This from Dr. Sheila Pryce Brooks, describing the thinking behind her “Threshold Contact Experience” model of anomalous experience, strikes me as an excellent extension and even fulfillment of the direction indicated in the likes of David Hufford’s The Terror That Comes in the Night and Shelley Adler’s Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection. Hufford’s “experience-centered” approach, and his and Adler’s deliberate decision to keep ontological and metaphysical questions and answers open instead of issuing flat reductionist decrees about the meaning of such things as sleep paralysis and, by extension, other anomalous experiences, leads right into Brooks’s conceptually and attitudinally generous model:

TCE does not offer a single explanation for these experiences. It does not determine whether they are neurological, psychological, spiritual, or external in origin. Instead, it identifies a class of experiences that share recognisable structural features and tend to occur under comparable conditions.

In doing so, it provides a point of reference that precedes interpretation. Different explanatory models can then be considered within a shared conceptual space, rather than in isolation.

This is a reclassification, not a conclusion.

The absence of a shared framework has practical consequences.

For experiencers, it can lead to confusion or the sense that their experiences do not fit within any coherent account.

For research, it reinforces fragmentation, with similar phenomena studied separately and rarely brought into relation with one another.

In clinical and therapeutic contexts, individuals may report experiences that do not sit comfortably within existing diagnostic or interpretive models. In such cases, attention is often directed toward explanation or management before the structure of the experience itself has been fully considered.

What the TCE framework offers is a way of holding these experiences together without reducing them to a single explanatory model. It creates the conditions for comparison, dialogue, and further investigation across experiential, research, and clinical domains.

As an “experiencer” myself, someone whose life and personal cosmos was upended by a series of sleep paralysis episodes with accompanying hypnagogic supernatural assaults in his twenties, I find this to be a deeply welcome and wholesome approach.