The Ghosts in My Bedroom Dan Denis
Event details
Ever since records began, there have been stories of people being visited or attacked in the night by nocturnal monsters. Typically, these accounts from across the world describe victims paralysed in their beds while a monstrous being approaches them before trying to strangle them.
Join psychologist Dan Denis of the University of York as he explores this cultural history and discusses the progress made by modern science to understand this phenomenon.
The event includes the screening of a short experimental animated documentary, Devil in the Room. Directed by Carla MacKinnon and released in 2013, it won Best Documentary at Cineglobe Film Festival, Cern, Switzerland. (Runtime: 07:55)
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons - The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli
About the speaker
Dr Dan Denis is a Lecturer in the University of York’s Department of Psychology. After gaining a PhD at the University of Sheffield, he completed two postdoctoral positions in the US at Harvard Medical School and the University of Notre Dame. He joined the University of York in 2022 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow, before moving into a Lecturer position in 2024. Dan is primarily interested in the nature and function of sleep, and how sleep impacts our waking cognition and mental health. He is also interested in so-called anomalous sleep experiences, such as sleep paralysis. His research here seeks to understand more about what causes these experiences, and ways that episodes can be made less frightening and even transformed into something positive.
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