I've experienced this many, many times, and it's apparently a very common phenomenon. Many cultures have their own myths to explain it. In the Gullah and SC Lowcountry culture, for instance, they believe that there are people who can willingly send out their concious spirits from their bodies to do evil things, and call these disembodied spirits "hags". They believe that "hags" will try to take over the body of a sleeping person, making that person do bad things in their sleep, and that whenever your start to awake, yet feel as though something is pressing down on you, preventing you from moving, that's the "hag", which is still trying to "ride" you and use your body to do its evil bidding. People who are accused of doing things like robbing a store or fooling around with someone else's spouse would often claim to have been "hag-ridden" at the time, having no memory of the event and no control over their actions.
That being said, I tend to experience sleep paralysis the worse when I'm not getting a good oxygen flow during sleep, often due to my chronic sinusitis, which causes my nose to become so stuffed up that I cannot breathe through it at all. Sleeping on my side helps, but I've gotten a lot of relief from Breathe-Rite Nasal Strips, which are adhesive strips that you put on the outside of your nose, like a Band-Aid, that hold open the breathing passages and allow better air flow. Sleep paralysis DOES have a very important and useful function-it keeps us from acting out, physically, what we're dreaming of, and either getting hurt or hurting someone else. It usually occurs when something-a small noise perhaps, or your brain telling you it's not getting quite enough oxygen-startles your conciousness awake while your body is still under the effects of REM sleep. Due the state of altered conciousness, all sorts of hallucinatory experiences can occur before the person is fully awake and mobile again, including a sense of a forboding presence in the room. I would not doubt that a lot of the old "Incubus" and "Succubus" legends, and many stories of "alien" abductions, result from really vivid examples of sleep paralysis.
pitbulllady
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