All In the Mind Radio 4
The Poetry Programme RTE Radio 1
It didn’t feel like it was “All in the Mind” when sleep paralysis came my way.
It was small baby time and the sleep patterns were off kilter. One night, I opened my eyes and felt completely terrified. Something was squatting on my chest so that I couldn’t move or I couldn’t breathe.
It felt like an evil demon was sitting on top of me – round to the priest and the house was blessed before you could say one Hail Mary and a Glory Be.
All in the Mind proved reassuring. Sleep paralysis – the sense of a presence, hallucinations and false awakenings is quite common.
That sense of feeling something evil crushing you may be a side effect of what happens when your brain wakes up but your body remains paralysed in a sleeping state.
Professor Christopher French said it was absolutely terrifying for the person. He referenced Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting The Nightmare – where a demon is squatting on a sleeping woman’s chest.
“That’s a beautiful depiction of sleep paralysis,” he said and thousands of listeners breathed a sigh of relief.
The groups most at risk of suffering from sleep paralysis are psychiatric patients and students – irregular sleep patterns are the culprit. The advice was to stay off the coffee and alcohol.
It is 50 years since Patrick Kavanagh died. Olivia O’Leary and guests celebrated him in the Poetry Programme.
O’Leary confessed she didn’t warm to him when she was young - too gritty, too much the world of the farmer.
But Poet Enda Wyley said she was swept up by his words when he wrote how “a man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes and finds it is his life”.
They talked about how Kavanagh breathed life and love into the banal.
How he took the horror and harshness of life in The Great Hunger and transformed it.
“He liberated us and gave poetry back to the Irish people,” said poet Noel Monahan.
Nevertheless, Kavanagh didn’t make this year’s Leaving Cert.
The jewels in the programme were Kavanagh reading his own poetry from Epic to Kerr’s Ass to the finale, one of the most beautiful love songs every written, Raglan Road.
