I've brough this here from the
"Scariest Fortean thing ever..." thread, as it fits better here
So, to address the second part of the question first - no, when I get sleep paralysis, there's nothing lucid about it - I'm not aware I'm dreaming, or able to exert any control, I'm just along for the ride!
As to what I like about it - firstly its like having your own personal and personilized horror movie, whats not to like?
I also like the interplay of the real and the unreal and the hypnopompic/hypnogogic (I can have episodes either as I'm dropping off or waking up!) hallucination/dreamstate. I find it fascinating that I can be 'awake' enough to perceive the room around me enough to be accurately represented in the dream/hallucination and yet still be asleep enough not to realise thats whats happening.
I'm partial to regular nightmares/bad dreams, too my sleeping mind can certainly put together a 'fun' show for the purpose of terrorising itself!
The addition of the whole paralysis aspect certainly adds to the frisson! Well, once I've woken up and the mind numbing terror has passed
I can still remember my 'first' (well, its the first one I can remember!) episode of Sleep Paralysis - recently talked to my mother about it, see if she remembered it - she did not - but told me we moved out of that house when I was three and a half years old, so I would have been about three when it happened, I recon.
The house was a typical UK 'two up, two down' terraced house, and I had the room at the front of the house, my bed placed with the foot facing directly to the door of the room.
The 'dream' started with me 'waking' abruptly to see bright, but still obviously domestic electric (c1974), light streaming in all around the door, making it a clearly delineated dark rectangle in the darkened room. I could even make out the door latch and the hinges (in silouette).
There was 'something' on the otherside of the door. It kept asking me, using the voice of one of my mothers friends (who was from America, and had a very distinctive accent) to open the door and let it in, and reasuring me it was just my mothers friend.
I knew this was a lie. I knew it was an entity that bore the physical shape of that most horrifying of creatures...
...Bungle, from the childrens tv show Rainbow. But with large black eyes -
@Bad Bungle 's avatar gives me a little jolt every time I see it, the resemblance is uncanny! Especially considering that the door never opened and I never actually saw the entity - I just knew thats what was there!
Anyway, this being a sleep paralysis episode I couldn't move or speak or cry out or any of that, so I just lay there, terrified, for I don't know how long, until I actually awoke, to find myself rotated 90 degree's and about halfway down the bed, my head poking out of the covers and hanging over the edge of the bed (in the dream, I was lying in the normal position, lengthwise on the bed, head on the pillow at the head end), and this the part my mother doesn't remember, bolted out of bed and belted downstairs (through the same door and onto the same landing the 'Bungle-Thing' would have been occupying if it was real) and wailed my way downstairs, disrupting the quiet night in with a few friends (I'm assuming including mums American friend, but those details escape me, too!).
It was after this I took to having the light left on until I dozed off (my parents turning it off when they went to bed) and sleeping with my favourite cap-gun (a faux six shooter with flaking chrome plating and dark red fake wood effect plastic hand-grip!) under my pillow.