By Baland Jalal

AWARENESS IS A TOOL

Review by Gunnel Minett

When the author was a teenager he experienced intense terror. He woke up one night totally paralysed, frozen from head to toe. At the same time there was something sinister in his bedroom. A being that he saw as a demon grabbed his legs and started to crush his chest and squeeze his neck. No wonder that this frightening experience stayed with him and played a role when he, later in life, decided to investigate what caused this episode. 

As a neuroscientist he has studied sleep paralysis (which he discovered had caused this horrible experience) in detail. In this book he gives a thorough explanation of these strange states, between wakefulness and REM sleep, that some people experience more often than others. In addition to sleep paralysis, he also looks at lucid dreaming, narcolepsy and other sleep problems that are based on malfunctions of the brain. 

In order to understand how the brain can construct the terrifying hallucinations of sleep paralysis, where waking and dreaming worlds interpenetrate, he explains how the brain works normally. To understand the malfunction of sleep paralysis, we first need to understand how our brains construct ‘normal’ reality in general. This involves going through which functions are at work to create what we perceive as reality. 

Sleep paralysis occurs when people wake up unable to move while vivid REM-sleep imagery leaks into consciousness. In Jalal’s detailed explanation of how the paralysis is caused, we see how brain functions, which are ‘designed’ to help us pass through the various normal phases we go through during healthy sleep, start to malfunction.

He also explains how culture shapes hallucinations. Depending on where you grew up and/or live, sufferers of sleep paralysis tend to experience specific figures from their cultural tradition, such as demons and shadow men. Experiencing demons, for example, has a natural explanation: unfortunately during sleep, some of the brain’s every-day, reality-generating procedures, such as logically filling in gaps in our perception are disabled. As a result, the brain may start to create a non-rational and even terrifying false sense of reality. 

Apart from a thorough explanation of sleep disorders, the book can also be read as a clear and accessible account of how the brain constructs what we take to be the real world around us. Jalal’s final conclusion on brain malfunctioning is: “For the greatest insight these states offer is simple and profound: when we understand the mind at its most fragile, we learn how to guide it at its strongest.” [p 271]

Published by Allen Lane,  November 2026, ISBN-13  : 978-0241729434