I’ve experienced sleep paralysis so many times that I’ve almost gotten used to it. Usually it happens when I have been staying awake for too long before going to sleep, or if I have been getting too few hours of sleep many days in a row.
Several times it has felt like someone was present. One of the first time I can remember the feeling of someone or something being present was maybe a decade ago or two or something. It felt like a dark shadow person standing in the corner of my room, by the door just looking at me while I was unable to move. Very creepy feeling.
Recently, I thought someone was sitting on top of me and pushing me very hard down into my bed. And I was like wtf, why is someone trying to murder me and I was very scared. And then I realized that lol it’s just sleep paralysis yet again. Still felt shaken for a while afterwards.
Sleep paralysis sucks, so I try to avoid it. Sometimes I get into a bad rhythm though and then it is increasingly probable that it will happen.
I've had a whole range of hallucinations from it, visual, physical and auditory, eventually I tended to get the paralysis part less and less but still have the hallucinations.
Things like the feeling of someone on your back grasping you and talking into your ear while trying to fall asleep. Sitting up awake in the morning and seeing fully formed objects floating in the room like a floating filing cabinet, fully formed person in the room not a "Shadowperson". Auditory ones usually happen as you're falling asleep and its all voices you know sorta talking gibberish sentences.
Around the same period of time it started I also began having lucid dreams too, generally always had a bit of trouble sleeping.
Ah crap, I only had it once and that Shadowperson was too close to my ear, whispering gibberish. I felt warmth of its breath, I think it was literally the fear which woke me up..
When I got it when I was younger, I used to see Ghosts. Terrifying. When I learned what sleep paralysis is, funny enough, the hallucinations changed. Now they are much more realistic things like someone in the room who really could be, more auditory hallucinations, etc. I was getting it a few times a week for a while, now ~1-2x a month. If it wasn't also associated with difficulty breathing (I think the root cause) I think I could enjoy it now, its a bit like a lucid dream.
No, I know it's common to hallucinate or something similar during an episode but I felt completely lucid. It was just as if the motor cortex was disconnected temporarily from the other parts of my body (which I believe aligns with the research that the brain stem "filters" or simply doesn't propagate the signals from the brain to the rest of the body).
