Happens to me a lot, but I won’t be contacting the filmmaker – I don’t do Facebook.
I mean, would you if the succubi were constantly at your heals?
I only had it once - and woke up four times within dream state before coming to reality. When I did arrive, I was utterly unsure it would continue.
I remain unsure.
I get them several times a year. At first I freaked out but now I just let it happen. Weird noises, ominous presences, yep, that’s it.
If you think you’re in a dream but aren’t sure, you can usually tell by watching how ordinary things behave. Light switches don’t work, windows aren’t really transparent, you can breath underwater and my favorite…you can levitate 
I’ve had something similar many times, but I never thought of it as sleep paralysis.
I always knew I wasn’t dreaming, and I was aware of the world around me, but I also knew I wasn’t truly awake. I knew I wasn’t half-asleep, either: rather than being somewhere in the middle of a continuum, it was like some components of an application had installed and others hadn’t. So Sleep would run, but many functions weren’t working at all.
That’s my working life.
I had episodes of sleep paralysis frequently from around the age of 12 until I was about 27. My wife loves watching those ghost story shows on basic cable, but won’t let me watch them with her because whenever anyone talks about seeing a ghost while in bed during the middle of the night, I scream out, “It’s just sleep paralysis!”
I actually look forward to sleep paralysis events. If you can get past the panic, and the ensuing sense of presences, then you can jump straight into lucid dreaming. It’s like a lucid dreaming free pass.
I theorize the malevolent “presences” that you experience are simply a very deep and limbic response to the terror of waking and finding yourself paralyzed and trapped in a familiar yet haunting dream landscape. The presences are not at all unlike the feelings of dread and inexplicable and troubling emotions you feel after a traumatic event – as if the traumatic event has an almost “demonic” quality or face to it (that’s how the base mammalian brain logs very serious and dangerous predators and chains of events in memory, by assigning malevolent agency to them).
If you just tell yourself when you wake up in the dream not to panic, don’t scream out, just relax into it, then you will circumvent the whole incubus phase. Then you can ask yourself, where do I want to go? Should I try swimming through the air and out the window, should I explore this place a little. Or you can just close your eyes and relax and fall back into the prickly blackness of sleep.
I used to think I suffered from sleep paralysis, but then it turned out to just be a run-of-the-mill case of extraterrestrial sexual experimentation.
I’m pretty sure they lost interest around the time I started getting crows’ feet and my back hair started growing in thicker.
My favorite is breathing under water. Maybe it’s because I grew up on the river and lake, but I dream about breathing underwater a LOT.
Like a slow creeping fog, that floats along the ground outside until its through the front door… dred building as it wends its way thru house and hallway to my bedroom. I sense its presents but suddenly cannot move. Heart beat speeds. Chest constricts in panic. Body totally paralized; I try to call out, then scream!!!
nothing.
It seeps through the cracked door and soon fills the floor. Dark, menacing, Fear. It wavers around my bed until thick with substance, finally snaking up the foot to pin my ankles, smother my legs and roll up and over my stricken body; the devils breath about to suck my soul away…
Usually I woke up in a sweat and scared shitless, until I eventually learned to focus on breathing and wake myself up, hopefully before the blob pinned me…
It used to only happen if the room door I was asleep in was open. I ALWAYS checked the door before sacking out. My brother would sometimes open it a crack if he woke up in the middle of the night and he knew I was asleep. Those were the worst.
30+ years later I still occasionally have them. I still check the door closed.
Happened to me once when I was maybe 11. I remember it vividly, but yeah, it was sleep paralysis, and not the 300 year old house I was in, Though at 11 it seemed like the house.
This used to happen to me pretty regularly back in my late 20’s. It was terrifying, laying there in bed, unable to move a single finger or even scream, while you can feel this unseen embodiment of evil slowly coming down the hall for you.
But, yeah, not going to contact the filmmaker. I don’t do Facebook.
“Spirit visitations” can’t be explained by sleep paralysis, as spirits are normally reported to be seen in a wide variety of contexts, very often when awake. Read e.g. the collections of Irish folklore collected by W.B. Yeats.
Incubi/succubi also can’t be wholly explained by sleep paralysis, as they are deeply sexual experiences.
Maybe the truth is that the religious experience is too complex a subject to be approached by a reductionist approach.
That said, the film sounds very interesting. Like others, I wish the link went to a non-Facebook page. I don’t use Facebook, and friends don’t encourage friends to use Facebook.
Fussy bloody extraterrestrials, eh? “ew! thar’s like - haar on his back dude! Gross me OWT!”
"Many scientists believe that sleep paralysis is the biological answer to such mysteries as spirit visitations, alien abductions, incubi/succubi, and out-of-body experiences. "
name two.
i’m a scientist (non-biology based). this happens to me, and no i don’t believe it’s any type of answers to any of those most probably fictitious phenomena.
I had that horrible experience once. By the time I was actually awake, I was so confused that I was in tears. Now I just have night terrors which actually don’t bother me once I’m awake, but scare the bejeebus out of anyone within hearing range of me while I’m still sleeping and screaming.
Wow! That’s exactly what happened - totally wierded out!
Not to mention the little menacing alien robots observing you from your pillow!
These days I find that, while I can’t move in such an episode, if it’s disturbing enough I can muster up enough vocal noise that my wife will do me the favor of waking me up.
