Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I've had similar experiences a few times. I would be asleep but felt a hostile presence in the room and knew that my life was in danger and I needed to wake up but couldn't no matter how hard I tried. Sometimes the brain and body get out of sync or something while you're asleep and you experience some strange things. It's not a big deal. I remember one time, I fell asleep on the floor, and I suddenly felt something violently shaking me. After a few moment I woke up. I find experiences like these interesting.
There are a lot of different states of consciousness; being fully awake, dreaming, hypnotic trance, drug-induced states, deja vu, and so on. Put simply, sleep paralysis happens when a person wakes up while the brain's still in REM sleep. During REM, the body is paralyzed but we usually don't know this because we're sleeping. Some of the known causes of sleep paralysis are sleep deprivation, certain medications, and certain sleep disorders (including sleep apnea and narcolepsy).
When I was a child, I had frequent deja vu experiences but stopped doing so by high school. I also had experiences when I'd wake up and still see bits and pieces of the dream around me which would gradually fade away, or I'd wake and something like a shirt draped across a chair would appear to be something monstrous (hypnogogic hallucinations, in other words, but without the paralysis part). These experiences stopped around the age of six.
I'm not saying that none of these experiences involve something paranormal or demonic, but in most cases a naturalistic explanation can be found. I'd see a sleep doctor if I started having these experiences before I called in the exorcist.
The mechanism that causes sleep paralysis is a good thing - it's what keeps you from sleepwalking or rolling out of bed when you actually are asleep. Occasional episodes of sleep paralysis, particularly if your routine rest has recently been disrupted in some way, aren't a medical cause for concern, but if you're having them repeatedly, I'd see a specialist and get check out for narcolepsy, sleep apnea, other problems that could be disrupting your sleep cycles.
That's called atonia. The body goes into a state of paralysis so that you don't act out your dreams. It doesn't always work however. On two occasions, I had dreams where I desperately needed to move, but couldn't. In one dream I was on a ladder and a heavy object was falling toward me. Being on the ladder I had nowhere to go, so I started moving from side to side as hard as I could trying to get out of the way of the falling object. I tried so hard that I threw myself over the arm of the recliner chair I had fallen asleep in and landed on my hands and knees. And that's how I woke up.
That's called atonia. The body goes into a state of paralysis so that you don't act out your dreams. It doesn't always work however.
LOL! Sure enough...when I was in the Army, one of the guys in the Company filled my boots with shaving cream (practical joke). I found out who it was but I didn't [consciously] have any plan for 'getting even'. I went out to a bar that evening and got plastered, then went back to the barracks and crashed. I had a dream in which I went to this guy's room, opened his locker and covered *all* of his uniforms with shaving cream.
The next morning, I ran into the guy in the hall, he gave me a heart-punch and walked away. Aside from being one of the most painful things I have experienced, I was shocked and temporarily paralyzed, and I had no clue why he had done that...later, I learned that I had only thought it was a dream, it was not and I had actually done the deed...
I have had some amazingly realistic dreams, everything from completely impossible things to boffing a co-worker (and that one was just marvelous...except for the fact that it occurred when I had fallen asleep at my desk in an office that I shared with several other people, what a surprise when I suddenly awakened at the 'happy ending' , fortunately it seemed that no one had noticed).
I have an issue that when I am sleeping, sometimes my heart and respiration rates drop to very low levels (low enough sometimes that my BP monitor can't get a reading). This causes CO2 levels to go too high, which results in hallucinations which seem quite real, and I can't move until I focus on my breathing and get the O2 level back up. (I can also consciously lower my heart rate to less than 30 BPM, which has been witnessed during several operations...much to the annoyance of the OR staff...I learned to do this using Tai Chi/TM while training to be a sharpshooter/sniper- greater accuracy can be obtained by having longer intervals between heartbeats.)
There are a lot of different states of consciousness; being fully awake, dreaming, hypnotic trance, drug-induced states, deja vu, and so on. Put simply, sleep paralysis happens when a person wakes up while the brain's still in REM sleep. During REM, the body is paralyzed but we usually don't know this because we're sleeping. Some of the known causes of sleep paralysis are sleep deprivation, certain medications, and certain sleep disorders (including sleep apnea and narcolepsy).
When I was a child, I had frequent deja vu experiences but stopped doing so by high school. I also had experiences when I'd wake up and still see bits and pieces of the dream around me which would gradually fade away, or I'd wake and something like a shirt draped across a chair would appear to be something monstrous (hypnogogic hallucinations, in other words, but without the paralysis part). These experiences stopped around the age of six.
I'm not saying that none of these experiences involve something paranormal or demonic, but in most cases a naturalistic explanation can be found. I'd see a sleep doctor if I started having these experiences before I called in the exorcist.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I think these were demonic experiences or paranormal. I thought I was clear about that.
I had a sleep paralysis episode while taking a sleep apnea test at a clinic... I was having trouble sleeping with all the wires and mask strapped to me but I finally nodded off late in the night only to wake up frozen and see a gigantic hairy Sasquatch-like creature with no head standing in the corner of the room. It noticed I was looking at it and charged me, shocking me into a full awakened state.
Wasn't until later when I was watching a bugs bunny cartoon that I realized what I had saw that night:
I remembered watching this a a little kid and being scared to death of that monster. Funny how things stay forgotten in your brain for decades only to "come to life" thanks to your bizarre subconscious!
That said, I've seen shadow people while fully awake and aware. There's a video of a supposed ghost doctor that gives me the heeby-jeebies because whether it's fake or not, it moves just like "them":
It sounds like you had an hallucination during an episode of sleep paralysis.
4. Sleep paralysis can involve hallucinations.
Unlike the visuals in nightmares or lucid dreams, which occur when the eyes are closed in REM sleep, these hallucinations occur in the state between sleeping and waking when the mind is alert and the eyes are open. True visual and auditory hallucinations during sleep paralysis are relatively rare, according to Breus, but many patients report feeling an undeniably strange or scary presence in the room.
Plus, sleep paralysis is just super frightening to begin with, so it often triggers a panicked response with increased heart rate. "People freak out because they can't move, and it's this extreme anxiety which causes people to be very fearful of their surroundings," says Breus.
I've had similar experiences a few times. I would be asleep but felt a hostile presence in the room and knew that my life was in danger and I needed to wake up but couldn't no matter how hard I tried. Eventually I did wake up, no danger, so back to sleep. Sometimes the brain and body get out of sync or something while you're asleep and you experience some strange things. It's not a big deal. I remember one time, I fell asleep on the floor, and I suddenly felt something violently shaking me. After a few moments I woke up. I find experiences like these interesting.
I've only experienced this once and that was enough. I don't know how long it lasted, could have been just seconds or a few minutes. I know it the terror that I felt was very real, I'm a combat veteran, I've experienced the fear of being shot at and the possibility of being killed, but this terror I felt that night was the most terrified I've ever been. I opened my eyes and couldn't move, the room was dark and I couldn't see anything, but I sensed something was in the room and it wasn't good. I tried to move my arms to wake my wife, but nothing would move, I tried to talk but I couldn't, I was terrified. I tried again to speak, and I yelled and my wife woke up. I was dripping with sweat by the time I could move my body. I'm glad this has only happened once, it is something I don't want to experience again.
This sounds so familiar to me. In the late 90s, this happened to me a lot. I remember waking up multiple times. My bedroom was dark. I would wake up and could not move. It felt like I was being held down. I was too much of a wuss to look. I would actually yell and say "let go of me you piece of sh*t"! I would always walk over to my light switch because the dark was too scary for me. And would you believe that every night this happened, my light switch would not turn the light on. I remember saying out loud "I can't believe this. The switch never works when this happens!" In the morning, it would work fine.
These were not dreams. I actually wrote this stuff down as soon as it happened. I have since learned that my light switch always worked. The issue was that I was out of body and that my "soul" was unable to flick a light switch. A lot of crazy stuff happened in that house. It hasn't happened to me since then but it was a nightly occursnce for a long time.
Sleep paralysis has been and still is quite common for me. Haven't seen any freaky shapes at the end of the bed for a while, but generally get the feeling of a presence.
The feeling I get is one of anger, rather than fear, as I can't get up to investigate - no matter how hard I try, I just can't move. Maybe I will finally be able to overcome the immobility, one night.
I go with the scientific explanations on this one, but still get a sense that something other-worldly has happened.
My 3rd son has Sleep Paralysis. He thinks he’s waking up to a giant spider sitting on his chest, holding him down.
This started when he was 16 & he is 28 now.
I have apparently “gifted” many of my kids with various sleep disturbances, as my DNA test revealed that I have the variants of the CRY1 gene, AKA: The Martian Sleep gene. It means my circadian rhythm is not set to planet earth’s rotation of a 24 hour day & is instead, set to the rotation of a planet in a similar position as Mars.
My oldest son had Night Terrors, kid #3 has the Sleep Paralysis, kid#6 has chronic insomnia & at least 4 of the others can, like myself; flip-flop to a nocturnal cycle in a matter of days.
I also have an odd history of sleepwalking when camping only. When I was a little girl my parents woke to find me missing from the tent & I was discovered not far from the camp sight but standing on the edge of a ledge over a river.
For both kid #’s 1 & 3; sleep deprivation seems to make it worse. Even one all-nighter can screw them up for the next several nights.
*Im editing to add: I do not doubt that there is more than just genetics at play here. Kid # 6 is very visual (auras). Kid #3 predicted kid #4 when he was 2 years old & kid #1 is highly intuitive. Also, the house where we lived when kid # 3’s sleep paralysis started was the same house where I saw “my bird” & every child, not just my own, who ever lived there, has had an unusual experience there.
Last edited by coschristi; 02-13-2018 at 01:57 AM..
I've had dreams about demons or evil beings but never actually saw them after I woke up, though I felt like "something" was there.
In regards to paralysis in particular, I've only had anything similar to that happen once. I dreamed that I was dying and I couldn't move in the dream or for a few seconds after I woke up. But I've had a few dreams where what was happening in the dream carried over - for example, once I was drowning in the dream and woke myself up gasping for air.
I have deja-vu a lot and usually remember my dreams because I'm a light sleeper and wake up frequently. It makes for some interesting stories at least.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
, fortunately it seemed that no one had noticed).
