In the latest in a series highlighting past episodes and archives of Squaring the Strange, here’s a look back at a show you might have missed…

Ben and Pascual begin with a nod to the band Shriekback, who provided our podcast’s theme music—see them if you can, they will be touring soon! Pascual examines an ad for the positive healing energy of “arumites” and discusses different types of actual frequencies and radiation. Then Ben reads feedback from a would-be ghost hunter and runs through a list of methodological problems, and an EVP sample prompts Pascual to explain what compression does to sound. In our main topic this week, the guys discuss the phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. From the clinical descriptions (first classified as a type of seizure) to the folkloric explanations (succubus, “the old hag”) to ghostly experiences and alien abductions, sleep paralysis can be interpreted as any number of strange experiences. Ben and Pascual discuss the 2015 documentary The Nightmare and relate their own unsettling experiences with sleep paralysis. Ben recounts a recent study that categorizes three different types of sleep paralysis depending on what neural functions are impacted, and we find that sleep paralysis is something we all experience regularly as we drift into REM sleep—just, when something goes wrong, we end up consciously remembering it. Sleep paralysis is also often accompanied by feelings of dread and hallucinations, which by definition seem absolutely real to the person experiencing them. On that note, sweet dreams everyone!

You can listen to it HERE.

You can find more on me and my work with a search for “Benjamin Radford” (not “Ben Radford”) on Vimeo, and please check out my podcast Squaring the Strange!