The Atlantic discusses a deadly culture-bound syndrome. When you’re dreaming, your body becomes paralyzed, so that you don’t act out your dreams in sleep. There are two ways this mechanism could fail: either you could not be paralyzed in sleep, in which case you might sleepwalk or worse. Alternatively, you could wake up while paralyzed, and this feeling, known as sleep paralysis, is usually accompanied by feelings of intense dread and the belief that a malevolent entity is in the room, if not actually on top of you. Sleep paralysis is known in all cultures, and different non-scientific beliefs attach to it in. The Hmong call it tsog tsuam, and have a system of beliefs surrounding it.
The article discusses an epidemic among ethnically Hmong who had immigrated to the US: in the early 1980s, 117 men, most of them healthy and relatively young, died in their sleep of unknown causes. The Hmong believe that, if you don’t worship the right spirits, evil spirits can cause tsog tsuam. The article argues that intense belief in this phenomenon could have triggered an “obscure genetic cardiac arrhythmia that is prevalent in southeast Asia.” Their belief in the spirit world, in a sense, scared them to death.
dailymeh posted this on September 17, 2011
