The BIG sleep paralysis and old hag topic

I’ve started attempting WILD the past couple of nights. Haven’t had much success. Friday night I actually started seeing quick, fleeting images–then sleep paralysis. I’ve experience SP before. At the time, I thought it was alien abduction, but the skeptic in me always kept me doubtful.

I’m far less fearful than I used to be, knowing what it actually is. Friday night in my WILD attempt, I saw a tall shadow figure in the southwest corner of my room. If I had been paying attention, though, I would have noticed that the perspective was entirely wrong…I was dreaming.

The feeling of weirdness is uncanny. I know it’s all in my head, but it keeps me from realising that I’m actually in a dreaming state. Hence, no lucid dream that time.

Oh well, try again. No shadow man can stop me from dreaming! I’ll just grab him next time and enter the dream world…

I actually had one of these SPs this morning after doing WBTB and I was actually levitating about 5 feet above my bed with my headphones on listening to techno! My body was doing these odd wave movements to the beat and I knew I was in SP, but I lost conciousness before I reached the REM period. It would have been my first remembered WILD induced lucid dream. MILD is much more effective in my case. I like the idea of imagining the girl for SP :content:

I’ve heard about sleep paralysis. I’ve read about it. Studied about it. I would have been completely ready for it and not scared at all…except…

Enter a small midwestern town, 6:05. A teenager is waking up in his bedroom. (Bit dramatic, but whatever.)

When I woke up, there was a strange hallucination above me. I was just waking up from a dream where I was looking at a door. I stared above my bed to find…a door, sliced in half diagonally, floating above my bed. Yet I knew it was reality.
My suspicons were confirmed when I tried to sit up but could only move about an inch. This was sleep paralysis.

Groggy confusion immediately gave way to inate fear. I had no feeling that anyone besides me was in the room, nor did I feel impending death, but I had thought of something horribly frightening. Illusions of threatening figures were disturbingly common during this state. Even if I knew it wasn’t real, it could still give me a terrible scare. Thus, I would have to try to free myself.

To my relief, I could fully move my arm. I waved it above my head, the door disappeared, and I sat up. Everything was normal. I sighed, used the bathroom, and went slept another 45 minutes without a second thought.

Overall, the ordeal lasted only two seconds. Besides being scared of seeing a threatening figure which there was one, I was not afraid at all. I felt completely alone and my only hallucination was the bizarre door. I’m convinced that if I had heard of sleep paralysis but never of the whole scary figure thing, I would have not been afraid at all. My guess as to why it was over so quickly is this: During sleep, your brain emits a chemical that paralyzes your body. Sleep paralysis occurs when the brain puts out too much of the chemical. That’s what I know for a fact. I think that my brain had put out just a very small amount too much, and that it had already been purged from my limbs. That’s just my theory.

Thoughts? Comments?

Perhaps, but to me it’s more logical to assume that SP just appears when you become aware of your paralysed body, while I dont think there is need for an overdose like you suggest for this to happen.

I’ve seen nothing but a black shadow :neutral:

But my mom saw a ghost type guy taking his shoes off at the foot of her bed. :bored:

I’ve never had it but I remember during my sleep paralysis my body was vibrating after a bunch of dizzy spells uncontrollably. Than when my eyes were forced closed There was a completely white background and the outline of an alien or something came into view. If anyone knows what this is please tell me. And is this a type of old hag?

kropa: sounds to me like you had some strong hypnagogic imagery during the sleep paralysis. How did you feel when you saw that entity? I’m not sure if it has anything to do with the Old Hag, because you saw it when you had your eyes closed. Mostly, the Old Hag appears if you wake up during SP and feel completely nailed to your bed. Often the Old Hag then appears to come out of a shadow in your bedroom.

IvanTheCat: Lol that’s a very weird experience your mom had. Was she terrified at seeing this ghost guy?

PS. I’ve merged your topic with the “BIG sleep paralysis and Old Hag topic” :smile:

When you really have SP you will know that’s it.
You can’t move at all, fear and entity presence is so strong and there is a lot of good sites where you can read about that.
It is well researched sleep “disorder”.
I read this is opposite to sleepwalking, where your body wakes up but not your mind. In sleep paralysis your mind has woke up but your body still sleeps, interesting, yes you would be following your dream moves and potentialy get hurt if your body wouldn’t be turned off all movement. It is normal to be still in sleep, but not in waking state.
You sure know those times when you wake up and last dream move is your first waking move, like grabing something in your hand or trying to kick or punch or run, etc. There are plenty of times, and all of this is between this on/off body motorics on the edge of sleeping and waking.

I finally have ‘seen’ something similar to an old hag, while I was in SP I saw a black shadow that looked like a ghost (that wanted to hurt me or something). I told myself it wasn’t real, it was just HI. At least it worked mentally but I still saw it.

An (linked) article about sleep paralysis…

unexplained-mysteries.com/fo … ntry550947

For lucid dreamer there are probably nothing new, but i added a comment, and if you want to share about SP and it’s use for OBE then it’s your possibility :wink:

There is a legend of an old hag or incubus that visits you while you sleep.
The Old Hag is very real and very scary. One night i was sleep on my stomach and something woke me up about 3am and i was WIDE awake. I could see everything in the room in front of me but i couldn’t move and i felt this heavy pressure on my back like someone was pushing me through my bed.I could not breathe & I also had covers on my back and i could feel them being pulled down my back. I was scared as hell! I know for a fact it was an old hag. I don’t believe no sleep parilysis crap, it’s an incubus! It’s the scariest thing when it happens. It only happens to me when im on my stomach. I hope it nevers happens to my worst enemy. Now it seems like this witch made me her boyfriend cause she visits me every other day. I got baggy eyes from losing so much sleep cause of this witch. When it happens to women it’s sits on there chest and when it happen to men it’s lays on there back. Do research on the incubus on the internet and you will see alot of people suffer from it.

This topic has scared me into only sleeping on my right side like I usually do. Im never gonna sleep on my back or stomach or even my left side, just to be safe. That sounds like the scariest thing ever. I dont know how or why old people can be scary but they can. I hope this never happens to me ever.

Who sees the Old Hag? Whenever I have Sleep Paralysis, my eyes are un able to open. If they are open, I am wide awake and laying there listening to Howard Stern trying to get my body to wake up, as well. So I don’t understand how people are seeing something scary during the SP.

Same for me! I never worried about this kind of thing until I came to this site!

If you read about sleep paralysis, you will discover that what people see during SP depends on their culture…

At the beginning, when i didn’t know about SP, i always saw someone coming into my room an throwing himself on me and strangled me… And i could swear to God it was real !!

I never had any of Old Hag appearance simply cause i didn’t know about this legend…

In the US most of SP people see aliens, in Middle East they see “Djinns”…

There is nothing real about SP hallucinations, the faster you believe it the faster you will get rid of them…

My mum had sleep paralysis once and some ‘presence’ got into bed with her (she was in an empty house). Then it got up and went to the bathroom and turned the light on and from then on she could move again. But… she had to get up and turn the light off! I think that was a ghost though as that house was undoubtedly haunted.

The last time I had SP (last night as it happens) I was lying on my side. At first the experience was (unusually) fear-free. I almost welcomed it like an old friend.

Normally I get a whizzing, buzzing, metallic stretching sound (the sound-enineers among you would recognise it as a flanger). I assume it’s the brain turning off unneeded audio processing functions :wink:

As soon as I heard it I knew I was experiencing SP. I was a little annoyed because I knew that I usually wake up from SP experiences quite sharply, and I needed the sleep.

For a change I didn’t experience difficulty breathing. This helped me remain calm, and I thought I would ‘ride’ the experience to proper sleep. I then seemed to enter a semi-dream state… My housemates entered the room and tried to remove our curtains. It became vitally important to wake up and tell them that we needed them to avoid being woken up by sunlight in the morning! (It was all a dream of course!)

It was unusually hard to wake up from that… Normally it’s a matter of two or three seconds, this felt more like ten. Still, breathing is our number one most important activity - having curtains comes a long way down that scale! :wink:

Does anyone else get odd sounds? How about triggers and other indicators? I normally feel my head ‘pop’ a few times while attempting to sleep before it happens. It’s like a build up of tension and a sudden release in my brain. Sometimes I get SP a few times a night when this happens.

Stress, lack of sleep and caffeine could be triggers, from my experience so far. Anyone else picked out any?

When i was about 10 years old i was asleep and i woke up. I was laying in my bed and something like an iron man or something else dark came up to me in my bed. All i could do was lay there and watch it approach me. It was really scary and i knew i was dreaming but couldnt wake up. Then it came over me with an axe and i dont remember anything after that except i tried to scream but it didnt work. Is this an old hag (looked at it fromt the site). Also this was in my older room. I had moved rooms a while before this but for some reason i woke up in this one. Any ideas as to what this meant?

Hi…

I starded “hanging out” here a few months ago, but lost interest after I while, cause I hated forcing myself to write down my dreams when I’v just woken up. Well, I’m getting away from the thread…

A “long time ago” maybe a couple of months I had my first SP, and I wrote the dream on this forum because at the time I didn’t know jack about LD and such… It was a scary feeling cause I had some kind of old hag SP, but with a shadow instead… After that experience I didn’t wanna have it again, so I think thats why I layed of with this whole LD thing.

But a few weeks ago I got new powers and decided to start trying to achieve LD again, and had some strange things hapeninig in the sleep… Maybe 2-3 times I have had some strange dreams that may have lead to this… I know that im not in a dream, I just have a LD feeling about it, cause I can do strange things… Like the bed starts shaking like crazy and I know this isn’t hapening in real life, but im not dreaming, Its different every time. But onces, whenever I said a swearword I would start to shake like crazy and if I kept saying swearwords the shaking would increase real heavy.

Other times I try to get into and LD, thinking about dreams I wanna have and such, and I will start shaking again, the more I think about getting into a dream the more I shake… I think this stage of shaking is really cool, cause I’m not scared, just amused by how I can increase it, but it never leads to an LD, and I would like to know if you guys have had the same thing, and may know what I should try to do, to get intro an LD…

And a last thing, today around 7pm I had an “old hag experience”, I woke up paralysed, hearing noices and a feeling that someone is here, but it could aswell have been that I live in an apartmentbuilding that is not soundproof that well. I remeber having this experience before, and got scared thinking I would see this thing again, but worse… So i didn’t wanna open my eyes… but I “feelt” this thing standing beside my bed shaking me, like trying to wake me up… I just kept lying there… “it” ran out in the kitchen I think, I opend my eyes trying to “see” what was goin on, but closed them right away thinking “it” would come back, see that I’m awake and do something…

I tryed to think about other dreams I wanna have, pleasent dreams… but was unable to change the seting… untill I fellt that I could move again, then I opend my eyes and thougt. if this thing is here, well NOW I can fight it… seeing how I could move…

How do I turns these into ld’s, should I just keep thinking about another dream or what?

/RasouL

I was watching a TV show the other day about UFO’s and they mentioned that a lot of people who claim to be abducted by aliens are probably suffering from SP and “the old hag” syndrome and just don’t know it. This isn’t a new theory, but what I learned was that there is a name for SP in Japan and it’s called “kanashibari” (I’m pretty sure I spelled it right and I believe it’s pronounced KON-ah-she-BAR-ee), which roughly translated, means “bound in metal”. I just thought that was a fun fact to share. :content: