I’ve experienced sleep paralysis and it is the most terrifying thing I’ve been through. It’s like being surrounded by total malevolence, time stretches to infinity, and you can’t move.

Practical advice to get out of it: move the muscles in your face - your eyes and mouth - as they are less affected by the body shutdown.

I have a tendency to experience sleep paralysis as abstract, bottomless terror, not as a visit from an entity. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen to me often, maybe once every couple of years.

What’s wrong with private non-repeatable experience?

Who’s proclaiming subjective experience to be wrong or invalid? It’s simply of much greater interest when it repeats with some commonality: we can learn from those commonalities. Poetry and music celebrating love would be nowhere near as popular if it the experience it discussed had so little commonality that very few people in the audience felt any sympathy for the composer.

What would you expect from a study of sleep paralysis? Anyone running experiments to objectively detect the presence of ominous entities would have trouble getting funding or being published.

Are you proposing that people should believe that a physical being was present, even if conscious witnesses in the room saw nothing?

I never said it had to be physical

we could see if multiple people in that state in the same place at the same time perceived the same thing, which would be really interesting…

Again, you’re saying the same thing that I’m trying to state above - that experience is only “valid” if it’s (1) repeatable and (2) can be experienced by many people in a predictable way.

Let me ask you a personal/rhetorical question: have you ever been in love? Could you ever take that one relationship and repeat it exactly? Could you ever make anybody else experience it exactly as you did? Of course not. And if you could, then what would be special about your experience once it was no longer private to you?

What’s wrong with private non-repeatable experience? You can’t sit here and say somebody else definitively didn’t experience something. After a while, it starts to just seem like jealousy that one person has had an experience and another has not, and thus discounts it.

I guess my main question is: if they feel real, then why can’t we simply accept them as real?

Are you proposing that people should believe that a physical being was present, even if conscious witnesses in the room saw nothing? Or that the person is translating some nonphysical phenomenon into a subjective physical experience?

It seems like the underlying bias of a study like this is that you can’t accept the testimony of your senses.

Stage magicians can produce very convincing illusions. People taking ketamine have had out of body experiences that provided inaccurate information about what was going on in other rooms in the house. Our senses can be fooled by causes external and internal; application of Occam’s Razor, which may or may not be appropriate in this case, would suggest sleep paralysis is another such instance. If we could figure out how to put people in this state at will, we could see if multiple people in that state in the same place at the same time perceived the same thing, which would be really interesting…

I’ll paraphrase…

In one instance I ’saw’ an invisible figure (think the old Predator movies when he’s cloaking) and then it leapt on top of me. This, being right after a nap in the middle of the day in my dorm room, was pretty startling. I was already awake though, which is the part that confuses me. But it was humanly heavy, extremely muscular, and I could feel its leathery skin and “claws.” I fought it off and it shreiked as it “fell” into some sort of… well, somewhere, I don’t know how to explain it. I actually wish my roommate would’ve been there at the time so he could verify that he didn’t see anything and that I was just flailing around. Because, who wants the whole “there’s a creepy thing that likes to attack me” concept hanging over them? I’d rather be reassured it was all in my head, really.

Was I scared at the time? Hell yeah. But did it phase or scar me? Nope. The scariest part that sticks with me was its scream, really. Like I said in my last comment, I have plenty of weird stories in my history, so I figured it would just make another fun story to tell. Plus, I figured I kicked its ass, and maybe, just maybe, I got some God-points for that. Promoted to demon-slayer, perhaps.

But a lot of my story feels inconsistent with most incubus stories. In particular, when I moved to Phoenix a year later, it came back and lay down next to me while I was taking a nap in the middle of the day on the floor. I had just woken up to let in the maintenance man, I stood around for awhile as he fixed my bathtub, and then after he left, I went back in and lay down and suddenly I saw/felt it lay down next to me. I guess I could say that it was a different one, but I don’t really know. It definitely felt identical. It didn’t attack me, it just came and lay there. I turned around, stood up, turned on some lights and went in the other room hoping it would just disappear.

And then less than a year after, I was reading Castaneda’s book “The Art of Dreaming” and found out that he supposedly “brought out” dream entities (inorganic beings, perhaps?) during a few lucid dreaming experiments/meditations. It was always something I had wanted to do in the past, but… not THAT thing.