Two gnomes are better then one

My gnomes

Garden gnomes are one of my bad habits. I collect them, at least slowly. I currently have 5 that I have collected over the last couple years, but I have to say I like them a lot. Every time I go somewhere that just might have gnomes, I go on a search for them to see if I can get in one at a good deal. Usually they end up being on clearance or small sized ones, but that works fine for me since I don't have much room to decorate my desk with the larger ones.

One of the first things that comes to my mind when I look at my small, but growing collection is obviously the tales of Icelandic elves and hidden folk tales or the infamous "Argentina gnome" videos.

Having already discussed those rather tired subjects, I figured I'd share and interesting thing I heard from a former coworker. This also isn't one of those traveling gnome stories (from Travelocity got the concept for their Roaming Gnome) and it doesn't have anything to do with garden gnome liberationists. In fact it's more of a question about whether what my coworker said has any basis or not. As far as I can tell by what he said, it is technically an urban legend, either way it fits quite well here, so here we go.

Let's say you own only one garden gnome and well, you decide it's lonely and needs a friend, so you go out and purchase it one. You get home, introduce the two fluffy bearded friends, and go about your business. That night you hear weird noises in your garden or wherever you keep your gnomes. The next day you awake to find things out of place or even trashed. You figure your cat did and ignore it, but then happens again and again in the same area the gnomes reside. Deciding to catch the cat in action you place a camera the area so the culprit can be caught on film.

The next morning things are in disarray like always and you load up the video and watch it. What you see shocks you. Your two garden gnomes appear to come to life and mischievously fool around right before your eyes. Afraid due to the sheer strangeness of it all you dispose of your gnomes and life resumes it's normal course.

My coworker never actually had this happen and I've never found any reports of this happening before. He swore up and down though that if you place two garden gnome figures together that they would come to life at night and cause mischief. Whether he was pulling my leg or simply passing down an urban legend I don't know, but the idea is certainly interesting. Doesn't surprise me that he associated it with gnomes either; after all they are creatures of myth and not just lawn or desk ornaments.

What do you think, is it an urban legend? Or was he simply assuming I'm gullible enough to believe something he made up?

Sleep paralysis and alien abduction

One of the skeptical world's favorite alien abduction debunking devices is that of sleep paralysis, which all of you are probably quite aware of. If you don't know what sleep paralysis is however, the simplest explanation is that it is a malfunction in the dream cycle during sleep. More precisely it is a malfunction that occurs when you wake from a dream, but your body fails to fully leave the physical dream mode. Victims often wake up immobilized by a safety mechanism designed to keep you from acting out your dreams. People, although they may be conscious, will still experience some other dream like symptoms, such as feelings of someone being in the room, or bright lights that aren't really there.

Since it is similar in description to alien abductions, it's no wonder skeptics like to cling to this as a reason why abduction is not real. What if they were right, at least in the sense that the abduction phenomenon is connected to sleep paralysis, but in a totally different way then the skeptics believe.

It has been thought that while you dream you sometimes can have things happen to you physically. For instance, I've had dreams where I'm falling then suddenly find myself awake with and my leg jumps as if I've landed on it. A little bit more extreme is the idea that dreams can take you to other real worlds/dimensions. Perhaps the aliens committing the abductions only physically abduct people a few times and the rest of the time use dreams and/or sleep paralysis to their advantage, using the so called "implants" found in some abductees to initialize the abduction experiences and doing what they do in a dream world.

Throwing out the more far fetched ideas of that theory however, aliens could perhaps be aware of the sleep paralysis phenomenon and simply use it as a cover for abductions. Triggering it to make abductees believe they are simply experiencing this ordinary phenomenon when in fact they are unaware they are being taken by alien beings. Just another arsenal to hide their actions just like screen memories.