Anyone have a good episode of sleep paralysis recently?

The shadow people are watching!

It happened to me a lot in my early twenties. Shitty feeling. Sometimes it felt like I couldn't breathe and it took all my strength to desperately "leap" out of it.

Always happens to me when I'm EXTREMELY tired

I think I'll keep my hyper-realistic dreams over this.

no drugs, always been this way

Although Fuseli labeled his painting quite unambiguously as a portrayal of a nightmare it clearly contains significant elements of Sleep paralysis or "Old Hag" experiences. As a consequence it has virtually become an icon for the phenomenon. The victim is supine and evidently helpless with a demonic incubus sitting on her chest. Although the picture is dripping with sexual innuendo and portents of evil the monster is neither initiating intercourse nor attempting to throttle his victim. Rather he seems captured in a reflective mood as though deciding just what fate to render. Or perhaps he has been caught be surprise by the artist.


The presence of the horse reflects the semantic confusion of the word "mare" from nightmare. The suffix "mare" is actually thought to be derived from "maren" - to crush. Thus the nightmare is the night crusher, which etymology suggests that the term nightmare might have been originally coined to describe not bad dreams, but sleep paralysis with hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations.

Natural phenomenon, homey. At least now most of the time I know what's going on and it usually doesn't involve the shadowy figure for me. So most of the time it's that my eyes aren't open and I'm just awake trapped inside my motionless body. That shite's easy because it's happened enough over the years where I just relax and make myself go back to sleep.

It scares the shite out of you when you're little and you don't know what's going on.

The rare "shadow figure" scenario, you can't talk yourself into relaxing and understanding what's going on so easily. I eventually did last night but you are actually scared that someone has snuck into your house/room to cause you harm.

Have had a couple episodes in the last 3-4 months. Scary shite.

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I felt like someone was outside of my cracked bedroom door and kept "seeing" someone there.

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I've had nearly this exact thing happen. I opened my eyes and saw light from the front door flood in and then go away. It was like someone came into my apartment sneakily. I was paralyzed and couldn't move my body... but I could see the door and I was freaking out pretty good.

I finally got my body to move and I 'cleared my apartment' with my glock... Then I yelled at the guestroom's closed closet door. "Listen, if there's someone in there, I've got a loaded pistol aimed at the door!"

And because I didn't want to make them think I was playing, I put a bullet through the door. I figured if someone WAS in there... they would realize I wasn't playing and come out. Turns out I just shot towels.

I got a couple friends who have had it happen. Most don't know what I'm talking about though. One of my good friends who was in the army says it happens to him 2-3 times a month

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When I went back to sleep, I would go on to have some classic open eyed sleep paralysis where I was awake and could see but couldn't wake the rest of my body up (couldn't move arms or legs, couldn't make a sound).

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There was a time in my life when that would happen when I was exhausted, and I was able to determine the onset would be within a minute or two of closing my eyes. It would often be accompanied by a tumbling sensation, the belief that I wasn't breathing and needed to consciously will it to happen, and brain "shivers", a very weird sensation with an auditory "sizzling" component that would intensify by moving my closed eyes or trying to break the body paralysis.

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As is often the case with sleep paralysis, I felt like someone was outside of my cracked bedroom door and kept "seeing" someone there.

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No monsters to report, but I did feel like I was going to die any second.