Here are a few books offered on a variety of topics. They've been read by the author of the site and come highly recommended.

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Product Description

"Wrestling With Ghosts" summarizes and updates a growing literature that includes traditional cultural accounts, scientific research, and subjective reports about the uncanny sleep disorder referred to as sleep paralysis (SP). The book serves as an important tool to normalize the sleep paralysis experience by attempting to remove its often-publicized mystical and supernatural aura. Specifically, the book is a serious contribution to the psychological and social scientific literature as an example of behavioral/social methodology in clarifying psychological phenomena that can be misinterpreted individually or by culture as "paranormal." However, the book does not refute the very real phenomenology of the experience and is intended as a practical guide for recognizing and managing the disorder in creative and self-enhancing ways. Moreover, this work reiterates the aesthetic and creative power of uncanny dreaming regardless of its origin. This aesthetic dimension of sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming is part of mythical, shamanic, creative, personal and scientific multidisciplinary approach to studying and describing dream phenomenology.

Additionally, this work provides a retrospective look at the history of this uncanny disorder in human evolution, its recent western medical history and its most recent empirical descriptions as so-called alien abduction cases, including a presentation of Jungian and Freudian mythical perspectives. The empirical data is presented in balance with traditional cross-cultural and folklore accounts of the disorder as well as in the context of numerous recent cases researched in conjunction with the long-term study. Part of the data presented includes a proposal about psycho-geographical and psycho-geomagnetic distributions of "ghost" stories, dream attacks, and other SP related phenomena. These geographical zones correlate with geodynamic areas such as the Pacific "Ring of Fire" region where an increased number of cultural name

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #190390 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

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Customer Reviews

You Lie There With Your Eyes Open And Can't Move
The book "Wrestling With Ghosts" by Jorge Servilla is about the phenomena of "sleep paralysis".
If you describe this phenomena to a room full of people, you will find a few that know exactly what you are talking about, but the rest will be mystified.

Based on my own experiences, a typical episode of sleep paralysis is like this: You are under stress and lie down in your bed to go to sleep. You may sleep briefly. But then you find that your are lying on the bed with your eyes open. You cannot move. The view of the bedroom is so real that you know you are not in a dream.

To this basic scenario, more disturbing elements may be added. For example, you may think that the house is on fire. You may see a pet or even a strange animal moving in the room and climbing on your bed. The animal may climb on you. You may hear a loud ringing in your ears. Typically, you feel intense fear because you are paralyzed and cannot act. You struggle to move and finally wake up, often with a jolt.

Sleep paralysis is a vivid nightmare of a particular kind. Important aspects of the dream match your real situation precisely: your location, the posture of your body, the view of the surroundings that you have from your paralyzed eyes.

According to the book, there are people who find sleep paralysis so disturbing that it intrudes on their waking lives. They interpret these episodes as paranormal experiences, contacts with ghosts, religious revelations or hallucinations that make them doubt their own sanity. (I, myself, always brushed them off as bad dreams. As to doubting my own sanity, I find sleep paralysis less convincing evidence than my purchases of certain woodworking tools.) Those who find the sleep paralysis experience intensely disturbing are usually relieved when they learn that it is a well known and scientifically studied phenomena. I think this rush of gratitude leads to an undeserved level of praise for "Wrestling With Ghosts". There is useful information in the book but it is embedded in some of the most tortuous prose that I have ever forced myself to read.

For example (with the abbreviation "SP" for "sleep paralysis" and "REM" for "rapid eye movement") we have the section: "Sociocultural and Folkloric: Alien abductions as Birth Memories and SP".

The section begins: "A fully contextualized approach to anything may be realistically, a pie in the sky proposition. Still, most sleep researchers and technicians engaged in electro-encephalogramic (EEG) technology and research are trained to interpret REM sleep as, Austin's reference of Llinas and Pare (1991) says 'an active brain in a paralyzed body.' This bit of knowledge should already close the gap between what we think of consciousness when awake and some other type of consciousness, usually an altered or alternate (and lesser) form of consciousness not deserving much debate in the Philosophy of Science literature. That is, this bit of wisdom should be enough to begin a phenomenological unveiling that intersects the so-called electrophysiological data with the cultural lore. Because the book is partly an attempt at de-singularizing complexity, semiotically speaking, we need to continue knitting, so to speak, an ecologically richer fabric of knowledge that extends from the individual experience, through the necessity of singularization in scientific enterprises to the cultural lore."

I suppose that a person who fears a nightly visitation from ghosts would have the motivation to wade through such stuff. People unfamiliar with sleep paralysis won't want to waste their time doing that.

As I interpret the book's content, the important points are these:

1. Dreams occur in the REM stage of sleep. Normally, in this stage the body is actually paralyzed. So "sleep paralysis" may have something to do with entering a state of consciousness that is more "awake" than normal dreaming.

2. The perpetuation of legends in certain cultures, particularly those that involve night time visitations by ghosts or mythical creatures, might be explained by the fact that some fraction of the population experiences sleep paralysis and has dreams that are suggested by the mythology of the culture.

3. People may be able to train themselves not to feel fear during episodes of sleep paralysis. An episode of sleep paralysis might be use as a gateway to having a "lucid dream".

The book does have notes to the chapters and a bibliography. Some of the references are to scientific studies of various aspects of sleep. Others deal with philosophical matters. (The question of dreaming does bring up the question: "What is consciousness?".)

I rate the book as two stars out of five, which means it is below average as an exposition of a scientific topic.

I now know more about sleep paralysis
Years of not knowing whether I was crazy, hallucinating, or drinking too much tea all but disappeared when I finished reading Dr. Sevilla`s excellent book. Even though my knowledge of sleep paralysis has grown in the last year, I thought I was alone in my recent capacity, or ability to move from the paralysis state to more fun lucid dreaming. Dr. Sevilla explains how he and others do this making me feel less alone. His proactive management of the debilitating paralysis and turning it into a positive experience makes this a hopeful and optimistic book about the syndrome.

Dr. Sevilla also provides a wealth of information and scientific background (his and others) that makes his book an excellent reference book. There a lot of technical terms used throughout the book and he explains all of them in an accessible language. He uses the metaphor of a `dream shaman` as a literary tool to identify with the reader and to link the personal-phenomenological information with the more formidable and specialized scientific literature.

Included in the book is a dream questionnaire that I found very useful and probes deeply into the kind of experiences dreamers are likely to describe if they experience both SP and LD or any other type of dream. A keeper.

Balancing the "spooky" with science
I just finished re-reading this amazing and unusual book. A friend of mine who suffers from sleep paralysis (she is interested in any books about dreams!) recommended it to me.
Most books that I have read on the subject of dreams are either too "out there" or offer too little practical advice that I can incorporate into my dream life. Dr. Conessa Sevilla's book presents a well-balanced scientific, practical, "spooky" story, not only in regards to sleep paralysis, but about lucid dreaming as well.
His book also incorporates narratives of individuals who have experienced these dreams.
Some of the more psychological (bio-psychological or Freudian)explanations he offers, I must admit, were either new to me.
Finally, Dr. Conessa re-interprets the sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming experiences from the point of view of aesthetics.
Cordially,
J. Rodman