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Sleep Paralysis & Night Hag Experience

Have you ever experienced the 'Night-Hag' phenomenon?

  • Many times

    Votes: 5 41.7%
  • Just once

    Votes: 1 8.3%
  • Never

    Votes: 3 25.0%
  • Not sure

    Votes: 3 25.0%

  • Total voters
    12
firefly52 said:
I would be curious to hear if others also experience the same 'Buzzing' and 'Spinning' sensation, during the first stage of 'S.P'?
Hi Firefly. I suffered from Night Terrors for decades and always followed the same routine: firstly a realisation that I am awake and paralysed, then a feeling of being forced into the matress by a great weight. I would then become aware of an intensely evil presence (although I never actually saw any entity) which would be accompanied by the loudest buzzing noise akin to being inside a very angry swarm of bees. The entire bed with me on it would rise from the floor and begin to gyrate wildly. No amount of effort from myself could get any noise from my lips although in my head I would be screaming blue murder and terrified more intensely than I have ever been in real life.

Then one night, after a particularly stress filled day at work, I retired to bed and was later awoken by the same symptoms kicking off. I was just so tired and exhausted that I shouted in my mind "Oh f**k off! I can't be arsed with this tonight!" The experience stopped immediately and I went back to sleep. That was about 3 years ago and I haven't had a Night Terror episode since. :)
 
sleep paralysis is something i`ve suffered from for years. It tends to come in waves, i can go for several years without having any experiences of them, to suffering several times in one month. It tends to be a hormonal thing, i don`t know if its common in females for their brains to be more active when they`re ovulating?
IWhen i was younger i used to think it HAD to be a paranormal experience, i had many books about ghosts and alien abductions and would relate my sleep paralysis experience to these, as the experience was similar. I would often wake up "frozen", wanting to scream for my dad but no sound came out, being unable to move, hearing sounds and sensing "beings" in your bedroom...its horrible when it happens as it really feels like you have no control over the situation and there really ARE beings in your room. One of the most disturbing occurences happened last year, (i`m in my late 20s now) i "woke" up to discover i could not move and a 7ft tall scaly brown horned demon with the black, ominous "Gray" eyes was standing next to my bed, had hold of my wrist and was attempting to pull me off my bed. Bearing in mind that i was asleep, my eyes were closed, but i "saw" it, in my minds eye (i`m sure people who have experienced similar would know what i mean, its very hard to describe) and it felt very real, and i was terrified. My boyfriend was over too and his arm was around me, he said he could feel me struggling and assumed i was trying to free myself so i could maybe get up to go to the toilet/get some water etc so he removed his arm from me, at which point i turned around and punched him hard in the face. It was purely instinctive, as i really DID feel there was "something" in my room. I felt awful afterwards, but luckily he was ok about it as he could tell i was having a bad dream due to the fact that i was wriggling around and talking under my breath. My boyfriend is an insomniac and was awake the whole time and i`m sure if there was a 7ft tall brown "gray" demon in my room that he would have noticed lol, and we also have a husky, who would have also surely noticed any kind of being! :)

Interestingly, since that experience, i have trouble sleeping on my own unless my telly is on, or the light is on. On the rare occasion that i switch everything off and attempt to sleep, i do feel the whole "paralysis" thing sneaking up on me, and often sense "beings" in my room, but none as severe as the experience i had above. They soon go away when i wake up and switch the tv and/or light back on. I`m guessing its psychological. I`ve been to the doctors who suggests i lay off the caffeine before bed, and i do recall seeing a news article last year suggesting that caffeine can be hallucinogenic in large quantities (and i do drink A LOT!)
 
I've had sleep paralysis quite a few times, the mind wakes up when falling asleep, it's very scary! I try to concentrate on moving a finger, as soon as I can do that it breaks the paralysis, the worst one was when I thought there was people standing around my bed, and I could hear this demented laugh coming from outside, was terrifying!


I've found it gets worse when I'm stressed
 
I had a really weird one that resembles alien abduction, except not really, and I've never heard a similar one. I woke up with my eyes closed unable to move, and unable to even open my eyes. Suddenly I started seeing things in the darkness, and it is as if I saw two man in the darkness. One was inside my room and the other was outside. They were yelling to each other about kidnapping me, and I think they were sort of like intergallactic garbage men or something like that. Maybe I am just crazy and this would be considered a hallucination :|
I also had the more regular ones of a feeling of someone sitting on my chest but not seeing on anyone, as well as someone coming to lay down beside me looking sort of white, thinking it was my mom.
 
I just had my first real sleep paralysis experience the other week! I've had other sleep oddities, but never had any paralysis before.

I guess it's a fairly boring "classic" experience, but anyway:

I woke up in the middle of the night to a dark figure sitting on the edge of my bed. My flatmate had friends over, and I could still hear them making a lot of noise down the hall, so my first thought was that one of his friends had come into my room. This troubled me, as there is no good reason for anyone to come sneaking into my room and sit on my bed, but I only became more frightened when I realised I couldn't move. I first assumed he had his hands on my shoulders, holding me down, before I realised the paralysis was total and the figure's hands were nowhere near me.

At this point, it becomes obvious that I was still slightly asleep, because if I was completely awake and alert I would have realised this was sleep paralysis! Instead, I became aware of the fact that my cat was sleeping on my legs, as she usually does. I could feel this pressure over the general "pressure" of the sleep paralysis experience. For some reason this dissipated my fears entirely, and I decided that if I was in danger my cat would have run off or stood up or something, rather than just sleeping... and so I immediately fell asleep again! Half-asleep logic can be interesting. :lol:
 
I really had an interesting experience when I was younger as well, I was 18 years old, I was into meditation and trying to meet my spirit guides through this, I started off as I usually did by deep breathing exercises and trying to bring in a white light to surround my body but when this was lacking and didn't happen I started to stay within the darkness. It was calm and I could hear the tv in the background that I had left on. When all of a sudden, a sensation of a being sitting on my chest was making it really hard to breath, it felt as if a second entity hopped on and at this point I because scared and nervous as to what was happening and my first instinct was to yell and to have someone from upstairs come down to save me, but all I could do was wease out a help and this was so faint that no one would be able to hear me... after this didn't work I started to panic and at that point I started praying in my head to all dieties that I could think of, abraham, joesph, jesus, muhammid, ect ect, as I did I started to shake as if someone took me by the shoulders and started to shake me violently. I was literally flung from off of the couch, landed on a coffee table that was 3 feet away and damaged the corner of it from landing so hard.

Later in life, recently actually I started reading a book on Astral Traveling, called this : http://www.astraldynamics.com/home/ which also has a website interestingly enough, found by doing a google search. At any rate it discusses the fact that when your astral body leaves your physical body and your physical body becomes awake and aware of the astral being gone, you will wake up to feeling yourself in a helpless state feeling as though you are paralyzed as so many of us have claimed to have happened to us.

As for my experience, I feel it sort of justified the feelings of being paralyzed and not knowing what to do and not having immediate control of my body, the experience I had that followed may have been my bodies reaction to my astral body coming back into my physical one with a tremendous force... I cannot begin to offer you comfort in the experiences where a demon has been seen.

I can however tell you that I have seen documentaries on this where people who suffer from sleep paralysis who claim that they are being haunted by specifics and feel as if they are being grabbed and touched throughout the night, were video taped during the night and had even had EVP set up in which things had been captured, I really wish I knew the name of the documentary to share but it was quite a few years back :(
 
I have a really scary one. The other night I fell asleep and it felt like I woke up suddenly or had my eyes open and saw in the air over the stairwell where there's half a wall a giant child sized doll dancing around. It was all shady and strange looking. I then woke up completley or blinked and it dissappeared...don't know if it's sleep paralysis or a dream, happened so fast.
 
guestus said:
I have a really scary one. The other night I fell asleep and it felt like I woke up suddenly or had my eyes open and saw in the air over the stairwell where there's half a wall a giant child sized doll dancing around. It was all shady and strange looking. I then woke up completley or blinked and it dissappeared...don't know if it's sleep paralysis or a dream, happened so fast.

Sounds like experiences with sleep paralysis I've had.

I had a really weird waking dream this last month. I keep hallucinating spiders when I'm nearly asleep, which is very annoying since I have enough spiders that I can never ignore them. But this time it happened while I was waking up, and I hallucinated a baby bird on the edge of my bed! It sort of fluttered and fell off, and I was freaking out in my mind. Then I sort of thought, 'Okay, let's think this through: it's not making any noise.' Not sure if I was paralysed or not, though.
 
jubecrew said:
I really had an interesting experience when I was younger as well, I was 18 years old, I was into meditation

As a teenager I'd lie in bed and more from boredom than anything else, would slow my breathing down until to all intents it was suspended. That induced a euphoric state, presumably from oxygen depletion but I was always aware what I was doing was dangerous. There was a definite out of body aspect and I had no weirdies present, but there was also a real sense of stuff, people, presences, whatever, that would come into play if I went any further. I never did.
 
jubecrew said:
I can however tell you that I have seen documentaries on this where people who suffer from sleep paralysis who claim that they are being haunted by specifics and feel as if they are being grabbed and touched throughout the night, were video taped during the night and had even had EVP set up in which things had been captured, I really wish I knew the name of the documentary to share but it was quite a few years back :(

Is it one of these documentaries ? :
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5dihh ... -de-4_news
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5di86 ... -de-4_news
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5dhqg ... -de-4_news
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5dhid ... -de-4_news

Sorry, I could find it only in french, and it is without credits. I couldn't find any reference that could suggest an english title, the name of a director or a producer.
My own sleep paralysis experiences here :
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... &start=240
 
nogoodnik said:
I just had my first real sleep paralysis experience the other week! I've had other sleep oddities, but never had any paralysis before.

Ditto. On Saturday night, I fell asleep in bed with the TV still on. Around about an hour or so later I'd guess, I became aware of my surroundings but with eyes still shut and lying on my front. I could hear the TV and sense the light in the room around me. It was quite the strangest feeling of being both asleep and awake at the same time (probably very familar to those who experience this often). I was suddenly aware of what felt exactly like a cat jump onto the end of the bed, walk up the back of my legs and onto my back where it appeared to me to be something quite evil pushing down on me heavily and curtailing my breathing. I was completely unable to move or open my eyes for what felt like a few seconds and the whole thing was convincingly real at the time. Some kind of lucid, waking nightmare brought on by over-tiredness and a disturbed sleep pattern, but a fascinating experience in hindsight and what, I guess, is my first genuinely Fortean event.
 
I used to suffer from SP on a regular basis. Occasionally frightening, occasionally oddly pleasant. I even managed an out of body experience on one occasion. I actually thought I'd died (I was ill at the time) and my immediate thought was, "well that was easy I don't know what all the fuss is about".

I've learned through experience that SP only happens when I'm asleep on my back (anyone have any idea why that is?) As a previous poster has said, I can also occasionally stop an SP experience by thinking, "sod off I can't be arsed with this right now" Again, no idea why this works but it seems to bring me into a level of consciousness where I can force myself onto lying on my side thus stopping the SP experience in it's tracks.
 
A victim of sleep-paralysis recreates his visions in photographs

Conceptual photographer Nicolas Bruno has suffered from sleep paralysis since he was 15. In confronting the visions, and feelings of fear and helplessness, that can accompany this phenomenon, Bruno has discovered that transposing the notes from his sleep-paralysis journal to his photoshoots provides him a powerful therapeutic outlet.

edit - here's another thread on hypnogogic images. It might need a merge. ;)
 
Man suffering from sleep paralysis captures shadow figure on camera while asleep

A man suffering from sleep paralysis decided to set up a camera to film what he experienced while asleep. The camera captured something strange hovering over him Altered Dimensions reported on Monday.

Mike Pike often wakes up in the middle of the night and upon waking he experiences a half-waking state where he is unable to move. On several occasions Pike felt like he wasn't alone and sometimes notices a strange shadowy figure at the foot of his bed watching him.

"I'm a rationalist and a very skeptical person with no previous interest in paranormal activity, but after doing some research it seemed like there was a possibility that this entity is real," Pike said.

On one evening last week Pike decided to place a camera in his bedroom to document what he was experiencing. The footage that he captured was shocking. In the video, around the 30-second mark, an eerie mist rises to the ceiling from Pike's bed.

"I have watched the footage over and over trying to figure out some logical explanation for what could have caused the image of what seems to be a ghost, but I haven't been able to come up with a solution," Pike said about the video. "I am really starting to believe that I captured the entity I saw during my paralysis on video. This terrifies me so much that I can no longer sleep in my room."

Scientists claim that a sleep paralysis condition known as hypnogogia is what causes the illusion of shadow people. Hypnogogia is also known as waking-sleep and the person suffering from the condition is in a dreamlike state but they are aware of their environment. During this state people experience a feeling of dread, pressure on their chest, and visual images of shadowy beings.

Some studies have showed that certain drugs such as pseudophedrine can produce hallucinations. Pseudophedrine is found in many over-the-counter allergy and cold medicines. Many people that suffer from pet allergies have had shadow person experiences.
http://www.examiner.com/article/man-suf ... ile-asleep
 
It's just a compression artifact of the MPEG format. Any slight movement or change of light level produces a wave of adjustments over several frames. It is a long time since I looked at any of the live updating ghost-cams online but it was easy to witness several similar anomalies per hour! :)
 
JamesWhitehead said:
It's just a compression artifact of the MPEG format. Any slight movement or change of light level produces a wave of adjustments over several frames. It is a long time since I looked at any of the live updating ghost-cams online but it was easy to witness several similar anomalies per hour! :)

I think that's what it looks like, too.
 
This new study indicates sleep paralysis and hypnagogic / hypnopompic hallucinations aren't all that uncommon ...

Sleep paralysis and hallucinations are prevalent in student athletes

Pilot data from a recent study suggest that sleep paralysis and dream-like hallucinations as you are falling asleep or waking up are widespread in student athletes and are independently associated with symptoms of depression. This study is the first to examine the relationship between these sleep symptoms and mental health in student athletes, independent of insufficient sleep duration or insomnia.

Occasional sleep paralysis was reported by 18 percent of the sample, and 7 percent reported that this happens at least once per week. Hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucinations (which are dream-like experiences that occur while falling asleep or waking up) were reported by 24 percent of the sample, and 11 percent reported that they experience these symptoms at least once per week.

Compared to those who never experience sleep paralysis or hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucinations, those who did experience them -- even rarely -- also reported higher depression scores. This was even the case after controlling for how much sleep or what quality of sleep the person experienced. ...

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180604093104.htm
 

Why Some People Conjure Terrifying ‘Sleep Paralysis Demons,’ According to a Neuroscientist

Neuroscientist Ben Rein explains the strange phenomenon of hallucinating while on the edge of consciousness.

Rein is diagnosed with narcolepsy—a chronic sleep disorder characterized by overwhelming, uncontrollable daytime drowsiness and sudden attacks of sleep. He has also experienced hypnagogic hallucinations, or short-lived, disturbingly realistic imagery that tricks the brain as you’re falling asleep.

First the brain enters a sleep state, then slowly descends into a deep sleep, before finally surfacing slightly to enter a dreaming period called Rapid Eye Movement (REM). The full process takes about 60 to 90 minutes. This acts as a buffer between being conscious and dreaming, which is why people often have trouble remembering their dreams, Rein explains.

For people who experience sleep hallucinations, the period between consciousness and REM sleep is shorter. These fits can plague people with narcolepsy, in which a person enters directly into REM sleep—they’re awake, and then they’re suddenly partially conscious and dreaming. This situation is comparable to a hallucination before reaching a true dreaming state.

Hypnopompic hallucinations, on the other hand, happen while you’re waking up. They are connected to sleep paralysis, which can be downright scary. “What happens is in sleep paralysis, during REM sleep, when you’re dreaming, your body is paralyzed, you have your brain intentionally disconnected from your body so that you’re not moving around acting out your dreams, for obvious reasons, of course,” Rein says.

However, during this rapid shift from REM sleep to wakefulness, the brain-body disconnection doesn’t necessarily happen for people who experience sleep paralysis. “And so you end up remaining body-locked and paralyzed because your brain thinks, ‘I’m still dreaming right now.’ But you are conscious enough to recognize that you are awake,” Rein says.

Since your brain is still hovering at the border between dreamland and wakefulness, you are not only paralyzed, but also hallucinating. You may even think you’re being attacked—a horrifying experience people call sleep paralysis demons. “These are actually hypnopompic hallucinations, because really, what’s happening is, the mysterious things happening in the dream world are leaking over into real life. And so it seems very real, but it’s still really a dream,” he explains.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a41648542/sleep-paralysis/

maximus otter
 
I have vivid hypnogogic hallucinations and often remember my dreams, but have very rarely suffered from sleep paralysis and only infrequently have hypnopompic hallucinations. I'm not sure where that leaves me...
 
Why aren't the "mysterious things happening in the dream world ... leaking over into real life" ever pleasant or neutral, like a lot of dreams are? I haven't experienced, nor have I heard of anyone who's experienced, pleasant "dreams" whilst in a state of sleep paralysis. It could be that the fear resulting from paralysis leads to subjectively unpleasant dream phenomena but this is conjecture, not a factual explanation.

I've had periods of my life when I've had frequent and vivid hypnopompic hallucinations but have only once had sleep paralysis. The hallucinations weren't dreamlike in the slightest in that they always took a similar form and didn't bear any resemblance to anything I've ever dreamed about, and I dream multiple times nightly and always have done. They felt like hallucinations and not dreams. Whilst such explanations may have an intuitive rightness about them, they aren't amenable to disproof and begin to fall down when applied to actual experiences. I think this area is significantly more complex than these explanations make it sound.
 
I think this area is significantly more complex than these explanations make it sound.
I am always fascinated by the ubiquity of sleep paralysis experiences, in that age, religion, upbringing, nationality etc seem to make little difference to the overall emotion and perception. The 'devil on the chest' 'something evil in the room' 'sensations of touch' etc seem to cross all boundaries, and seem to point to something intrinsic within us.
 
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