A lot of times before I'm falling asleep I think about "you know, I usually don't remember anything from when I fall asleep so what if it's actually some horrific experience you have daily and just forget about?"
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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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.
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.