens)
  • see bright lights/orbs
  • feel like I'm getting electric shocks: loud "buzz" sensation across whole body, absolutely terrifying
Pro tip: it helps me to get out of these states if I focus on wiggling one finger at a time. Then a wrist, then an arm, etc until I'm fully "out" of the paralysis and wake up.
 
I was really in to lucid dreaming for a time and have remained conscious as I intentionally went into a dream from a waking state, a term known as "wake-induced lucid dreaming," or WILD. I also experience sleep paralysis whenever I doze off in the bath, and both of those experiences offer sensations very similar to abduction accounts.

When I am in unintentional sleep paralysis (not intentional lucid dreaming) I experience the following sensations:
  • feeling "stuck" in my body, cannot move, sensation of being out of control or controlled
  • mechanical sounds: buzzing, drills, whirring, heartbeats, whooshing
  • voices speaking in languages I don't understand
  • see abstract shapes and electricity/flashes in my vision (I keep my eyes closed so I don't hallucinate hags/ghosts/sexy aliens)
  • see bright lights/orbs
  • feel like I'm getting electric shocks: loud "buzz" sensation across whole body, absolutely terrifying
Pro tip: it helps me to get out of these states if I focus on wiggling one finger at a time. Then a wrist, then an arm, etc until I'm fully "out" of the paralysis and wake up.
I've had sleep paralysis that was entirely different from that ( except for the "stuck in my body" part) so I wonder if dreams were a part of your experiences. I remember dozing on the couch, and hearing my husband tell the kids "Your mom's asleep. Don't wake her" and several other things while they all were in the kitchen cooking dinner. I kept trying to say that no, I was awake, but was unable to speak or move. The conversation I heard was all corroborated by the others when I finally did get up, so it was coherent speech, accurately remembered.
 
And then the other thing, have you ever dreamed that you were dreaming and woke up but were still dreaming? One morning I was three layers deep before I finally did wake up for real.

Done that a few times, though in my cases, I almost always know I'm dreaming. The sleep paralysis part isn't that something disturbing is happening and then I wake up and realize it was a dream, rather it's a disturbing dream and I know it's a dream, but I can't move and wake up to escape it.

I'd also add the wife and I have also had dreams that leave a bit of "emotional residue". Especially the breck-up or affair type dream where it seems your spouse is heavily involved with another person. I've found that several hours after waking up from one of those I'll still be "You left me for that guy?! I know, I know it's just a dream. But that guy?" The feeling stays with me for a time.

I think given what you've shared, as well as Tink and Ann, various forms of dreaming account for a majority of the abduction cases. They almost all seem to happen to a person that is alone, despite the talk of marks and implants, there is often little to no physical evidence, and they were then often enhanced through hypnotic regression which only reenforces the dream and adds elements to the "encounter".

The problem is that becomes a bit of a "Wizard of Oz" argument to people, "Oh, you were just dreaming". In the case discussed here I think this would have been passed off as a dream even by Chaulker if it weren't for the hair. Khoury pretty much says he was in a codeine induced slumber when the encounter happened. It starts off as a standard male sex fantasy possibly related to a magazine spread he had seen, but then gets weird, as dreams often do.

There was another thread that touched on the use of hypnotic regression:

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/alien-abduction-and-hypnotic-regression-clinical-trial.12747

In it @Domzh quoted a number of sources but was having issues working on a small phone. This one is interesting:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.5127/jep.017811

The lead author did work on traumatic memories associated with PTSD in war vets and CSA (Childhood Sexual Assault). Through a roundabout series of connections, including John Mack, who along with Budd Hopkins and David Jacob really lead the abductee movement, the author ends up working with alien abductees. It's from a PDF, so the Cop & Paste is a little wonky (all bolds by me):

Susan and I had originally considered recruiting participants who reported satanic ritual abuse as a means to study false memory propensity in participants whose memories were almost certainly false. However, we soon changed course after I received an invitation to participate in a weekend conference at Harvard Divinity School on “anomalous experiences” that John Mack, an eminent, Pulitzer-prize winning psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School was hosting. I was among about two dozen scholars he had invited. The conference was not open to the public, and the media were not notified.
Content from External Source
They studied 3 groups:

One group comprised adults who reported “memories” of extraterrestrial kidnapping, whereas a second group reported a history of alien abduction, but had no autobiographical memories of the experience. These participants inferred abduction from diverse indicators such as mysterious marks on their bodies, panic attacks triggered by seeing pictures of the movie character E.T., and an inexplicable passion for reading science fiction. When Susan asked them what happened to their memories, they conjectured that the aliens had zapped the memories from their brains or that the abduction had occurred in “another dimension.”

The third (comparison) group comprised participants who denied ever having been kidnapped by space aliens.
Content from External Source
Then they did some experiments about false memories:

As we did in our study of CSA (Clancy et al., 2000), we used a variant of the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) paradigm to test for false memory propensity in our abductees (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). We asked participants to listen to a series of lists containing 15 words. Each list converged on a theme represented by a critical lure word that participants never heard. For example, the list might contain words such as sugar and candy with a critical lure of sweet. When we asked participants to recall all words from a list, we tested whether they would falsely recall hearing the critical lure word. At the end of the experiment, we also had them read a list of words containing ones that they had heard, distracter words that never occurred, plus the critical lures. We asked them to circle all words that they recognized as having heard.

Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that both abductee groups had rates of false recall and false recognition about twice the rate as the comparison group of participants who denied experiencing alien abduction. The strongest predictor of false recall was the score on Tellegen and Atkinson’s (1974) absorption questionnaire -- a measure related to a vivid imagination and a rich fantasy life
Content from External Source
And a study on how people react to scripted stories about traumatic experiences:

Of our participants who reported actual “memories” of abduction, most also participated in our script-driven imagery study on the psychophysiology of abduction memories (McNally et al., 2004). In this experiment, we tested whether abductees exhibit the psychophysiological signature characteristic of PTSD patients who hear audiotaped accounts of their traumatic experiences in the laboratory (Orr, Metzger, & Pitman, 2002).
Content from External Source
Our comparison group comprised 12 individuals (seven women) who denied a personal history of space alien abduction. We “yoked” each of them to an abductee so that they heard the audiotaped neutral, positive, stressful, and abduction scripts of a stranger. We thereby controlled for the possibility that anyone listening to these wild stories of extraterrestrial encounters might react psychophysiologically to them.
Content from External Source
Hence, prompted by their audiotaped scripts, recollection of alien encounter memories produced reactions statistically indistinguishable from recollection of extremely stressful memories. In fact, reactivity to the abduction scripts was at least as great as the reactivity of Vietnam veterans with chronic PTSD when they listened to scripts of their war-related traumatic events (Keane et al., 1998). Our control participants exhibited very little psychophysiologic reactivity while listening to the abduction (or stressful) scripts. After completing the experiment, some of them shrugged and said, “Hmmmm, that was weird.”
Content from External Source
On various scales, abductees were no more or less depressed or stressed than the non-abductees, but they were much more likely to experience dissociative and magical things:

Psychometric data also confirmed the mental health of the abductees. For example, their mean score on the Beck Depression Inventory II (Beck & Steer, 1987) was 3.6 and their mean score on the Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger, Gorsuch, Lushene, Vagg, & Jacobs, 1983) was 36.1. In contrast to these measures, the abductees scored significantly (ps < .039 - .001) higher than comparison participants did on the Dissociative Experiences Scale (Bernstein & Putnam, 1986; 8.4 versus 3.3), Magical Ideation (Eckblad & Chapman, 1983; 9.2 versus 2.9), and absorption (Tellegen & Atkinson, 1974; 21.6 versus 9.6).

In other words, the abductees were neither depressed nor anxious, but they had reported unusual alterations in consciousness, belief in unconventional modes of causation, and had vivid imaginations and a rich fantasy life.
Content from External Source
As we've been discussing:

Second, when I asked our participants how their encounters with aliens began, they described what appear to have been episodes of isolated sleep paralysis accompanied by hypnopompic (“upon awakening”) hallucinations (Hufford, 1982; McNally & Clancy, 2005b). Participants mentioned awakening shortly before dawn, attempting to roll over in bed, and suddenly noticing a complete inability to move.

Terrified by their sudden paralysis, they soon began to feel electricity coursing through their bodies, to see flashing lights, to hear buzzing sounds, and to glimpse the presence of alien intruders in the semi-darkness of their bedrooms. Some experienced the sensation of levitating off the bed. Our participants spontaneously mentioned these experiences when recounting their history of alien encounters.
Content from External Source
Although we did not study our participants in a sleep laboratory, their descriptions of their initial alien encounters fit the description of isolated sleep paralysis accompanied by hypnopompic hallucinations. Indeed, sleep paralysis episodes are difficult to capture in the laboratory because they are infrequent and unpredictable.
Content from External Source
It's a small sample size, but they do make this argument:

In summary, the ingredients for a space alien abductee include: 1) New Age beliefs (e.g., high scores on measures of magical ideation), 2) episodes of isolated sleep paralysis accompanied by hypnopompic hallucinations, 3) hypnotic memory recovery sessions, 4) high scores on a measure of absorption, and 5) familiarity with the cultural narrative of alien abduction. We cannot say whether any of these ingredients is essential or whether our recipe applies to abductees who have never been in our research program.
Content from External Source
And after a lot of negative feedback from the abductee community, they make this argument:

This criticism misses the mark. There are two common explanations for why sincere, nonpsychotic people report recollections of alien abduction. One explanation is that they were abducted by aliens. The second explanation comprises the ingredients in the recipe I describe above (e.g., sleep paralysis, absorption). In principle, either hypothesis could be true. However, the first one is inconsistent with an immense amount of solid science in the fields of astronomy, physics, and biology, whereas the second one is not. An abductive inference -- or inference to the best explanation (Harman, 1965) -- leads one to accept the hypothesis as likely true that best accounts for a phenomenon without clashing with relevant, well-established findings. In other words, one would have to reject a tremendous amount of science to accept the hypothesis that extraterrestrial kidnappings explain reports of alien abduction. In contrast, our explanation does not require us to reject the findings of astronomy, physics, and biology.
Content from External Source
It's an easy read, not so much an actual journal paper for other professionals, but an explanation of what they did and found for laypeople.
 
And then the other thing, have you ever dreamed that you were dreaming and woke up but were still dreaming? One morning I was three layers deep before I finally did wake up for real.

Or did I? (just a joke :) )...

Lucid Dreaming is not bunk. I've done those too.

After waking up from a 3-layer deep nested dream once I told my g/f all about it, and then I realised that she shouldn't be at home, she should be at work. Shit - it's a dream! In a panic I woke up from my 4-layer deep nested dream. And immediately went to tell my sister in the other room all about it. But my sister's in a different country. Shit - it's a dream! In a panic I woke from my 5-layer deep nested dream. And immediately went to tell some of my old workmates all about it. But they're also in a different different country, and what are they doing in my flat? Shit - it's a dream! In a panic, I woke from my 6-layer deep nested dream. And my flat was empty, and I had no-one to tell. And I breathed a sigh of relief.

Like you, I don't just get false awakenings, but also often have lucid dreams. If you get into lucid dreaming enough to transcend mere awareness into control, and then you push the boundaries of that, it seems you can unlock many of the same hidden bugs and features of the brain that hallucinogenic drugs can give you access too. And please don't take that statement as an endorsement of either.
 
Back
Top