Thread: Unreal WILD(pun) experience! Can you help?

Hello everyone! New to DV; this is my first post.

Anyway, I've always been interested in lucid dreaming, last night, I experienced something crazy.

I have spectacular dream recall, every morning, I wake up and can recall at least 2 of my dreams in vivid detail. With this "ability" I felt lucid dreaming could be easy to pickup.

Get comfortable, ya got a lot of reading a head of yah!

So, last night, I laid down in bed. I was going to try lucid dreaming with a custom approach, using Mantras. I was falling asleep with this phrase, repeating in my mind, "I will wake up in my dream", repeating this over and over. Eight minutes into me lying still, I feel these weird rushes throughout my body, and I started to lose sense of where my body was (positioning). I knew this was sleep paralysis, so I tried to wiggle my arms and move around a bit to shake it off, as I just wanted to sleep and wake up, not go consciously into the dream world. No matter how much I moved, the sleep paralysis took over my body. My heart was racing so fast, I swear the beating of it was shaking my bed. I started feeling pressure of a million fingers pushing down on all edges off me. Then, it felt like I got pushed back into my bed, and all the sudden I was imaging me being pushed into my bed, but I was seeing it from a very very blurry third person perspective. Maybe an OBE? My heart in my body, I could still feel and my breathing was very very very fast, faster than it's ever been in my life. I was sweating like crazy and everything. This paralysis feeling got so intense, it felt like an extreme psychedelic trip. I started to feel intense vibrations. At this point, my heart was beating so fast, I legitimately feared that I was going to have a heart attack, so I struggled with all my might to come back, I finally did. When I came back to my body, I was sweating, breathing heavy, weak and panicky, and my mouth felt very very weird.
Anyway, the reason I fear sleep paralysis so much is because I have a very very strong imagination and a very "powerful" mind. In other words, my dreams are always so vivid and my imagination can do crazy stuff. I really don't want to see all these crazy entities in my room. I know they can't hurt me, and I realize being more scared or expecting them to come makes my subconscious create them, but I can't help it.

So my question is, during sleep paralysis, can I keep my eyes closed? Or am I forced to see in my room? I'm fine with having audio hallucinations, it's the visuals that I'm scared about.
Secondly, what do I do when I'm in paralysis? How long do I have to wait it out. I have ABSOLUTELY NO problem whatsoever for enter paralysis, I can easily do that at will, it's just when it happens I get so scared and I can't enter a dream, I don't see fragments of a scene or anything. What do I do?