Happened to me three times last night, fucking viscerally terrifying even though I recognized that’s what was happening after the first time and could kind of get a handle on the panic the subsequent times.
Happened to me three times last night, fucking viscerally terrifying even though I recognized that’s what was happening after the first time and could kind of get a handle on the panic the subsequent times.
When I was about 21 I read about training yourself to do lucid dreaming by repeating to yourself that you would remain in control of your mind as you fell asleep. Within just a few attempts I was successfully lucid dreaming, although with somewhat limited control. I was hoping to keep practicing and get better at it.
But shortly after this success, I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time ever. It was absolutely as horrifying as everyone says it is. I couldn’t move, but my eyes were open, and my “sleep paralysis demon” took the form of the black drape I had covering the window in my bedroom, which my brain was interpreting as some huge and pitch black entity looming over my bed while I couldn’t move.
I stopped trying to lucid dream, but now I still get sleep paralysis once in a while, like a couple times a year at this point. The last time it happened I was sleeping next to my girlfriend, I couldn’t move and I kept thinking I was hearing someone loudly stomping down the stairs to our bedroom. I managed to make some extremely strained, high-pitched but not loud “screaming” noise - sorta like when you try to scream but keep your throat closed but like… wrong - and my girlfriend was able to shake me awake.
She knew about my sleep paralysis because it happened not long before that and I told her about it, and so she was ready to help me, but I still thought she would be more unsettled by the very disquieting noise I was making, lol.
Anyway yeah that shit sucks, do not recommend.
I’ve never gotten the trick of inducing lucid dreaming, though as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten better at not letting it destabilize when I randomly become lucid and then managing to take some limited amount of control at times, often by sort of prompt-hijacking it with a spoken statement of what’s going to happen and the forcing a change of scenery by walking through a door or something. Although sometimes I’ve gotten into a weird loop of realizing I’m asleep, false-awakening, realizing I’m still asleep, false-awakening again, and so on.
I remember the first time I had sleep paralysis was sometime in my early twenties too. Weirdly I didn’t panic then: I recognized what was happening and at the time my old dog was still alive so there was a huge, hundred plus pound dog laying across the only door to the room so I felt entirely safe and secure; I distinctly remember fighting as hard as I could to lift one arm and flip off the shadow hallucinations (I probably didn’t actually manage that, but it felt like I did) while laughing maniacally in my own head; I knew the figures were hallucinations and felt such complete contempt for them because of that lmao.
I don’t get it often, and I don’t usually feel the terror people typically describe, but this is the first time it’s gone along with auditory hallucinations and merged seamlessly into dreaming that I got up to investigate them. I guess lately I’ve been on edge and becoming hyper alert at weird sounds that are usually just my fan clicking a bit or one of my cats hopping onto something in the hall by my bedroom.