Question: I’ve had episodes of sleep paralysis throughout my entire thirty years.
The first one I can really remember clearly happened when I was seven. I fell asleep watching TV in my bedroom…sort of. I was still wide awake, but completely unable to move. The sensation was not unlike that of being stuck in a mudhole. I had a poster on my wall with a bulldog on it, and the bulldog’s eyes glowed yellow and it snarled at me with this echoing demonic hiss. Then I snapped awake and started crying.The rest of my episodes thankfully haven’t included visual hallucinations, or if they have, I just don’t remember. In one of my more recent ones, I had dozed off in the middle of the day. I heard thumping and rustling noises, and muffled talking among several men. It seemed like they were robbing my house. This one was extremely bizarre because I would switch between being awake and sleep-paralyzed and lucid dreaming. The auditory hallucinations were the same between the two. During the lucid dreaming part, I would hop out of bed, grab my shotgun, and run to confront the men. But every time I touched my door knob, I was instantly teleported back to bed. After a few attempts at it, I’d wake up and try to get up to grab my gun, but I couldn’t move. This repeated a couple of times until I just started thrashing about, and finally managed to get up. I knew exactly what had just happened, but I was so paranoid that I had to grab my gun anyway and check the whole place out before the shakes would stop.