Thread: Sleep Paralysis - Have you experienced it?

When i got my first SP i were waking up. When i realaised that i were awake but couldn't move, i knew that it was SP and not anything dangerous. I knew that my brother were in the same room, so i tried to scream but all i got was screaming inside my own head. Then i did feel pressure on my chest and just second after that i were able to move.

BTW, I didn't have any hallucinations, or at least i don't remeber having any.

The first time I ever had sleep paralysis, I was about 10 years old. I remember waking up, and not being able to open my eyes, or move, or talk. I wasn't really scared because my mom was at the door way talking to me, and I figured she knew that my silence was an agreement to what she was saying. Years later when I found out about sleep paralysis, I figured that my mom was probably never even there at all!

Since then I had only experienced it twice. They were pretty recent too. Like a month ago, and last week. It's very obvious, and not scary to me. I think it's really interesting, and the vibrations (you feel intense vibrations) are pretty jarring, but soothing at the same time.

Trying to WILD before any sleep isn't ideal. I tried that for weeks and one day after staying still for what felt like 45 minutes, I felt my body tingling. Eventually the tingling got stronger and my body felt heavier and my breathing slowed to a crawl. I could still move if I tried though so I don't know if I was 100% in it. I than heard voices and it scared the hell out of me and I moved so I cut it off.

ive only had 1 sleep paralysis... kind of scary at the time because i just seen the fourth kind, probably about 3 days before this.... then i read online and found out it was just sleep paralysis

For me it is a very interesting feeling. Pretty much all of the SP's I have gotten resulted from me not even trying at all. They just happened. What I experienced wasn't really scary or anything. I felt an inner rumbling coming from inside me and it was actually kinda peaceful and from my SP's that happen without warning, I usually take advantage of them and use them to enter a dream which I can't really move in and they only last for a few seconds. I think it's because I either enter to early or too late for me to really exert any control over the dream. Now even though I'm paralyzed, it's not a very frightening experience, but perhaps that is just me.

Originally Posted by whisperinggirl

I have a few times. It really freaks me out. For me, I get numbing and pressure that starts at the feet and moves it's way up. I also see shadows in the corner of the room that disappear when it stops. I've never tried to have OBE with them because I was always afraid that I might have a hard time getting back into my body. Are they necessary for LDing or are there ways to LD without them?

When Astral Projecting, its easy to get into your body. All you have to do is think about your physical body, then your back in it.

I have never had sleep paralysis. TBH thats kinda pissin me off. I have been trying and trying to have it. But I can't keep myself awake and have my body fall asleep. So annoying.

When I was a child, I had very unpleasant SP after half-waking from a nightmare twice. It was really terrible.
I sometimes enter SP intentionally now (for LDing) and it is quite nice . I have much more positive approach to it with LDing, so I can see nice HHs. Mainly I don't try to cry, so I am not frustrated when I can't cry anymore.

What sucks for me... even though it can be scary, I'm excited for it!

When I can feel a sleep paralysis coming on, the adrenaline starts to pump and then the paralysis fails... I wake back up...

I'll try it again to night to see if that happens.

I have! It's a lot of fun! There's tons of frightening things, but since I know it's sleep paralysis it's one of the greatest experiences in my life. I'd compare it to a full body orgasm.


I get full-body vibrations and waves. I hear LOUD classrooms of children talking, LOUD LOUD LOUD ringing in my ears, and occasionally LOUD LOUD LOUD screams and clanking noises (these are the most fun). My vision becomes strobe lights (I love this) usually. If I have my eyes open (which I have only done once, because I am trying to slip into dream, not visualize SP) I've seen cloaked figures with weapons in my room and had a female demon with an elongated mouth and sharp teeth mount me (in a rather sexual manner, but she had blue skin and was very threatening and frightening. Haha) and scream right up in my face while about to choke me. This was actually pretty damn fun, too.

It's all in how you perceive it. Some people are scared out of their minds and emotionally scarred. I consider it one of the best experiences of my life, second only to LDs.

Speaking of which, I have had near-lucid dreams where I've experienced SP in the dream. In one instance, I was upstairs in a room and kneeled (Tebowed. haha) and my vision became strobe and I got full body vibrations. I left the dream and was in SP and then slipped back in, doing the same once more.

I started to... My hands were numb and my blanket felt heavy... And if you've ever heard the song Moves Like Jagger, I heard the whistling from that... I was too afraid to open my eyes though... I only now realize now that if I did Adam Levine might have been standing before me. but knowing my luck it wouldve been something extemely creepy and scared me out of trying to LD for a while... I may try and open my eyes tonight though...

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa., Nov. 13 (UPI) - Only 8 percent of the general population experiences sleep paralysis, but it is more frequent in students and psychiatric patients, U.S. researchers said.

Brian A. Sharpless, clinical assistant professor of psychology at Penn State, said some people who experience these episodes may regularly try to avoid going to sleep because of the unpleasant sensations they experience. But other people enjoy the sensations they feel during sleep paralysis.

"I realized that there were no real sleep paralysis prevalence rates available that were based on large and diverse samples," Sharpless said in a statement. "So I combined data from my previous study with 34 other studies in order to determine how common it was in different groups."

Sharpless and colleagues reviewed 35 published studies from the past 50 years to find lifetime sleep paralysis rates involved 36,533 people. Overall the review found that about one-fifth of these people experienced an episode at least once.

The study, published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews, found 28 percent of students reported experiencing sleep paralysis, while nearly 32 percent of psychiatric patients reported experiencing at least one episode.

The witch trials in Salem, Mass., are thought possibly to involve the townspeople experiencing sleep paralysis, while in the novel "Moby Dick," the main character Ishmael experiences an episode of sleep paralysis in the form of a malevolent presence in the room.

I have, roughly, experienced sleep paralysis over 500 times in my life over the course of the past 10 or so years. I say rough estimation because I don't remember how frequently they occur in sequence any given night. I do however know that they occur far more than what is 'normal', even for chronic SP 'sufferers'. For me, they are almost always brought on by lack of sleep and almost always happen when I am falling asleep, although I have on occasion experienced SP upon waking. This has led me to consider experimenting intentional sleep deprivation, but I worry about the negative effects this would have on me during the day. I have had SP sometimes without being tired, so maybe one doesn't necessarily cause the other.

Once I realized that this could be used to initiate a lucid dream, I began to experiment with my 'episodes'. Unfortunately for me, sometimes the feeling of presences and the sense of 'evil' that I get are so overwhelming that I can do nothing else but 'will' myself out of the experience. But when I can enter, it is for a fleeting moment of astonishment. Usually this is accompanied by the sensation that I have left my body; I have left my apartment, 'flown' through the sky to my parent's house, and have smelled a flower in a way that was so realistic that the amazement brought me back to being awake. Other times I have just 'floated' around my room for a bit.

The range of my experiences with SP span from the the most horrifying (I have thought I was dying/was going to die at least 5 times), to the most sublime (I have left my body before after 'accidentally' discovering that I could do so). There is a sensation of electricity in my brain/body, sometimes with a sinking feeling in my stomach. I have, at times, considered that I was feeling my brain as it was producing electricity. The closest I could get to a metaphor is imagining 'waves' of energy coursing over your brain. Either this is immensely pleasurable or it is almost unbearably intense, but never painful. I have struggled for years to define my experiences in an easily explainable way, but there are memories of SP events that no one but a fellow 'experiencer' would be able to understand. I would love to explain more of what I know here as long this topic remains alive.

Does anyone else have advice for initiating LDs for me based on SP, or do I have to try it through some other method?