faith2faith said:
I tend to believe that those experiences are real.
All experiences are real. It's the interpretation that's disputable.
And as to the question how you can discern something truly evil from plain fear that comes from within, you definitely CAN.
I'm willing to accept the premise that you can. I'll be very surprised if I ever find that I can, and would like to have some sort of comparative description to understand how you can - but I don't particularly want the first-hand experience, and have been on the receiving end of people assuming that they understand my own experience better than I do to inflict it on anybody else if I catch myself in time. But it's one of those annoying reflexes people have, and ironically it's the same reflex regardless of whether you're pushing your own interpretation of an event or discounting someone else's. Our own experiences and preconceived notions trump everybody else's inside our own heads.
Like it or not, sleep paralysis and hypnogogic/hypnopompic hallucinations are interpretations that have to be examined for relevance in every single experience that involves resting situations. That doesn't mean it's the explanation every single time; nor is a physical explanation for an experience always the most important thing to determine. We don't understand these phenomena thoroughly, and we never will if we leap to conclusions about what did or didn't happen. There's been a lot of good sleep research done in the past ten years, and much of it has been written up in popular science form.
Charles Darwin's remark that ignorance begets certainty and knowledge uncertainty is relevant. I frankly don't understand why people who think that sleep paralysis always explains everything about a resting experience ever come onto threads about it - they're not going to learn anything new because they're not paying attention to the data, which clearly doesn't interest them. However, to suggest ways in which an experience matches sleep paralysis is not the same thing, especially if the experiencer has not considered the experience in that light. Some people don't have this information, and some people aren't very good at analyzing their experiences. We can't always tell what category a poster falls into from out here.
My bipolar friend was hospitalized when she experienced herself as a paramecium in a petrie dish and told people about it. I asked her when she was lucid whether this was her attempt to speak metaphorically about the process of her treatment (we've discussed at length the experimental nature of modern mental treatment - to see a mental health professional is to become a guinea pig) or if she really thought she was one at the time, and she said: "Yes." She'd experienced the metaphor as a physical truth, but now that she was lucid she knew the difference. So it's clear to me that even people with severe cognitive difficulties can tell subjective experience from objective, sometimes; can tell when they get mixed up together, sometimes; and can be completely confused on the issue, sometimes. If all that can go on inside one person's head, it's the height of arrogance to think that I can know enough about some stranger on the internet to tell them what "really" happened. But I can know enough to suggest possibilities for them to compare against their memory and apply as relevant.[/quote]
Lets not forget our supposed objectivity. 
