The Strange Case Of The Phantom Pokemon

Psychologist Matthew Tompkins gives an explanation about sleep and what happens when we dream, starting with the case of a woman in Moscow, who had a seemingly strange experience. She went to sleep after playing Pokemon Go on her phone, and woke up later that night because she felt a huge pressure on her chest. When she opened her eyes she saw a Pokemon on top of her. She wasn’t able to speak, but she finally fought the Pokemon off and reported the whole incident to the police.

Tompkins explains that what happened to the Russian woman is called sleep paralysis, a sleep disturbance that can be studied in a lab by waking people up from deep sleep. 

“Beyond the inability to move, these periods of wakeful paralysis are often accompanied with vivid multisensory hallucinations.” 

Examples of sleep paralysis are found throughout history and across cultures, Tompkins writes, and they have, of course, been interpreted according to those specific times. It is believed that sleep paralysis is what started the Salem witch hunt craze, and the phrase “alien abduction” has been thrown in the conversation regarding this disturbance.

The author then goes on to explain what happens in our brains when we dream, and gives a very interesting insight about how our dreams change after we play video games. As Tompkins points out at the end of the article, the Russian woman’s case can be a starting point for new research on sleep and why people dream, because “our brains are highly complex systems, and, as such, are prone to the occasional glitch.”