Is gnetke a sleep paralysis? The unusual between folkloristic and medical classifications

Abstract

One may come across descriptions of strange incidents associated with sleep in folklore narratives from different regions of the globe. A sleeping person feels pressure, as if some external force pushes them down; they are aware of everything, but cannot move; they hear sounds, see strange images and interact with them in a certain way. Folklore offers specific patterns for explaining such conditions and for modeling human behavior when they occur. Biomedicine calls such conditions “parasomnias” and includes them in the International Classification System of Diseases (ICD) as certain pathologies associated with sleep. However, this approach leaves beyond the scope of medical nosology many other “symptoms” important for folklore consciousness. How appropriate is it to reduce various “folklore facts” related to sleep to several ICD headings? This article considers unusual states that arise on the border of wakefulness and sleep from several positions: (1) ways of organizing and formalizing such experience in folklore texts of different genres (mainly based on the material of Russian folklore); (2) mythologizing of such states and their connection with certain mythological characters; (3) transformation of folklore patterns of Russian oral tradition in urban folklore and Internetlore (based on materials from the Russian-language segment of the Internet); (4) the correlation of folklore and medical discourses in the interpretation of states associated with sleep.