The Lethifold

[Cindy L Wells]

No: HPFGUIDX 60229

Nicola wrote:

> I was wondering where JK got the idea of the Lethifold from because it
sounds
> like a sleeping disorder I get.  I wonder if she has it?  Its called sleep
> paralysis.  Its when you are falling into REM sleep or waking up from REM
sleep
> so you are awake and you suddenly become paralysed with a feeling of
somebody
> pushing down on your chest.  Depending on the severness of the disorder
you
> can hallucinate (an evil figure in a black cloak), be raped, strangled etc
> (unfortunately I get the more severe one :/).
>
> The Lethifold has similarties to this, such as the black cloak, the
choking
> and suffocating and the feeling of evil.  I just thought it was very much
a
> coincidence.

Sleep Paralysis is the medical/scientific term for it, but as it's a
disorder that's always been around, you can bet that more than one culture
has made very different interpretations as to the causes of this phenomena.
The psychic Sylvia Browne--in her book "Book of Dreams"--defines the same
disorder as "astral catalepsy", and she believes it comes from coming in and
out of out-of-body states. Whether you believe this or not is unimportant;
what's valuable about the book are her accounts of how other cultures have
interpreted this phenomena. (I wish I had the book in hand to write them
down in full here, but it's on loan to a friend.) In Japan, for instance,
they believed it was ghosts trying to suffocate the living, and other
cultures had equally supernatural figures to explain it. I've dealt with
this problem, too, so I found those accounts fascinating.

Basically, as sleep paralysis has been around as long as there have been
humans, I wouldn't be surprised if many cultures have their own version of
the Lethifold, and it could be from one of these that JKR got her
inspiration.

Cindy W