With the sensational release of Pokemon Go, millions of people have been on the hunt for Pokemon worldwide. In Moscow, something quite peculiar took place when a woman drifted to sleep after playing with the app, and was abruptly awoken by a crushing pressure of a Pokemon character. Opening her eyes, the woman reportedly claims she was panicking, unable to speak, and struggled with the “live Pokemon.” Her boyfriend was sound asleep next to her, and she finally escaped the Pokemon’s grip. International tabloids had a field day with the story. According to psychologist, Matthew Tompkins, this is considered a ‘normal’ event.

This coincides with the idea of sleep paralysis, which is a subtype of parasomnia. One becomes enraptured in the limbo state (both awake and dreaming). Hallucinations are a part of the vivid effects of such a state of sleep. Sleep paralysis has been historically researched to date back as far as 400 B.C. across various cultures. The first reference to such an issue was in the Zhou Li/Chun Guan, an ancient Chinese book on sleep and dreaming. Researchers have identified E-meng (dreams of surprise) as a form of sharing traits that are currently associated with are associated with sleep paralysis. Brian Sharpless and Karl Dograhmji are both sleep paralysis researchers that have effectively discovered 118 different terms. Some terms describe “witch pressing” and “elf pressing.” Norwegian folktales describe evil elves that shoot people with arrows, while the Japanese have experiences with being bound inside metal. The Kurds perhaps have the most terrifying tale of an evil spirit that suffocates people. Some modern scientists link such hysterical events to alien abductions.

Jon Loudner provided evidence during the infamous Salem Witch Trials of his experience drifting off to sleep, being abruptly awoken by Bridget Bishop, one of the first victims of the Witch Trials. Jon experienced a vision of a figure on top of him, and dubbed this a witch. The parallels between the Muscovite woman and Jon are that they both were unable to move, yet were awake. Bridget was executed by hanging. Witchcraft is a much less popular explanation; the only thing we know is that when we dream, our actions are confined to our imagination. We all have a built-in safety mechanism that prevents our motorized skills from acting out. However, as we all know, our brains are complex systems that sometimes have run-ins with glitches. One glitch is known as sleepwalking, and are generally a consequence of more general sleep disruption. Experts estimate that 50% of the population experience sleep paralysis at least once, including healthy people who do not have a mental illness of drug abuse.

Now, why would this woman in Moscow dream of a Pokemon? Well, dreams are one of the most difficult subjects to study. The link between Pokemon Go and the woman’s dream is quite simple. A team of scientists led by Robert Stickgold at Harvard Medical School reported that those who played the video game known as Tetris were reporting seeing game-related ‘hypnogogic imagery.’ They saw falling blocks prior to falling into the deep sleep state. Various other experiments proved that people who are given memory-based tasks will perform better if they can sleep immediately after learning. It’s as if our dreams are a practice space for reality. An experiment on rats’ hippocampus (the part of the brain associated with the way we form memories) led to the discovery that learning something prior to sleep does in fact produce a side-effect in the brain of trying to solve similar problems associated with the subject learned.

Although a substantial amount of questions has not been answered, it is evident that maybe a dream is much more than a dream, maybe it’s reality.