this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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sleep paralysis (mander.xyz)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 62 points 6 months ago (14 children)

So glad I never had the visions. “Just” the paralysis.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (8 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

As scary as it sounds, I'm kinda curious to experience this just once myself

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

It's hard to do it on purpose, but one tip I can give you is this: (this turned out way longer than I meant it to be lol, sorry)

Sleeping on your back seems to be a must. I've never had it happen to me while sleeping any other way. For this reason, in my experience it's more likely to happen when I'm sick or physically exhausted, because I toss and turn a lot before I actually manage to get to sleep.

Another thing I've heard people say is that learning how to lucid dream can help. Which makes sense, because for one, I've always been able to lucid dream and I seem to have gotten sleep paralysis a lot more than most people. And two, sleep paralysis is just being lucid during REM sleep but with your eyes open.

Also something to keep in mind is that it may only last a few seconds, and you're not really guaranteed to see anything strange. It's not always a wild 1-2 minute long journey like in the experience I shared here. For me, a lot of the time it'll start with me trying to wake myself up when I realize I'm dreaming, and then I'll get my eyes open and struggle to move... Then after a handful of seconds I overcome it and go to the bathroom or something, then whoops, the door fell off and into a huge expanse of blue sky and clouds that's somehow located entirely within my bathroom. I never left the bed, I just dreamt that I overcame the paralysis lol.

In order to see stuff that isn't there your emotions have to get involved. It's still a dream even though you're using your eyes and mostly looking at real things, so the dream parts of what you see are heavily influenced by what's going on in your head. That's why most people see shadow monsters or "feel their presence", because not being able to move your body when you're not expecting it is scary, so you start to see scary things. The experience I shared here started off peaceful because I wasn't compelled to move, I was just relaxed and looking at pretty glowing orange lines morphing into runes on my ceiling... Then the kids outside my window startled me, and that turned into a horrifying audio hallucination. Then later in the experience, I didn't see anything scary until I realized I couldn't have actually fallen off the bed if I were still in my bed, which made me nervous and the fan monster manifested itself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

The one time I got it was when I was actively recording my dreams and trying to lucid dream

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