Comment on sleep paralysis
honk@programming.dev 2 months ago
So glad I never had the visions. “Just” the paralysis.
This has only happened to me once. I was conscious, my eyes were open, and I was able to move my pinky and ring finger on my left hand. My wife sleeps to my left. I kept clawing at her, trying to scream her name, but only a sound that resembled her name came out. On the other side of the room, was a tall, dark, shadowy figure with faint, white eyes. Just staring at me. Not moving. Eventually I fell asleep and woke up in the morning.
An experience I don’t care to repeat.
An experience I don’t care to repeat.
I think I might be weird, because I love getting sleep paralysis. I’m sad that it doesn’t happen to me very often anymore. Same with nightmares, at least when the subject isn’t something that makes me sad.
A lot of my taste in art and what I find compelling in general was shaped by surreal and terrifying cartoons like Courage the Cowardly Dog, and I think that’s partially why I enjoy it. There’s a weird feeling of catharsis I get from coming out of an intense state of fear and realizing it was all fabricated by my mind, and as a bonus I sometimes come away from it with a small story that’s intensely personal to me.
birds of a feather 🤙
I once had paralysis but seems I was half asleep, because I felt like I fell asleep sitting and felt my roommate watching me, when in fact I was laying in the bed and the roommate was sound asleep 😅
Other symptoms matched but maybe it was something else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the rare occasions this happens. I usually hear distorted voices or conversations.
A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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. I was scared of that corner for a few nights.
One of the crazier ones: One night there was an orange-ish light coming through my blinds from the street light outside my apartment because my curtains were open, and my window was open too so the blinds were moving with the wind and the lines were moving back and forth on the ceiling 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, which in reality I’m sure 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, threatening to spill into my room and kill me (despite the voices sounding joyful), yet there was no visual evidence of anyone being there.
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 again. The orange lines are spilling onto my ceiling again 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 fan blades, twisting and looming over me while making surreal metallic sounds.
azertyfun@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Your sleep paralysis demon should send their resume to a few Hollywood producers if they ever get bored of only traumatizing one human at a time. A+ storytelling.
iheartneopets@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Or the guy who made skinamarink! He had a YouTube channel originally where he’d adapt people’s dreams into short films. There was some wild stuff
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
im gonna need a link for that channel bro
duviobaz@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
As scary as it sounds, I’m kinda curious to experience this just once myself
A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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.
SeducingCamel@lemm.ee 2 months ago
The one time I got it was when I was actively recording my dreams and trying to lucid dream