Have any of you experienced sleep paralysis w/ the wierd shadow person thing?

I had it happen 3 times, years ago, when the doctor changed some medicine I was taking. I knew nothing about that kind of thing, and it was REALLY frightening!

Hi please explain more, i may be able to answer it.

Regards
Vic

You might could look it up on the internet.

But basically, one is in a dreamy state of sleep.
A state of darkness and fear seems to take over them mind.
One can't move or speak.
A dark, shadowy presence (like a demon) is over or beside the person.
IT'S SCARY as HELL.

I was able to make this "presence" go away by forcing myself to say the name "Jesus".

It was so strange, but then when I googled it, I saw that people have experienced similiar things for generations. I am not sure, but it seems to be an altered state of consciousness where one sees things not normally perceived with the 5 senses.

I have, back few months ago. But the pitch black mass thing was size of a small child. I know it turn its head twice at me, as I'm looking at it. The thing was facing my room-mate bed. That was my first sleep paralysis with shadow being. But experienced seeing shadow being had been few times. Didn't scares me tho, accept that one sleep paralyze event.

I sure would like to know the truth/science behind these events!!!

I used to get this all the time - Sleeping peacefully and hear footsteps coming from upstairs. The footsteps would get a bit louder as they came down a staircase that didn't actually exist in the house. I'd feel like I was wide awake but trying to stay still and pretend I was asleep. A few times, the footsteps came right to my room and I got a glimpse of a young girl as she walked through my room. Other times, the noises were metallic and much heavier sounding. Again, I felt wide awake but could not move even a finger no matter how hard I tried. Rolling over in bed was impossible and it was horrifying with my imagination running wild and in full fight-or-flight mode not being able to move. When I'd eventually wake up for real, it was clear that I was in a super deep sleep and lucid dreaming. I had this experience so often that I eventually learned to recognize subtle clues that I was just dreaming and either wake myself up or change the parameters of the dream on the fly. Now days, the closest I get to this is extremely vivid lucid dreaming where I'm trying to run but can only move in slow motion. It's still spooky but not nearly as terrifying as the sleep paralysis shadow figure thing.

Yes i have sleep paralysis. It happens when u go straight to bed after a stressful day without giving ur body and mind time to relax. U fall asleep then wake up but ur mind is still convincing u that ur asleep n dreaming although ur fully awake ..

I had it once when i was asleep on chair during my lunch time at work, though my chair is very comfortable to sleep on, but i think it happened due to the posture of body which was still for quite long time, i dun know it may be the reason...but i did not see any shadow or anything, what i experienced was i was trying to move but i was unable, i tried to scream for help but i could'nt....

Sounds like lucid dreaming to me. It used to happen to me a lot.

Here is some information from Wiki.


A lucid dream is any dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. In relation to this phenomenon, Greek philosopher Aristotle observed: "often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream".[1] One of the earliest references to personal experiences with lucid dreaming was by Marie-Jean-Léon, Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys.[2]

The person most widely acknowledged as having coined the term is Dutch psychiatrist and writer Frederik (Willem) van Eeden (1860–1932).[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] In a lucid dream, the dreamer has greater chances to exert some degree of control over their participation within the dream or be able to manipulate their imaginary experiences in the dream environment.[10][11][12] Lucid dreams can be realistic and vivid.[13] It is shown that there are higher amounts of beta-1 frequency band (13–19 Hz) experienced by lucid dreamers, hence there is an increased amount of activity in the parietal lobes making lucid dreaming a conscious process.[14]

Skeptics of the phenomenon suggest that it is not a state of sleep, but of brief wakefulness.[15][16] Others point out that there is no way to prove the truth of lucid dreaming other than to ask the dreamer.[17] Lucid dreaming has been researched scientifically, with participants performing pre-determined physical responses while experiencing a lucid dream.[18][19]

Yes i,ve had ' shadow people ' visit me 3 times as a child , it was around the time i started to beleive in God ...

Same as you i was frozen with fear , on the third occasion i summed up some courage and got out of bed and followed it through 3 rooms until it dissapeared , it didnt walk it glided ...

Im a Christian , allways been spiritual , and many millions of people have had this excact same experience ...

I felt a sinister presence when they were their , so i beleive they were demons , fallen angels ...

I had to do some research on this subject, as I haven't heard this term used before.

When I was very young, I had a problem with what seemed to be Rats running over my person while I slept. This was in conjunction with dreaming that I could be anywhere else at the time. I would try to run away or scream out but I was unable. My feet felt like cement blocks were attached to them, and my voice was mute despite straining with all my might.
This is as close as I've ever experienced to the phenomena that has been described. Less the fact, the entities weren't human-like in form.

At the time, my religious convictions were very muddied with the hope of various other 'would-be intermediaries' that were going to come to the rescue, but instead they seemed to escalate the problem instead.
Calling out to various Saints, Holy Mary, Jesus, and counting on crucifixes or statues was hopeless.

I knew that nothing could exist whether good-or-evil except by the Almighty God's leave. What is more, even Satin himself couldn't do anything except by the Almighty God's permission as well.
The more I put-away any icons and idols, however much they were condoned by the Church, the less frequent these horrific dreams took place. Eventually, my resolve was such that I only found myself counting on the Almighty Creator all of the time without expecting any other intercessor.

Conclusion; While anybody maybe conscience of their spiritual need or not, it doesn't exempt any of us from showing what we really revere in our daily lives. When we inadvertently are preoccupied overly-much with the creation rather then the Creator, this is the danger we fall into. So, pursue the True God with all your heart, soul, and strength.

'But, Who is the Almighty God...?' You may ask.

This is often confusing for many, so here are some general rules as to who and what the Almighty is.

Number one: No picture, statue or work of art can ever serve to compliment what the Almighty Owner Of The Universe looks like.

Number two: No one from the past or present, in the physical world, has ever seen the Almighty directly.

Number three: No words conveyed to anyone from the past or present have ever been received directly except, by His presents being veiled or His sending an emissary, like that of an Angel. The Emissary will always state that it is present only by the True God's leave.

I've experienced sleep paralysis more than once and it's a truly frightning experience. I have also done some research and understand that it isn't anything paranormal or a mystical phenomenon, but at the moment you are experiencing it, nothing seems normal about it.

You are fully aware of everything around you, yet still in a deep sleep. You cannot move, speak, nor force yourself to wake up. I hope to never have to experience it again, but I don't think that will happen.

It was an ordinary night, but Salma, a 20-year-old student at The American University in Cairo, had a particularly frightening experience. She woke up, unable to move a muscle, and felt as though there were an intruder in her bedroom. She saw what appeared to be a fanged, bloody creature that looked like "something out of a horror movie," standing beside her bed.

She later explained her experience to researchers who were conducting a survey about sleep paralysis, a common but somewhat unexplained phenomenon in which a person awakens from sleep but feels unable to move. Up to 40 percent of people report experiencing sleep paralysis at some point in their lives, and a few, like Salma, hallucinate shadowy intruders hovering over them.

"Sleep paralysis can be a very frightening experience for some people, and a clear understanding of what actually causes it would have great implications for people who suffer from it," said Baland Jalal, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego.

Researchers say that sleep paralysis happens when a person awakens during a stage of sleep known as rapid eye movement (REM). People in this stage of sleep are usually dreaming, but their muscles are nearly paralyzed, which might be an evolutionary adaptation that keeps people from acting out their dreams.

It is harder to explain why a subset of people who experience sleep paralysis feel a menacing figure in their room or pressing on their chests. [Senses and Non-Sense: 7 Odd Hallucinations]

One possible explanation could be that the hallucination is the brain's way of clearing out confusion, when there's a disturbance in the brain region that holds a neural map of the body or the "self," according to a recent article that Jalal and his colleague Vilayanur Ramachandran, of UC San Diego, published in the journal Medical Hypotheses.

"Perhaps, in part of the brain, there's a genetically hardwired image of the body — a template," Jalal told Live Science. Previous studies have suggested that such a region may be a part of the parietal lobes, which are situated in the top-middle part of the brain.

It is possible that during sleep paralysis, the parietal lobes monitor the neurons in the brain that are firing commands to move, but aren't detecting any actual movement in the limbs, which are temporarily paralyzed. This may lead to a disturbance in how the brain builds a sense of the body image, Jalal said. The appearance of a bedroom intruder could result when the brain tries to projectthe person's own body image onto a hallucinated figure, he said.

This idea, though intriguing, would be very difficult to test, Jalal said. One way to gather evidence showing whether this is what is happening inside the brain during sleep paralysis would be to test people who have different body images. For example, if this idea is true, people who are missing a limb might hallucinate figures who are missing the same limb, Jalal said. Still, people with such different body images are likely a small subset of the population, and it would be difficult to conduct such an experiment, he said.

What's so frightening about sleep paralysis?

It's also possible that people's differing experiences of sleep paralysis are due to differences in their cultural beliefs. Previous research has suggested that certain ideas found in people's cultures could shape how they experience certain phenomena, Jalal said.

For example, in a 2013 study published in the journal Cultural, Medicine, and Psychiatry, Jalal and his colleague Devon Hinton, of Harvard Medical School, looked at the rates of sleep paralysis, and the amount of stress that people felt because of the episodes, among people of two different societies: Egypt and Denmark. They found that, compared to study participants in Denmark, the Egyptians experienced sleep paralysis more frequently, and had more prolonged episodes that were accompanied with a greater fear of dying from the experience. [Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders]

"These are two very different cultures; Egypt is very religious, whereas Denmark is one of the most atheist countries in the world," Jalal said.

Most of the Danish participants said they thought sleep paralysis was caused by physiological factors, brain malfunctioning or sleeping the wrong way, whereas the Egyptians were more likely to believe that sleep paralysis is caused by the supernatural.

In another survey, about half of the Egyptian participants from that study said they thought their sleep paralysis was inflicted by a jinn, a ghostlike, menacing creature from Islamic mythology, according to the study, published in the journal Transcultural Psychiatry in 2014.

Jalal and his colleagues concluded that people with such supernatural beliefs tend to experience more fear during sleep paralysis, as well as longer episodes of it. It is even possible that the fear actually contributes to an increase in the person's severe episodes of sleep paralysis, and vice versa, Jalal said.

"If you have fear, the activation in fear centers in the brain might mean more likelihood of fully awaking during sleep paralysis, and experiencing the whole thing," Jalal said. "And by experiencing it, you would have more fear " and then, you have all these cultural ideas of what it is added as well, and now you are even more scared of it."

Jalal said he thinks finding a scientific explanation for sleep paralysis could help people who have particularly frightening and stressful episodes because they've culturally learned to attribute it to supernatural beings.

http://news.yahoo.com/ever-wake-think-see-ghost-heres-whats-happening-203000582.html

oh my...

it's caused by jinns and demons...

written of in old truths.

seems to be the favorite explanation of the unexplained... DEMONS!!! lol, damn demons and jinns... i hate them...

hehehe...

such be jolly jokes for the meek of mind and hallowed of heart...

those who believe in anything, if they feel or feel it, since these always fear what "might or could be"...

as real...

the unsane...

sum sea...

and so pity the unknowing mortal's.

and never feel superior.

just sad for the weak of mind.