Dr Sheila Pryce Brooks

Dr Sheila Pryce Brooks I'm on a journey, exploring sleep paralysis as a spiritual and transcendental experience, bridging the gap between science, spirituality, and consciousness.

One of the assumptions surrounding sleep paralysis is that it represents a complete loss of control.Yet many people who ...
10/07/2026

One of the assumptions surrounding sleep paralysis is that it represents a complete loss of control.

Yet many people who have lived these experiences describe something rather different. Although the body may be temporarily immobilised, they often report remaining aware, making decisions, regulating fear, and gradually developing greater confidence in navigating the experience over time.

My latest article explores agency as a core feature of Threshold Contact Experience and considers whether our understanding of these experiences has overlooked one of their most important dimensions.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

https://sheilaprycebrooks.substack.com/p/agency-a-core-feature-of-threshold?r=zdvcq

Many people remember the room as vividly as they remember the experience itself.The bed remained where it always was.The...
02/07/2026

Many people remember the room as vividly as they remember the experience itself.

The bed remained where it always was.

The door remained where it always was.

The room appeared familiar.

And yet something had changed.

My latest article explores environment as a core feature of Threshold Contact Experience and asks why place may matter more than we have traditionally assumed.
https://buff.ly/IOMsajD

For many years, discussions about sleep paralysis have focused primarily on paralysis itself.Yet when people describe th...
25/06/2026

For many years, discussions about sleep paralysis have focused primarily on paralysis itself.

Yet when people describe their experiences in detail, the conversation often becomes much larger. Dreams, contact experiences, spiritual questions, transformation, consciousness, reality, identity, and meaning frequently become part of the story.

This raises an important question: where do the boundaries of Threshold Contact Experience actually lie?

My latest article explores the scope and limits of TCE, while also explaining why the conversation is expanding into wider areas of inquiry.

You can read it here:
https://buff.ly/E9v8S9S

What happens when a meaningful experience is understood primarily through the lens of pathology?This is a question I hav...
18/06/2026

What happens when a meaningful experience is understood primarily through the lens of pathology?

This is a question I have been reflecting on for many years.

Many people find enormous relief in discovering that sleep paralysis has a recognised medical explanation. That knowledge can reduce fear, provide reassurance, and help people understand experiences that once felt frightening or isolating.

Yet in my research and conversations with experiencers, I have repeatedly encountered people who felt that something important remained unaddressed.

Not because they rejected the medical explanation.

But because the experience itself often seemed larger than the explanation available to them.

People spoke about recurring dreams, synchronicities, sensed presences, spiritual experiences, intuitions, life-changing insights, and events that continued to shape them years after the episodes themselves had ended.

Whether we interpret those experiences psychologically, neurologically, spiritually, or in some other way is a separate question.

What interests me is that many people feel these aspects of their experiences matter, and yet they are often the first things left out of the conversation.

My latest article explores what may be lost when experience becomes pathology.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Have you ever felt that an important aspect of an experience was overlooked because the explanation arrived too quickly?

https://buff.ly/sUBZWTo

One of the most psychologically striking aspects of many Threshold Contact or sleep paralysis reports is not simply fear...
26/05/2026

One of the most psychologically striking aspects of many Threshold Contact or sleep paralysis reports is not simply fear, but the feeling of responsiveness.

The sense that the interaction changes once the presence becomes aware it has been noticed.

This recurring relational quality appears across many different interpretations of the experience.

Sleep-related experiences are usually grouped by when they occur.Dreams, sleep paralysis, night terrors, each is treated...
17/04/2026

Sleep-related experiences are usually grouped by when they occur.

Dreams, sleep paralysis, night terrors, each is treated as a separate category.

But these categories are based on timing, not on the structure of the experience itself.

When you look more closely at what people actually report, including interaction, presence, and repeated sequences, the boundaries between these categories begin to blur.

This raises questions about whether our current classifications are accurately reflecting the experiences they are meant to describe.

There is a strong assumption that dreams and sleep paralysis are fundamentally different experiences.In practice, that d...
15/04/2026

There is a strong assumption that dreams and sleep paralysis are fundamentally different experiences.

In practice, that distinction doesn’t always hold.

People report very similar features in both, including interaction, presence, and structured sequences.

What changes is not necessarily the experience itself, but how it is interpreted.

This matters because interpretation shapes how these experiences are studied, discussed, and understood.

Some experiences we call dreams don’t behave like dreams.They repeat, follow structure, and involve interaction.In this ...
09/04/2026

Some experiences we call dreams don’t behave like dreams.

They repeat, follow structure, and involve interaction.

In this week’s Substack post, I begin mapping what I refer to as Dream Contact and how these experiences relate to what is commonly known as sleep paralysis.

This marks the beginning of a new thread within the Threshold Contact Experience framework.

If this resonates, you’re welcome to explore further.
https://buff.ly/YXSxFVf

Dreams and sleep paralysis are typically treated as separate types of experience.However, when you look at how some of t...
08/04/2026

Dreams and sleep paralysis are typically treated as separate types of experience.

However, when you look at how some of these experiences are described, there are clear overlaps.

Certain dream experiences repeat, follow consistent patterns, and involve forms of interaction that feel structured rather than random.

At that point, the distinction between categories becomes less straightforward.

A framework doesn’t create something new.It reveals what was already there.Once patterns become visible, they begin to c...
06/04/2026

A framework doesn’t create something new.

It reveals what was already there.

Once patterns become visible, they begin to change how we understand experience, and how we respond to it.

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