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.

  • Comrade_Mushroom [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    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.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 month ago

      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.