I was helpless and could not move, flat on my back. They were behind me...I could not see them. They meant me harm, and my fear was amplified because I could not escape. As they closed in, I tensed my body and screamed...

And I leapt out of the bed screaming; I ran against the room and slammed my fists into the wall, trying to strike down what...what I had been dreaming about?

Unfortunately, this was a shared wall that I banged on, and I had to explain to my now woken neighbors I had had a bad dream. By the time they went back to their own condo, I had calmed down from the Night Terror/ Sleep Paralysis I had experienced.

Image Source

This was the last time I suffered from one, although not the most embarrassing one; running though the packed-in crew quarters of a ship bound for Japan in my shorts and screaming at the top of my lungs took that cake ;>

Luckily, by the time I had the last incident, the web had been invented, so I could look up the "symptoms" and see what other folks had experienced. And after I read the following advice, I never had a Night Terror/ Sleep Paralysis again:
When you have one, don't try to "get away" or to move your whole body; if you find yourself paralyzed, try to wiggle your pinkie or your little toe

Uhhh, Steve...you promised us aliens...

Well, OK. I'd think the image of me running around in my boxers would be terrifying enough for anyone!

So aliens it shall be. But not proven aliens, or more specifically, proven alien abductions. We'll talk about the experience of alien abduction, instead.

Two doctors, John Mack and Rima Laibow, have worked from the perspective that what the "abuctees" experience was and still is, real to that patient. Psychologist Stuart Appelle, whose work specialized in research specialized in the nature of conscious experience and the perception of reality, agrees with this idea.

Mack:

After many hundreds of hours of work...I have no basis for concluding as yet that anything other than what experiencers say happened to them actually did
Abduction Humans Encounters with Aliens

"I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. [But] I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can't account for in any other way, that's mysterious. Yet I can't know what it is but it seems to me that it invites a deeper, further inquiry.
Alien thinking

Laibow

When events which are too anomalous to allow their incorporation into our world schema are presented to us, we are likely to dismiss them by using assumptions based in out currently operative world view.
Clinical Discrepancies Between Expected and Observed Data in Patients Reporting UFO Abductions: Implications For Treatment

Appelle:

The “abduction experience” is characterized by subjectively real memories of being taken secretly and/or against one’s will by apparently nonhuman entities and subjected to complex physical and psychological procedures
The Abduction Experience: A Critical Evaluation of Theory and Evidence

Image Source

Mack and Laibow have also argued that the people reporting these experiences are not suffering from other mental issues such as psychosis; however, Laibow (and others) have noted a correlation between child abuse victims and "abduction" reportees.

This discussion of anomalous experience and treatment has created more than it's share of criticism
The Lancet suggests that Mack was subject to "faulty instruments" and his own beliefs; see The art of medicine: The psychiatrist who wanted to believe. In 1994, Harvard even set up an unprecedented commission to investigate his work that Mack considered "Kafkaesque" (Wiki).

While Mack, Laibow, and Appelle may have lead the way, recognition that the damage of the experience, whether the abduction took place or not, must be treated has become commonplace:

the new breed of mental-health professional now contending that such other worldly experiences are legitimate and commonplace among the sane. That's not to say they accept the reality of alien abductors or precognition or ghosts—though much to the horror of their colleagues, a few of them have. But what many of these therapists have come to believe over the past five years is that such experiences—regardless of their cause—are common among normal, healthy people, and that those who find themselves traumatized by such episodes are just as deserving of psychological ministrations as those who suffer anxiety, depression, or the trauma that follows a plane crash or a rape.
The Dark Side

Next Time

We'll talk about how media deceptions of alien abduction distort our perception of reality, some common issues between night terror, abductions, and other common human myth-types, and maybe we'll even get into the nature of reality.