Thank you brain, very cool
So glad I never had the visions. “Just” the paralysis.
I’ve seen some wild shit during sleep paralysis. One of the tamer fits I had was seeing a really tall human-shaped apparition that was made of the shadow in the corner of my room. It felt like he cursed me to not be able to move. I was scared of that corner for a few nights.
One of the crazier ones: One night I was going to sleep with my curtains open, but the blinds were down so lines of orange light were spilling in from the street light onto the ceiling. I had the window open, so the occasional breeze pushed and pulled the lines like waves on a beach. It was hypnotizing. I was watching them half asleep, and eventually they slowly started morphing into what looked like pretty glowing runes dancing around my ceiling.
Then I start hearing voices outside my apartment. In reality, I’m sure it was a few teenagers walking home while having an unreasonably loud conversation for the time of night, but what I heard was 3 of them, multiplying into maybe 6, then tens of them, hundreds, thousands… Eventually it felt like an ocean of people was outside my apartment. Playful voices that were utterly unconcerned with me, not even aware I existed, but I was terrified they might spill into my room and kill me. The juxtaposition between the threat of being overrun by whoever those voices were coming from and the complete lack of visual evidence that there was anyone there at all was surreal.
At this point I know it’s sleep paralysis because I can’t move, but I try my best to drag myself off the bed with what little motor functions I still have to hopefully wake me up on impact. Eventually I succeed, and I wake up in my bed. The orange lines are spilling onto my ceiling just like before. Everything is quiet again, with just the soft sound of my fan whirring, slowly turning left and right.
And then I think about what just happened… If I woke up by falling onto the floor, how am I still in my bed?
Now the fan has morphed into a monster with a head of violently spinning blades, twisting and looming over me while making intimidating metallic sounds.
Your sleep paralysis demon should send their resume to a few Hollywood producers if they ever get bored of only traumatizing one human at a time. A+ storytelling.
Or the guy who made skinamarink! He had a YouTube channel originally where he’d adapt people’s dreams into short films. There was some wild stuff
As scary as it sounds, I’m kinda curious to experience this just once myself
It’s hard to do it on purpose, but one tip I can give you is this: (this turned out way longer than I meant it to be lol, sorry)
Sleeping on your back seems to be a must. I’ve never had it happen to me while sleeping any other way. For this reason, in my experience it’s more likely to happen when I’m sick or physically exhausted, because I toss and turn a lot before I actually manage to get to sleep.
Another thing I’ve heard people say is that learning how to lucid dream can help. Which makes sense, because for one, I’ve always been able to lucid dream and I seem to have gotten sleep paralysis a lot more than most people. And two, sleep paralysis is just being lucid during REM sleep but with your eyes open.
Also something to keep in mind is that it may only last a few seconds, and you’re not really guaranteed to see anything strange. It’s not always a wild 1-2 minute long journey like in the experience I shared here. For me, a lot of the time it’ll start with me trying to wake myself up when I realize I’m dreaming, and then I’ll get my eyes open and struggle to move… Then after a handful of seconds I overcome it and go to the bathroom or something, then whoops, the door fell off and into a huge expanse of blue sky and clouds that’s somehow located entirely within my bathroom. I never left the bed, I just dreamt that I overcame the paralysis lol.
In order to see stuff that isn’t there your emotions have to get involved. It’s still a dream even though you’re using your eyes and mostly looking at real things, so the dream parts of what you see are heavily influenced by what’s going on in your head. That’s why most people see shadow monsters or “feel their presence”, because not being able to move your body when you’re not expecting it is scary, so you start to see scary things. The experience I shared here started off peaceful because I wasn’t compelled to move, I was just relaxed and looking at pretty glowing orange lines morphing into runes on my ceiling… Then the kids outside my window startled me, and that turned into a horrifying audio hallucination. Then later in the experience, I didn’t see anything scary until I realized I couldn’t have actually fallen off the bed if I were still in my bed, which made me nervous and the fan monster manifested itself.
This has only happened to me once. I was conscious, my eyes were open, and I was able to move my pinky and ring finger on my left hand. My wife sleeps to my left. I kept clawing at her, trying to scream her name, but only a sound that resembled her name came out. On the other side of the room, was a tall, dark, shadowy figure with faint, white eyes. Just staring at me. Not moving. Eventually I fell asleep and woke up in the morning.
An experience I don’t care to repeat.
An experience I don’t care to repeat.
I think I might be weird, because I love getting sleep paralysis. Same with nightmares, at least when the subject isn’t something upsetting. I’m sad that it doesn’t happen to me very often anymore.
A lot of my taste in art and what I find compelling in general was shaped by surreal and terrifying cartoons like Courage the Cowardly Dog, and I think that’s partially why I enjoy it. There’s a weird feeling of catharsis I get from coming out of an intense state of fear and realizing it was all fabricated by my mind, and as a bonus I sometimes come away from it with a memory of a small story that’s intensely personal to me.
I’ve had this since my late teens. It’s more common when you have irregular sleep patterns. Nowadays it’s more rare.
It’s scary shit, specially if you panic. In time I’ve learned to control it when I have an episode and mostly succeed. But occasionally I still panic, but not like before.
Wiggling a toe will make the movement come back slowly and if you recognize what’s happening and keep calm you’ll avoid the most disturbing hallucinations. You can even succeed in controlled lucid dreaming during an episode.
I never saw the demon but I have felt its presence. It’s actually not as scary as it sounds. The scariest hallucinations were actually feeling people had entered my room and were intending to hurt me and I couldn’t budge. Once it happened with my old landlord when I was in college. He lived upstairs and I had an episode after falling asleep in my living room. I heard him enter my unit and saw him stand over me talking gibberish. It was so unsettling. I finally moved in a panic and I was by myself. He was actually a very chill guy, best landlord ever.
A few times I was unable to move, alone in the dark, and suddenly moved unexpectedly only to see my girlfriend or room mate towering over me and tell me I was moaning heavily in my sleep and thought I was having a bad nightmare. I’ve wondered how many of the sleep paralysis are actually nightmares and we ARE asleep.
Man…
For me it happens when I’m under extreme stress, like my 3 year long “come back, I love you. I don’t love you anymore. I’m not cheating, he’s just a guy I snuck out with for no reason while I thought you were gonna be at work” divorce.
You said wiggling a toe got you out of it. For me it was tapping my pinky and trying to scream.
I even learned to control it and it was like an acid trip. Well, more like I learned to ride it and not be afraid.
One of the wildest ones I experienced though, I had recently purchased a hamster for my daughter that turned out to be a pregnant female. I tried to give the babies away, no one would take them. They slaughtered each other. I didn’t know they did that.
I was laying in bed watching my comfort food, Star Trek TOS. Suddenly the hamster cage appeared on my stomach with the gate opened. 40-50 hamsters crawled out and started eating my fingers and burrowing into my chest and stomach. I couldn’t move. My ex appeared at the foot of the bed as a shadowy creature with wild hair rocking back and forth laughing at me and hissing. I tapped my pinky and tried to scream once I was aware it was sleep paralysis. A hamster crawled up on my face and started eating my nose. I finally managed to mumble scream enough to get my exes attention and she reached out and touched me. As soon as she did I snapped back to reality.
The last time it happened I wasn’t expecting it. I was in a decent place in my personal life, work was chaotic though. I thought my house was full of distant relatives and they were killing people from outside of the family in my living room.
I hate that shit when it takes me by surprise. When it happens regularly I take control and I don’t mind it.
I get that feeling of “someone’s in the house” every single time… Horrid even though I know that it’s not true.
Dude once I had this particular episode living in a first floor apartment. I was facing the opposite direction, but I heard my bedroom window slowly open and an intruder step inside my bedroom. I was absolutely fucking terrified thinking I was about to be murdered. Nope! Just sleep paralysis!
I haven’t had an episode in a long time but I would try to tell myself to just breathe through it. The moving an extremity would help too. The worse part was that I’d get them in bunches. If one happened I’d have to stay awake for a bit or I’d get them over and over. Thankfully never saw any demons; just a vision of my surroundings but I couldn’t move.
This is almost exactly how it happens for me, I’ve never really seen “the demon”, but I know it’s there and I can feel its presence at a super intense level. Sometimes, I hear them walk into my room and stand over me. Other times, they’re just there, staying perfectly out of sight.
The worst part of it for me is when I try to speak or scream and nothing comes out. That’s more scary to me than “the demon”
It’s interesting that other people call it “the demon” too. That’s how I’ve always thought of it. The demon comes in various forms for me. Once it was distinctly female with a feminine voice. Another time it was a gargantuan shadow beast slowly walking toward me to kill me. Very rarely it won’t involve a demon though and I’ll think a human is breaking in, or I won’t perceive anything in particular.
I’ve had a few episodes a few years ago while i was heavily depressed and my sleep pattern was messed up. i didn’t see much, just shadows in the corner of my eyes, but i knew something evil was in the room and i heard deep, demonic voices from behind. the first few times i was in a full blown panic, but i read about sleep paralysis before, so i at least connected the dots quickly… wiggling my pinky finger was my mode of escape.
fixing my sleep pattern with sleep meds (by force) made it go away
reading this thread right before sleep, awesome.
I’ve had this once in my life, when I was 3. It’s my oldest memory I guess, 30 years later i still remember the animals staring at me from the wall at the other side of the room. Until they started running towards me and I could not even scream.
Same, except it was toy of Petrie from land before time. It had multiplied and i was surrounded by Petries.
Mine is similar but my bedroom had stretched out like a giant hallway and tiny figurines of my parents were stacked floor to ceiling at the far end with their backs to me. In the hallucination I said, “What the fuck?” and they all instantly turned towards me in anger and fell over making a tsunami wave that crashed over me, fully waking me up.
It was horrifying and I thought I was going to have a heart attack at the age of eight.
