348 – No Respect for the Dead

Oh Rags what will we do with you?

So I did a little poking around online to look further into the tophat theory I mentioned on Tuesday and found something interesting. Some of you might have heard of the phenomenom known as shadow people. Oftentimes people in the grip of sleep paralysis will dream that their room has been invaded by something evil and menacing. A lot of people report this presence manifesting as a shadow person (or people) — basically just a blank dark human silhouette. A lot of sleep paralysis victims interpet these as actual spirits or demons; I’m a little more skeptical myself, since I think the brain tends to fire off all sorts of random neurons while you’re dreaming, and, since the brain always seeks to find order in chaos and seems pre-programmed to recognize human forms, it tends to collapse its random noise into something that looks human. But whatever, I’m no dreamologist (and when I do have episodes of sleep paralysis, they don’t often include vivid visual hallucinations — usually I’m just positive that there’s something in the room even if I can’t see anything). What I found interesting, though, is that many people report seeing an entity they’ve dubbed the hat man. The hat man often appears to be the lead shadow person, distinguished by the fact that he wears a hat. Now most people describe it a wide-brimmed hat more resembling a fedora buuuuut it’s not too far a leap of logic to think that some might interpret the same figure as wearing a tophat. Now I wonder if the bogeyman’s tophat might have originally been inspired by descriptions relayed by sleep paralysis sufferers? MAKES YA THINK.

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