[calm_bull]

i got it last night, and i get it about three or 4 times a week usually, on top of constant nightmares, i probably wake about 4 times a night at this stage. i cant remember the last time i had a decent nights sleep. mine usually starts where im looking around my room and then i start to hallucinate, either someone/something walks in and starts screaming at me or trying to hurt me, or otherwise one of the objects in my rooms turns into someone. its crazy and usually leaves me waking up hyperventilating and afraid to go back to sleep!

[whatsup?]

Originally Posted by calm_bull

i got it last night, and i get it about three or 4 times a week usually, on top of constant nightmares, i probably wake about 4 times a night at this stage. i cant remember the last time i had a decent nights sleep. mine usually starts where im looking around my room and then i start to hallucinate, either someone/something walks in and starts screaming at me or trying to hurt me, or otherwise one of the objects in my rooms turns into someone. its crazy and usually leaves me waking up hyperventilating and afraid to go back to sleep!

Christ that sounds awful Think that's more nightmare than sleep paralysis!

[tedobrien98]

I had it once. I had been sick as a plane to Lourdes for a few days before it with the flu and all that, (It was about a week before Christmas last year) and I woke up normally in the middle of the night, as you do, and decided to go out to the toilet... So I did the thing in your brain that tells your legs to move, and they didn't... I tried again, no movement... This is strange I thought... I remember feeling a funny thing in my legs... I just said fvck this and went back to sleep... Which is strange for me, because my mind ALWAYS makes things seem worse than they are... After reading some of these posts, I'm surprised I didn't have the whole kit and caboodle... Ould women sitting on me, her friend over in the corner staring, rats running up the wall, Justin Bieber on the radio... I'm sure it can be very scary for some people!!! I'm afraid of it happening again now, incase I'll have an experience like ye'rs...

[therattler]

i get it from time to time. Scary. Latest was last Wednesday....I was having a nap on the couch with my 2 year old daughter. I woke (half woke) and my eyes opened. I tried to get up but couldnt move. Couldnt even move a hand. Just my eyes. I could hear foot steps and with the fear of the situaution i got it into my head that someone came into the house so then I started to panic. Think I just closed my eyes then and went back asleep.

I got it really bad once in bed last year. I woke and not only could i not move but i couldnt breathe properly. I was looking at my partner who was asleep beside me and was trying to get the strength up to make a noise with my voice to wake her cause I was freakin' out but couldnt. Eventually I think I just reached the threshold for not breathing and woke up.

Mental!!

[St. Jimmy]

I get sleep paralysis fairly often but I'm not really bothered by it, in fact I'm intrigued and fascinated by it. Worst one was last night. Happened twice in a 5 minute period. I'll try and explain it in the best detail I can.

I sleep on my belly with my face pointing to the left or right. I was having alot of weird dreams (one involved me going into the kitchen for a snack and all I found was broken pieces of Easter eggs HAH... but that's a story for a different day). Anyway when I "woke" from the dream I felt the familiar sensation of the skin on my face being sucked off, I felt an evil presence in the room and everything was kind of... blurry. My face was pointing towards my girlfriend who was fast asleep next to me. As with sleep paralysis I couldn't move a muscle so I tried to shake my hand and breath heavily to try wake her but to no avail. Then (and this freaked me the fuck out) she suddenly sat up and turned her head to me. As it was dark and blurry I assumed it was her anyway. She stared at me for a minute or so then really quickly crawled off the bed out of my view and as she crawled out of view she kind of resembled a demon like creature/incubus type thing. She was gone for a minute and then I felt her crawl onto my back which made my breathing really difficult. I tried to scream and rock back and forth, all the while my breathing was getting increasingly heavier and after a minute or so of this I woke up.

Out of breath and exhausted, I looked over and there was my girlfriend looking at me asking me did I just have a seizure. I sat up in bed for a minute and after I gathered my thoughts I laid my head back down on the pillow. Literally within a minute it started happening again. Blurry room, unable to move, that face suction shit going on. I was like "Jesus!! Not again". I was able to snap out of it the second time and finally fall back asleep.

It's a scary occurrence but it's totally harmless. It's caused by messed up sleeping patterns, medication, caffeine, stress... etc... as someone said a few posts ago once it's happened a few times and you know what it is it's not something that bothers you it's just something that happens from time to time.

Read the wikipedia page. It helps you understand it a bit better. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

[gogomum]

It is so interesting to hear other people's stories who have gone through this. I had it happen to me when I was 7, 14, 17, 21, 27 and 28 and for a while thought I was haunted by a poltergeist. It was especially strange that the number 7 seemed to occur at each "visitation". I had a combination of visits from a little leprechaun type man, speaking an ancient language through the radio which to me sounded like a satanic chant but I understood it, not being able to move, hearing voices calling my name in my ear, hearing footsteps on the stairs, feeling something on my legs pressing me down, seeing things move about the room like pictures or balloons or the sheets being pulled down. I thought for a long time that I was haunted and was so interested in watching horror movies. I even had my own special language that I could write when I was a teenager, with different letters that I knew off by heart and could write in a diary, I looked it up since and it was the Paleo Hebrew alphabet that I was writing in which dates from the 10th Century BC or earlier.

I read the Demon Haunted World by Carl Saagan though a few years ago and realised it was quite common and not at all supernatural, I am a humanist so it went against my beliefs to believe in ghosts and higher powers, although I do believe that electrical forces in humans can do strange things. For example I can stop a watch in anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours, just by wearing it, sometimes I mess up the laptop if I'm feeling stressed. I noticed the same kind of thing happens if tin foil is near the mouse pad area on the laptop too! It is spooky stuff and not nice when it happens, but now the odd time that it has happened since, I recognise the signs and am able to stop myself before it escalates.

[TheStook]

I've been getting it so much recently, I enjoy it for the most part but sometimes..

Seems like every second night I'm getting it.

Most of the time I'll just go with it and let myself slip into a dream, (Btw the sensation of knowingly falling into a dream is one of the best feeling I've ever had, its ****ing crazy).

But lately its been getting worse, like I'm starting to see ****. Usually its spiders forming in the corner of my room. I still havent experienced this "demon" which sits on you or any form of entity, when that day comes I'll probably stop sleeping once and for all. Its bad enough seeing nothing.
And ever since I've been aware of this demon thing that most people see, Its been horrible. It's like I'm waiting for him to appear so instead of slipping into a dream I shake myself out of the paralysis.

Anyway, just thought I'd share

[Hippies!]

Sleep paralysis comes with stress for me or general lack of sleep. Haven't had it in ages though and been sleeping like a baby, so much so I've been able to shoot people in my dreams no guns without bullets for me these nights

[Miprocin]

It happens to me regularly enough, mostly if I've been using MDMA or benzodiazepines though it does sometimes happen without this factor. I haven't experienced hallucinations. What usually happens is that I wake with a sense of dread unable to move. I either regain control of movement after a few minutes or fall back asleep, in which case it will happen again.

[TheStook]

Originally Posted by Miprocin

It happens to me regularly enough, mostly if I've been using MDMA or benzodiazepines though it does sometimes happen without this factor. I haven't experienced hallucinations. What usually happens is that I wake with a sense of dread unable to move. I either regain control of movement after a few minutes or fall back asleep, in which case it will happen again.

I find that just falling back asleep is the easier thing to do, its very easy to start panicking and freaking yourself out. Even though you're effectively paralyzed you're still able to breath so a few deep breaths and then ease yourself back to sleep.

It only takes a matter of seconds for me to fall back asleep, I'm not sure if its subjective though..

[BlueJohn]

I've had it twice over the past 3 months. My first time I had it i woke to my door open in my room and the feeling some one was behind me. I was trying to move my hand to wake myself up and eventually did. Pretty scary **** cause when i woke up my door was still closed.

I think the reason I have started to get them is I had used LSD heavely for amount 6 months or a while before it.

[Ciano35]

I always feared I would get this, and then I got it 3 times over the last 2 weeks! Stress or something..

Although they haven't been as scary as some of the ones described here.

My most resent one I remember being barely able to move.. It was very weird. Like I was half conscious, and could only move my hands and legs very slowly, as if there were heavy weights attached to them.

I was also seeing a tarantula dropping down slowly from the ceiling which was frightening the crap out of me!! It turned out that it was just the wires of a smoke alarm that had the cover removed!

[Shinners25]

I get it when I'm stressed or if my sleep pattern is disturbed.

The first time it happened me it felt like someone was sitting on my chest trying to suffocate me! The next morning I just told myself it was a dream. Then the next time it happened if felt like someone was squeezing my duvet around me trying to suffocate me again!! Scary ****.

So I googled it and was so relieved to learn it was sleep paralysis - had never heard of it before

Now that I know what it is it's not a problem. A tip to anyone that gets it...when I feel it coming on, like when you start to feel that pressure coming over your body and you can't move... Keep telling your brain WAKE UP, WAKE UP, WAKE UP!!! And eventually the pressure eases off and your body wakes up and you can move again

[zef]

Good to find a thread on this. I like it and hate it both, some of it is fun, but a lot is pretty scary.
I get different types of experience - the most common being involuntarily pulled from my sleeping body and floating around the ceiling, although I can never see my own face, just the shape of me in the bed. One of my lads has black plastic over the small window on top of his bedroom door to keep the landing light out, and I had the experience of floating thru that, and seeing him there , even noticing his usual duvet was not on the bed, my pink 'cat' one was!

I also feel as if i have managed to get back to my body, it feels like i'm walking thru jelly on quicksand, have woken up, and am getting out of bed. But then I realise i'm still stuck in this body paralysis level.

The worst ones are the demon ones. Thankfully pretty rare. Sometimes I get great ones where I'm pulled out of myself and my bedroom becomes huge, bigger than a cathedral so i must be very tiny? Or flying. Or sitting on top of a train like the DART and going at speed. If I decide it's too freaky I have the libity to 'come back'. It's too vivid to be a dream.
It might sound odd but I had one where i was instantly transported to a shop and diner in some random US smalltown, and some other quite fun ones that I was aware throughout.
I find the best way to induce one is to have about 4 hours sleep, get up for an hour then go back lying on your bed reading a book that requires some concentration. Something challenging that you've put off. Always works for me.

I read that book about Irish exorcisms "The Devils Sacrament" I think, Its mentioned over on Paranormal a lot and it's a book you won't forget! One chapter was on a girl who began inducing astral travel with a guy she met from years ago who was into the occult. Apparantly the writers of that book are pretty devout Christian and denounce yoga, though.
It started happenning to me spontaneously after a (negative) near death exp in my early 20's. I wonder if they are related?

I have some past lives/ astral travel MP3's (recc Dick Sutphen) its mostly extreme deep relaxation which in itself is pretty pleasant and floaty, they work the odd time too.

[Michelletarian]

If there's anything scarier than sleep paralysis, then I haven't ****ing found it.

Any tips on how to avoid it? People always think it's "cool" or "funny" when I relay to them what it's like... it's a feeling of terror nothing has ever matched for me