sleep paralysis, part 1

**As a disclaimer, these are my experiences and my thoughts. I've done some research and found some websites, and while I might not agree with every single thing on each of the links I will put here, I feel this confirms the theory I made up a couple months ago (which is the last time I experienced sleep paralysis). Be warned- these blog posts may be a little intense/scary, but unfortunately everything that has happened to me is true. I'm not writing this as a pity story, but if someone out there has had similar experiences, well, you are not alone.**

Also, I don't think I've written about sleep paralysis here before. In the past year and a half, I've had at least seven times. Tonight was the most intense- I'll describe it in a sec, but first here's a quick overview of what can happen (every experience I've had has been different in one way or another). Basically, your eyes, ears, and mind wake up, but the rest of your body is immobilized. Sometimes you feel pressure as though you can't breathe (I have had experiences where I can breathe fine, or at least I'm not focusing on not being able to breathe, while other times that's the most terrifying part) and usually you can't talk (probably the second time I had SP living in the cottage with Laura, I heard her get up to use the bathroom and I tried to call out to her to see if she could wake me up (at this point I knew little about SP) and barely made a low grunting noise. Distressing, to say the least). Sometimes you get the pleasure of having a visual hallucination with it (I've seen a creepy clown head on a spring, three dark shadowy hooded figures looming over me, and now Freddy Krueger- more on why those later), and sometimes you also get sounds and noises (with the shadow figures, I heard kind of like an organ that doesn't have enough air or maybe just a really out of tune orchestra, but basically a "scary music" cluster chord, and last night there was some crazy ringing/drilling/wailing sounds. Other than that it's been silent/normal the other times). It can also lead to lucid dreaming (which tonight was the first time I experienced that). Whatever the combination of symptoms, one thing that is always there is the intense fear and panic felt throughout the process.
Here's the Wikipedia article (yes, I'm aware the danger of Wikipedia, but it explains it pretty well, and you can check out the references) as well as a revealing Youtube video.


In some ways, what happened tonight was my own fault (or at the very least, I was being mocked). I don't really know where to start now except to describe what happened/put out my explanation of the crazy experience of SP. However, you'll have to wait for part 2, because I have to get ready to go to church.