Threshold Contact Experience (TCE)

You open your eyes and see your bedroom exactly as you expect to see it. The curtains are where they were when you went to sleep; you can make out the familiar shapes of the furniture around you, and perhaps there is enough light coming through the window to see the doorway, the chair beside the bed or the objects on a nearby table. You know that you are in your room and, as far as you are concerned, you have woken up. There is nothing obviously dreamlike about this moment because you are looking at the same room that you fell asleep in only hours before, with the same awareness of yourself lying in the same bed.

Then you try to move, and your body does not respond. Before you have fully registered what is happening, the atmosphere in the room may also begin to feel different. A powerful sense of foreboding can fill the space, sometimes accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of menace or evil, as though something has changed in the room itself. Fear begins to rise, then panic, and you become acutely aware that something is wrong. It is often at this point that something else captures your attention: there is someone in the room with you. Perhaps they are standing beside the bed, watching from the doorway or ceiling, or moving towards you from a darker part of the room. You may see them clearly or know they are there before you see anything at all. You are still looking at your bedroom, still aware of yourself lying in bed, but the room no longer feels like the ordinary space in which you went to sleep. What began as an ordinary moment of waking has become something else entirely.

The experience can develop from there. The presence may move closer, touch you, speak, communicate directly or respond to what you are thinking and doing. You may hear footsteps crossing the floor, feel the mattress move under additional weight or experience pressure, heat, cold, breath or touch against your body. Something even stranger can then happen: your experience of where you are can begin to change. Instead of experiencing everything from the position of your body in the bed, you may find yourself above it, elsewhere in the room or looking down at your own body from another position. From there, the experience can extend beyond the bedroom altogether. The familiar room may change around you or give way to another place, and you may find yourself moving through an entirely different environment while still knowing who you are, remembering what has already happened and experiencing what follows as part of the same continuous event.

This is where the experience becomes particularly difficult to explain to someone who has never had one. You are asleep, but you have experienced yourself as awake. You have seen the room in which your physical body is sleeping. You have thought, observed, reacted, made decisions and sometimes interacted with someone or something else. There can be an extraordinary continuity to the experience. Unlike an ordinary dream, where waking usually makes it clear that you have moved from the dream back into your bedroom, here that distinction can be much harder to make. When the experience ends, you find yourself in that same bed, looking at the same room, with no obvious point at which one reality gave way to the other.

Eventually, something changes. You regain movement and wake fully, yet even this moment can be confusing because the room you wake into may be the same room you have just been experiencing. The bed is in the same place, the doorway is still there, and the furniture has not moved. What has changed is the experience occurring within that environment, and for some people the transition is so seamless that it becomes difficult to identify precisely where sleeping ended and ordinary waking began.

Long afterwards, another unusual feature remains: you remember it. You may remember where the presence stood, how it moved, what it communicated, what the room looked like, what you tried to do and how the experience ended. Years or even decades later, the memory can retain a clarity that many ordinary dreams simply do not possess.

This is the world of sleep paralysis that is often lost when the experience is reduced to the statement that someone “woke up and couldn’t move”. Paralysis may be present, and for some experiencers it is terrifying, but it is only one part of a much richer and more complicated experience. For others, bodily paralysis barely features in the account at all because their attention is consumed by what else is happening: the presence in the room, the interaction that follows, the environment through which they move, what they are able to do within it and what remains with them afterwards.

It is this wider, richer experience that sits at the heart of what I have called Threshold Contact Experience (TCE).

 

Read the full article