Ever since Joy was a little girl, someone or something has stalked her bedroom late at night. At first, this specter inexplicably terrified her. But when she became an adult, the ghost continued to visit her — and it became something of a familiar friend.'

I used to have visits from strange spirits or whatever and actually have sex with them,' Joy, who did not want to reveal her last name, told Mic. 'It was very pleasurable. It was almost like I was in a real relationship with a guy.' Unbeknownst to Joy at the time, she was experiencing what paranormal investigators and parapsychologists have deemed ',' a term that encompasses both the actual act of alleged paranormal intercourse with ghosts, spirits or invisible lovers and the fetish for paranormal intercourse. (It also, curiously, is used to describe sexual arousal derived from reflections in mirrors.)The phenomenon has come to be something of a punchline in recent years, thanks to a rash of sexual supernatural encounters reported by celebrities like, and, famously, who claimed a ghost would crawl up her leg and have sex with her while she was living in Texas. 'I used to think it was my boyfriend, then one day I woke up and found it wasn't,' she told FHM magazine., an actress best known for the film parody, had a similar experience that went viral after she revealed it on a British talk show last year.'

I just could feel this presence coming closer and closer and then I start feeling the actual touch without being able to see much,' she told Mic. 'The touch itself like that, it's kind of human, like, you know, hands. I could feel it all over my body.' GiphyGrim grinnin' ghosts: Despite the elbow-nudging and eye-rolling the idea of ghost sex can evoke, eerily similar experiences of supernatural sex or spectral rape have been reported in one form or another since at least 2400 B.C., when Ardat Lili and Irdu Lili were described on the, the tablet that gave the world the epic of. On thetablet, the demons are described as visiting men and women nightly to either become pregnant or to impregnate humans with hybrid spawn.' This is something that's gone on — truly written in every culture, in every philosophy, in every religion — since the beginning of time,' Patti Negri, a psychic who conferred with Blasick after her experience and who served as a paranormal expert on the Travel Channel special Ghostly Lovers, told Mic.The book further recounts the demonic predators and spectrophilia-like experiences that have appeared in the more than 4,000 years since the tablet was etched. They include reports from, a tale from the Old English epic poem, an account from the Mohammed and 16th- and 17th-century.

Sleep Paralysis is the inability to move or speak while being awake. It is a frightening experience that can often be tied to hallucinations, sleep.

'The Nightmare' (1781) Henry Fuseli/Wikimedia Commons'You feel like you're going to die.' But even though ghost sex predominantly has its roots in mythology, modern-day researchers now attribute the phenomenon to a very real, very common condition:.' When I first started working on it, a lot of people thought it was a cardinal symptom of narcolepsy, which it's not,' David Hufford, author of and one of the first researchers to begin studying spectrophilia, told Mic. 'Other people mistook it for psychosis —, for example — which it's not. It's normal and it's common, much more common than people thought that it was.'

Is thought to be the result of someone waking up before their REM, or the, cycle is finished. (Estimates for exactly how many people are affected by sleep paralysis vary widely, but Hufford said he believes roughly 20% of people have experienced it at some point.) Because of a physiological mechanism that prevents sleepers from acting out their dreams, those who experience sleep paralysis are left paralyzed (hence, the self-reports of being 'frozen' during ghost sex encounters). They can also experience intense fear, chest pressure, hallucinations and difficulty breathing.Worst of all, the sufferer, despite being unable to move, feels fully awake throughout the entire episode.

'Your body can feel like it's getting pushed or crushed. It can be painful for some people,' Ryan Hurd, an independent dream and consciousness researcher and the author of, told Mic.In fact, sleep paralysis can be so terrifying that a string of sleep-paralysis related deaths amongst in the United States to create the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. 'You feel like you're going to die,' Joy told Mic.

'No matter how many times it happens to you, you feel like you're going to die.' 'The Incubus' Wikimedia CommonsWhen terror turns to sexual arousal: It's not exactly clear why certain people experience sleep paralysis, or who's at risk for the condition, though anxiety and do play some role. Negri told Mic that anecdotally, women are more likely to report spectrophilia and sleep paralysis than men, but she attributes that largely to reporting bias.' I certainly have men who've experienced it, but women seem to want to talk about it more and experience the wheres and the whys,' Negri said.More difficult to pinpoint than the cause of sleep paralysis is the fraction of sufferers whose episodes aren't terrifying but are instead of a sexual nature. According to Hufford, sexual sleep paralysis experiences are 'maybe no more uncommon' than blissful, out-of-body reports of sleep paralysis, which have also been reported.

And according to data from sleep paralysis researcher, while 95% of people who experienced sleep paralysis over a lifetime reported feeling fear, 13% of those respondents also reported having pleasurable sleep paralysis experiences.Laura Hale, a 23-year-old woman from Louisiana, said she has experienced both sexually pleasurable and terrifying episodes of sleep paralysis. The first time, she said, it was a combination of the two.' It obviously creeped me out. I definitely felt sick about it, but it definitely felt like something sexual was happening to me and my body was responding,' Hale told Mic. 'It was all kind of just 'This is really weird and I'm not sure what's happening.' 'Joy reported using self-pleasure as an antidote to the terror sleep paralysis would otherwise bring. She told Mic that she has a technique for keeping night terrors at bay: using a hand that 'floats out of her body' ethereally, 'I will go down and just pleasure myself and it will take the fear away and I'll have an orgasm.

If I don't do that, I get super scared and it's a horrible experience.' GiphyYet the question remains: Why do some people find sleep paralysis pleasurable, while others find it terrifying? Physiologically speaking, there are a handful of possibilities. One common theory is that we enter a natural state of sexual arousal while we sleep. When our heads hit the pillows and our brains enter REM sleep, resulting in erections in men and lubrication in women.Another possible explanation lies in the intrinsic link between terror and pleasure. Numerous have determined that fear can trigger sexual arousal, possibly due to the fact that both emotions activate the, the part of the brain that processes both sexually arousing and threatening stimuli.Hurd's readers have supported that theory, reporting feeling both scared and aroused by sleep paralysis episodes.

But the truth is that researchers still don't really know what's going on.' It's really an understudied aspect of sleep paralysis and sleep paralysis hallucinations probably because of all the nested taboos related to the topic,' Hurd said. 'Who wants to talk about how they had sex with demons?'

A thriving community of ghost lovers: Apparently, the answer to that question is quite a lot of people, if the popularity of online and are any indication. Both Hale and Joy are members of the subreddit, where they share experiences, compare notes and swap stories with other people who have similar experiences.' It's a really helpful resource for just kind of feeling more normal, even though this is a really weird thing happening to you,' Hale said.Joy said she finds comfort in the forums because they normalize sleep paralysis and provide a nonjudgmental space for people to discuss its sexual dimensions. She's even used the forums to recommend her 'technique' to other paralysis experiencers who have intense fear during their episodes.'

I shouldn't be embarrassed of it because it is what it is. I think it's just the sexual part of it that's embarrassing,' she told Mic. 'If I was to say to the ghost, 'Oh, I just say go away in the name of Jesus,' it would be considered 'Oh, she's cool.' But since it's sex, it's almost kind of like, taboo. Even though everybody masturbates.' As more and more sleep paralysis experiencers come forward with their own accounts — supernatural, natural or otherwise — perhaps researchers will continue to learn more about the spirits that visit people in their sleep and what makes them so horrific (or just horny).

But until then, we'll continue to hear reports of spectral sexual encounters. And as we do, it's important to remember that these accounts, while frequently bizarre and often inexplicable, are never quite as out of the ordinary as we might think.

If you've ever woken up in the middle of the night feeling as though you're being crushed by a demonic being, you may have just experienced what's called the incubus phenomenon: an 'attack' by a male demon. (Its female counterpart, the succubus, usually attacks men.)The phenomenon is, in many ways, the quintessential nightmare. For centuries, the incubus demon has been said to haunt sleepers, inspiring as well as works of art.Now, a new meta-analysis from the Netherlands suggests that this frightening phenomenon may be more common than previously thought — and that it should be taken more seriously by psychiatrists and psychologists who hear such accounts from their patients. The so-called attack usually occurs during an episode of sleep paralysis, a condition that's even more common than the incubus phenomenon, according to the meta-analysis.is a result of the dissociation of sleep phases, said senior author Dr. Jan Dirk Blom,a professor of clinical psychopathology at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.The condition happens when a person is falling asleep or waking up. During sleep paralysis, two aspects of REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, occur when a person is conscious.During, which is the period when a person typically dreams, the body's muscles are relaxed to the level of paralysis, presumably to prevent the sleeper from acting out his or her dreams, Blom said. But when sleep paralysis takes place, the person's mind wakes up — however, the person is still dreaming, and the body is still paralyzed.'

Lying in bed in such a state of paralysis, the brain's threat-activated vigilance system kicks in and helps to create a compound,' Blom told Live Science.What the afflicted person sees is a combination of their actual surroundings and a nightmare, which is projected onto the real world. The experience feels exceptionally real, Blom said. Tracking demonsIn the meta-analysis, which was published in November in the journal, the researchers looked at 13 studies of the incubus phenomenon that included nearly 1,800 people. The different studies came from various countries, including Canada, the United States, China, Japan, Italy and Mexico.The researchers found that over 1 in 10 people, or 11 percent of the general population, will experience the in their lifetimes, Blom said. 'That means that there is an 11 percent chance for any given individual to experience this the incubus phenomenon at least once during their lives,' he added.But in certain groups, the odds of 'encountering' an incubus are higher. Among people with psychiatric disorders, as well as among refugees and — somewhat surprisingly — students, the odds of experiencing the incubus phenomenon are as high as 41 percent, Blom said.The analysis also found that people sleeping on their backs are more likely to experience the phenomenon.

Alcohol consumption and irregular sleeping patterns also make an incubus visit more probable, Blom said.Though the frightening experience gets frequently dismissed as 'just a bad dream,' Blom noted that the incubus phenomenon can lead to additional problems, including anxiety, difficulty sleeping due to fear and even delusional disorder, a mental illness akin to.In the paper, the researchers speculated about a possible link between the incubus phenomenon and sudden unexpected death syndrome, a situation in which a healthy person inexplicably dies in his or her sleep.' People who have experienced the incubus phenomenon often report a level of anxiety that is 'off the scale,' Blom said. 'Many of them have the feeling that they will actually die during an attack. Whether that ever happens is unknown, even though for a person experiencing it, it is not hard to imagine this happening.'

The analysis also found that the form of the incubus figure and how people react to it can vary based on the person's cultural background.For example, 'patients with Muslim background often tell me that they see the incubus phenomenon as a proof that they are being haunted by, an invisible spirit created by Allah out of smokeless fire,' Blom said.Sometimes, however, the incubus may take on a much more friendly and entertaining form.' I recently spoke to a healthy 15-year-old girl who had experienced the incubus phenomenon,' Blom said. 'She found four miniature penguins dining at a table on her chest, and had been thrilled and amused rather than scared.' Lcn mob wars.

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