Suffering from sleep paralysis

I am leaving the main topic of this blog for a moment to talk about something serious: Sleep Paralysis

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, it can be defined like this:
Sleep paralysis is a temporary inability to move or speak that occurs when you're waking up or falling asleep. It's not harmful and should pass in a few seconds or minutes, but can be very frightening.

I have encountered this state three times now. Allthough the first one happened many years ago I still can remember every single detail.
At first my wife thought I just had a bad dream and I am overracting. After the second and third time, and after some reading about it, she believed me that I encountered horrible situations.

I am sure there are many others who faced this experience and many more that may react is disbelieve.
So let me tell you about my three experiences

The face in the corner

As mentioned, my first sleep paralysis happend some years ago. I woke up, wasn't able to move. Was wondering why. Started to get panic. And suddenly it appears in the top corner of our bedroom. It looked mostly like this: (known from the memes)

I started panicking more. I was breathing like after a long sprint. My heart was beating like hell. Why can't I do anything? I wanted to scream, wanted to say something. Impossible! My wife was sleeping next to me. I wanted to shake here, wake her up. Warn her about this demonic stuff in the corner.
Suddenly, like on button press everything went back to normal.
The face disappeared and I was able to move finally. I jumped up, screamed like never before. My shirt was soaking wet.
Me sitting on the floor my wife of course woke up wondering wtf was going on. After a minute or two I came back to reality and labeled it as nightmare and went back to bed.

Touching Aliens

The second time was more intense in terms of proximity.
Again, I was in this half awake state. Suddenly two Aliens with their typical Hollywood look showed up.

Their thin long fingers started to touch my chest. Me - again - totally unable to move or do anything, panicked. Somehow I remembered the last time. Was it just a nightmare again? But why does it feel so real? Their ugly hands were coming closer to my face. That's it. At this point I was completely terrified. Only able to move my eyes I hoped to wake my wife.
And again, BOOM!
I woke up comletely. Screaming my lungs out. Jumpig out of the bed, and my wife was again like wtf is wrong?!

The Ring?

Last but not least horrifying I encountered this girl from "The Ring"

But this time, it was a bit different. Again, I was lying on my back. And there was this thing crawling towards our bed. I started to breath heavily. But there was no panic in me. This time I somehow knew I need to wait until everything goes back to normal. My wife was lying next to me. I tried to shout so she could wake me up. Which I obviously wasn't able to do.
This thing was still crawling at me. I stared at the ceiling tried to calm down and wake up. I knew, wakinging up will release me from all this. And somehow it worked. I woke up, didin't even scream. I just needed to calm my heartbeat.
My wife didn't notice anything this time.

But what stays is the horror of not beeing able to move and just accepting those creatures staring at me or even touching me. I did not figure out why this happened to me or how to avoid it. So I just accept it and try to "survive" this time until I wake up.

What about you? Have you ever encountered something like this? If yes, how do you deal with it? Do you talk about it with others?
Let me know in the comments.

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