Posts by darkskipper24

maxur said:About fifteen minutes ago, I was posting my experiences on another forum. I did a bit of Googling on the subject and stumbled upon this place by accident, so I figured I’d share what I just wrote here. C/P follows. 😉

I actually came to this forum specifically looking to start this exact thread, but it turns out someone beat me to it. 😁

I deal with this phenomenon quite frequently. A few months back, I started digging into it online and realized that other people's accounts line up perfectly with mine. It basically goes like this...

First off, this happens most often when I take an afternoon nap and then try to go back to sleep at night; I usually sleep on my back. Often, right before it hits, I get that sensation of falling as I drift off, which triggers a spike of stress 😁. But anyway... I slowly sink into sleep. The best way to describe it is being stuck in the gray area between dreaming and being awake. Instead of slipping into sleep, my brain stays fully alert while everything else shuts down. Physically, the body has checked out, but mentally, I am wide awake. Sleep paralysis is a standard biological mechanism—it's the body's way of making sure we don't actually act out our dreams and injure ourselves. So, I am acutely aware of my own body and the fact that I am paralyzed. But that’s exactly when the "Old Hag" phenomenon kicks in. This intense wave of terror hits, and I feel a presence—an entity, if you will. It sounds ridiculous, but no matter how many times I experience it, the feeling is identical: there is something there, and it feels malicious, like something out of a horror movie that wants to cause harm. For some inexplicable reason, my instinct in these moments is to force my eyes open, though I’ve never had a witness, so I can't say if I ever actually succeeded. But that’s where the worst part starts. The moment I attempt to open my eyes, this terrifying buzzing sound starts. It’s deafening. It amplifies the fear and feels like an electric current surging through my body. That surge feels like actual pain—intense, sharp, and it intensifies along with the buzzing and my struggle to open my eyes. It’s like an energy pulse running through my nerves. In those moments, there's always this recurring thought: if I keep fighting the paralysis, I’m going to physically or mentally break myself. It’s incredibly difficult to put into words, but I’ll use terms that come closest to the sensation. Any movement—twitching a hand, a leg, or even trying to pry my eyelids open—results in that electrical pain and the buzzing, creating a sense that I am self-inflicting injury. Again, I am fully conscious; this isn't a dream. At one point (though I can't be certain if it physically happened), I manage to crack my eyes open slightly, and that's when the hallucinations trigger. Instead of seeing my room (or the ceiling, since I'm on my back), various images bleed into my vision. Sometimes they are objects, sometimes faces, but the strangest part is how seamlessly they integrate into the scenery of the room. Throughout the whole ordeal, I feel a sensation that, in religious terms, I would call a demonic possession, because alongside the pain, there is this sense of a negative identity trying to exert control over me. This might all sound like an overly vivid dream, but the incredible thing is that I've read accounts from people all over the world, and the descriptions, sensations, and visions are identical. The only difference is the cultural lens used to describe the entity. In some places, they call it the "Old Hag," a witch who sits on your chest to pin you down. Since a more traditional Christian perspective is more familiar to me, I describe it as something akin to being possessed, though I don't literally believe it's a demon—it's just how the sensation manifests.😁
All in all, this can drag on for several minutes with waves of pain hitting you, and any attempt to fight back only makes things worse. How are you supposed to break free?

When I went through this for the first few times, I was completely blindsided; my reaction was right on the edge of a full-blown panic attack. Now that I’ve actually had some experience with it, I handle it much more calmly, but all those symptoms described above are inevitable. Anyone who has dealt with this has one singular desire: to wake up as fast as possible! The problem is that fighting it, "resisting the entity," or trying to force yourself awake simply WILL NOT work.
The trick is to squeeze your eyes shut even tighter, surrender completely, and relax both your body and mind. Don't dwell on the situation you're in; instead, try to actually fall back asleep in that hazy threshold between wakefulness and slumber. If we can let go of our thoughts and drift off for just a moment, we’ll wake up instantly, and the pain and ringing will vanish immediately. As for the fear—during those first few times, you'll be so shocked you won't dare close your eyes. It even happened to me where the whole thing repeated itself while I was trying to fall back asleep. Once you have "experience," the fear fades as you wake up.

I tried to lay it all out here. I hope someone finds themselves in this description and realizes they aren't losing their mind if they've felt this way until now (just like I did until a few months ago 😁). Look, this is a fairly widespread phenomenon that still hasn't been properly explained 😁

It was such a relief to stumble upon your post. I actually went through this last night, and the most tragic part (and weird at the same time) is that my little 9-year-old was experiencing it at the exact same moment. It’s terrifying; I don't think I'll be able to sleep easily again. I've had this happen several times throughout my life. It's almost identical every time—that feeling where you're stuck, unable to move, unable to breathe, with a weight on your chest like an elephant is sitting on you, accompanied by these strange noises. I was in total madness, screaming "help, help, I'm dying, I'm dying"—I'm still shaking as I write this. I read about it after the first time it happened to me, and of course, I forgot all about it until it struck again. But now I am truly panicking because when my little girl came to me last night—and I was already awake and shaking in bed—she was so frantic. She looked absolutely terrified, staring at me with wide eyes, unable to speak. It was horrifying. In that moment, I threw everything I had ever read about this out the window. I was honestly convinced it was some kind of curse or something like that