Shadow Visitors: Sleep paralysis and discarnate “dark ones”
A week or so ago I finished reading Louis Proud’s fascinating book Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences. Published just last year, it argues that sleep paralysis is actually a cousin to spirit mediumship, in that the experience represents an actual visitation by paranormal entities that live constantly among us. Usually we remain in a condition of mutual ignorance — we don’t see these entities, and they don’t see us — but sometimes they become aware of us, and then, if they’re the lower and more craven kind, they latch onto us to feed on our life energy. Sufferers of sleep paralysis thus serve as conduits to the spiritual or daimonic realm in a manner roughly similar to mediums or, in a slightly different context, the teenager that’s typically identified as the focal point for a poltergeist disturbance. (For a detailed explanation of Proud’s ideas, see the interview he gave to TheoFantastique a couple of months ago.)
You’ll recall that I myself suffered for years from savage episodes of sleep paralysis. I still have them occasionally, only they’re much milder and less dramatic than they used to be. In the beginning they were fully as shattering and spiritually transformational as what Proud — a sleep paralysis sufferer himself — describes in his book. Although I never bought fully into an all-out paranormal explanation of the whole thing, remaining mostly skeptical about such matters, I was unable, as a matter of psychological fact, to escape the awful pall that the experiences cast over my life for a few years, just as I was unable to deny the clear impression that the figure or figures that visited me during those episodes were objectively real, as opposed to subjective dream figures generated by my brain. Of course, that doesn’t mean they actually were (or are) real. But as in all things, it’s prudent here to make sure you’re informed before you pass judgment, and in this case that might mean reading — for instance — the work of David J. Hufford, the brilliant pioneer of sleep paralysis studies (and a professor of both humanistic medicine and religious studies in the Penn State and University of Pennsylvania systems). Among the several aspects of his work that are guaranteed to provoke a reaction deeper than a mere shrug are his findings that the phenomenology of the sleep paralysis experience (what it feels like, and what the “entities” encountered during it look like and act like) remains constant across cultures, even among those that are fully isolated from each other, thus giving the lie to the idea that cultural expectations determine the content of the attendant hypnagogic visions; and that even among educated moderns who have been taught, or who have sometimes eagerly sought out on their own, the voluminous medical literature that explains the neurological aspects of sleep paralysis, it’s still quite common for them absorb this medical-scientific knowledge without changing their opinion that their experiences have a metaphysical or paranormal basis.
Reading Proud’s book has got me to reflecting seriously on everything that happened to me during those years, a task that’s made easier by the fact that I wrote about a lot of it in my journal at the time.
Here are two things about my experiences that I’ve never mentioned to anybody, including family and close friends. I bring them up now because I figure they might prove interesting to those of you who are fans of my horror fiction and want to know more about its origins.
First, I’ll highlight two famous images from Hollywood that, although they’re very distinct from each other, manage in tandem to illustrate the thing that I encountered during one of my earliest and most powerful sleep paralysis experiences (which I described in a kind of glossed-over fashion in “Fun with nocturnal assault“):
If you can imagine these two images — which are probably familiar to you — mingled together to the point where they’re concomitant, then you’ll have a good sense of what I encountered in my bedroom one night in 1993. On that occasion, I emerged circa 3 a.m. from a sleep so deep that it was almost a coma, to find myself paralyzed by a dark figure hovering over me at the foot of the bed. When I say I was paralyzed by the figure, that’s precisely accurate: I had the sense that this thing was responsible for the awful state of paralysis that had unaccountably taken hold of me. And yes, I do know, and I think I may even have known then, about the physical paralysis that naturally occurs during REM sleep. In the presence of that dark figure, I was immediately panicked, horrified, positively sickened with terror and dread, in a way and to a degree that I had not only never experienced but had never even conceived. And this horror was a result not only of my paralysis, nor of the figure’s presence and frightening appearance, but of the awful knowledge of its reason for being there, which gripped me suddenly and totally. The thing was a vaguely man-shaped vortex of darkness, and I knew, with a kind of psychological weight that I had never imagined, that it was the anti-me, that it was like my own personal black hole, and that its presence, in fact its very existence, meant my utter annihilation. I actually felt it sucking my entire being into it, like a roaring, devouring hurricane meant for me and me alone.
Yes, cue thoughts of the Jungian shadow, the disjected and repressed aspects of the total self, objectified in a moment of involuntary hypnagogia to confront me. But does such an explanation, even if accepted (and it sounds valid to me), necessarily negate and exclude all others? Can’t the “explanation” of many things be multivalent?
So that’s the first of the two things mentioned above: In 1993, during my worst-ever episode of sleep paralysis, I encountered a demonic-seeming figure whose very essence and raison d’etre was my utter negation, and which looked a bit like the cinematic images I’ve supplied. I didn’t think of the movie pictures until sometime afterward, though, when I was trying to come to grips with the whole thing, and was trying to remember what the entity had looked like, which was singularly difficult because although it definitely had a visual appearance, which definitely felt like I was looking at it in just as real and wakeful a fashion as I’m now looking at my laptop screen, its appearance was also, somehow, psychological or spiritual, so that what it looked like to the physical eye was completely intermingled with what it “looked” like to thought, emotion, and the imaginal eye.
The second thing is a little anecdote from my college years that has come back to haunt me from time to time, and that has now pushed its way to the front of my thoughts thanks to Proud’s book. As I mentioned in a recent Demon Muse post (“Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (1)“), when I was an undergraduate at the University of Missouri-Columbia, I took a class titled The Creative Process. It was offered through the honors college, and was created and taught by Dr. Betty Scott, who in addition to being a noted trumpet player was and is a long-time adherent of alternative spiritualities and health modalities. Her Creative Process class, which I took when it was brand new and had only been offered once or twice before, was ostensibly about the subject named in its title. It was supposedly intended to teach students the psychology of creativity and help them increase their creative potential. And while it really did cover this territory, it also ended up being so chock-full of non-mainstream spiritual and psychological stuff that it could validly have been titled New Age 101. Under Dr. Scott’s tutelage, I and my fellow students engaged in guided visualizations to find internal creative guides. We drew and shared personal mandalas. We created and endlessly wrote affirmations. We listened to subliminal learning tapes consisting of New Age electronic music accompanied by subaural messages aimed at increasing our creative focus and energy. We discussed Richard Bach’s newest book at the time, One, which continued the author’s tale of his transcendent love affair with his “soulmate,” Leslie Parrish-Bach, that he had begun in The Bridge Across Forever. (Having been mesmerized first by Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull and then his Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah back in high school, I was an easy mark for this one. Of course, the whole thing seemed to fall apart retroactively when he and Leslie divorced in the late 1990s.)
At first I dug the hell of the whole thing, and I started out as one of the star pupils in the class. But partway through the semester I dove with gusto into researching a paper for another class about the then-hot New Age movement in America, and by the time I had finished writing that paper, which touched on the channeling phenomenon (including J.Z. Knight and her Ramtha swindle), neurolinguistic programming, crystal mania, UFOlogy, and all the rest of that ill-defined, Shirley MacLaine-helmed phenomenon, I had shifted into full-blown skeptic mode, and for the rest of my foray through The Creative Process I was barely able to contain my scorn for what we were doing. Poor Betty, who really was a great lady, couldn’t help but notice the change. Of course she was a lot older and wiser than I was, so I think she just endured my altered demeanor as she had probably endured the attitudinal volatility and pseudo-schizophrenia of a great many college students before me.
Then, a year or two after I was out of her class, a mutual friend named Robert who had been in there with me, and who had gone on to spend more time with Betty in The Creative Process II (a class that I naturally opted to skip), told me something that came blazing up from my memory several years later when I was suffering my near-meltdown from repeated sleep paralysis attacks.
Specifically, Robert told me that when he was talking with Betty one time after a class meeting of Creative Process II, he brought up my name for some reason — an understandable occurrence, since the three of us, he and Betty and I, were all mutual acquaintances. And then for some reason she shared with him that she was concerned that I might have a “dark one” attached to me. I blinked when he told me this, and replied, “Huh?” since this was the first I had heard of such an idea. So he explained that, according to Betty, a dark one is an unincarnate or disincarnate spirit that longs for fleshly existence, and that sometimes one of these spirits will attach itself to a person and live vicariously through his or her bodily experiences. But when it does this, it accidentally and involuntarily imparts a kind of night-sided emotional cast to its host, simply by the fact of its own nature and presence, so that its host’s outlook, mindset, attitude, and overall view and experience of life are tilted in a certain dark-ish, anti-life direction.
And that, my friends, is something that Louis Proud describes very specifically in Dark Intrusions.
As I have explained before — for example, in my Strange Horizons review of Unexplained: An Encylopedia of Curious Phenomena, Strange Superstitions, and Ancient Mysteries, and also in some blog posts here and at Demon Muse — I’ve been very interested in the paranormal, in ghosts and UFOs and cryptozoology and all the rest, since I was a kid, when Daniel Cohen’s books about these things were a delight to me. As an adult that interest has continued,. and I’ve gone on to read books of a much more sophisticated nature, everything from Colin Wilson, John Keel, Patrick Harpur, and Anthony Peake to explicitly skeptical stuff like Skeptical Inquirer and a couple of the hardcore skeptical titles from Prometheus Books. And I’ve done all that while earning a graduate degree in religious studies and pursuing a side career as a supernatural horror writer and independent scholar of such matters. So it’s not like I haven’t thought about such things in awhile. It’s not like I haven’t been “up” on the mediumistic and parapsychological theories of earthbound spirits and all that. But reading Proud’s book, and finding him not only saying things about “lower order spirits” that recall Betty Scott’s odd speculation about me all those years ago, but doing so explicitly in the context of a study of sleep paralysis, which is an experience that helped to define who I am now, has really knocked the bolts loose on some of my mental doors. Multiple interpretations indeed. I feel like I’m living out a metaphor.
If you’ve experienced sleep paralysis yourself, and if you have any thoughts about any of what I’m saying here — or even if you haven’t and you don’t — I’d love to hear your reactions. The comment threads on my previous posts about sleep paralysis have been most enjoyable to read, so if you’re so inclined, please speak up.
Oh, and for those who may be wondering, the answer is yes, the nocturnal supernatural assault scene near the end of my story “An Abhorrence to All Flesh” in Divinations of the Deep, where a character is horrifically destroyed by a man-shaped hole or vortex that appears at the foot of his bed, does indeed hail from the experience I’ve described here.
Posted on May 26, 2010, in Paranormal and tagged horror, louis proud, Sleep Paralysis. Bookmark the permalink. 33 Comments.
Matt, I’m glad you were able to finish the book and find it not only helpful, but inspirational (perhaps in unsettling fashion) in some sense. It is indeed amazing what sources we may draw upon for our creativity. Makes me wonder about folks like Poe. And just as some of your horror fiction finds its roots in these experiences, no doubt more of our classic horror literature and cinema is likewise. As a fellow scholar and one on the journey regarding not only sleep paralysis, but also the paranormal and “the fringe,” I hope the bolts come back together for you in even more promising and creative ways.
Thank you, John. As has been well said, we only grow by being knocked off balance and out of our comfort zone.
Hello, Matt Cardin. Your blog is very informative and your literary talents as a writer shine through it. I am 19 and last year I had a similar sleep paralysis “visit”. It resembled the images you posted and a character from the anime “Gurren Lagann”:
http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j2/BamaSnoopy/GurrenLagann-Anti-SpiralAvatar.jpg
I only gazed at the figure’s “face” and an intense panic rushed throughout my body. I actually screamed “within” myself; for an instant I felt unbelievable horror and broke free from the paralysis to see everything became okay…
Thanks for responding, Sepehr, and also for the link. Best of luck with any further visitations. They can be highly transformative@
I am a 28 yr old man who has been dealing with sleep paralysis my entire life along with a certain “visitor” who stands at the side of my bed…..I was 5 yrs old when i had my first experience. A shadowy dark-cloaked figure who at times seems as though he is looking away towards my door as if to give the impression that he is guarding or watching out for me. Other times he watches me. i have become so accostom to these experiences that fear is no longer a factor, i just get angry with him for waking me and attempt to yell at him as i yearn to know why he has been doing this. He just stares at me. What is most odd is the feeling of protection he offers and not feelings of threat.His presence gives me a sense of security. WHY???
What you say about the sense of security that comes from your “visitor” really is striking, Mike. Please feel free to post more about it here if any further developments come to light.
I had a similar experience to the one you described here. There was a dark figure similar to the one you described dark, ‘cloaky’ hovering above me. I still have the similar issue of what it looked like because I guess, I had an OBE with it.. at one point it felt like it was behind me tugging on me at others I remember seeing it from the outside pulling me out of my body.
I guess this is where we differ there was a chain attached to my spiritual back linked to my body. I felt as if this thing were able to pull me completely free from my body then I would die so I fought it. My memory of it is spotty but eventually the episode was over and I was just paralyzed with no illusions and then I was able to awake. Like you said this was my most intense episode
I guess what I was most intrigued about with your article was the dark-tilt that is associated with the ‘dark one’. I’m a skeptic of all things supernatural now.. as of recent I guess since that experience though one would expect opposite. Initially I suppose it fueled my appetite for the supernatural but something changed and I’m not sure where or why.
6 – 8
When I was younger I also had a visitor that was an old lady she seemed to always stand near my bed watching me or looking out the window.. I never really felt afraid of her but I can’t say I felt secure just aware of her presence..
But one night I woke up screaming to a host of dark entities that seemed to surround me in my room and I could see them in the hallway outside my door. My dad came running to me.. I saw him walk through them and turn on the light, they were gone.. when he turned the light back off I screamed they were still there. They were more like what Sepehr described with the link.. only they weren’t glowing at all. and just congregated like idle zombies.
He being a religious man.. prayed and they were gone.
I love these types of accounts, so I appreciate your sharing, James.
I’ve had a hand full of these episodes nothing like a dark figure. One I was in my bed sleeping on my back I remember having a dream and I woke up from it and couldn’t move my vision was shaky like my head was vibrating I tried with everything I could just to try to move a finger but couldn’t it was so hard to breath then above my head looked like a white see through long cloth was being swayed over my face. My eyes scanned the room and I thought I was going to die was pretty scared I closed my eyes just hoping if I was going to die then let it be over I think I may have went back to sleep when I closed ‘em and woke up scared thinking it had to be a dream but I remember the way everything was in my room like the sunlight coming through my certains the time of the clock laying next to my bed. My other episodes will make me sound like a lunatic so going to keep them to myself.
Hey was up my name is will n Ive been experiancing this demonic presence trying to posess me since a child . It happened to me over 20 times and the most recent time was interesting . I was on a trip with my brother who Ive always discuss this with and we were talking about Bruce Lee and how concious he was as a person who made his bidy this best it can be physically mentally and spiritually and was effected by sleep paralysis which was interesting to me because how can a man so healthy die at the age of 33. As we discuss that and how weird that was I got tired and went to take a nap the last time I experianced that was months ago and was not thinking something like was going to happen to me . Once I fell asleep I felt like I was concious while my physical eyes were close my spiritual eye was open and scanned the room in which I saw a short figure looking upon me on my bed and quickly moved to the shadows I immediatly woke up because I felt it was about to attack me with the paralysis . I then went downstairs and told my brother what I saw and said their a presence in this house thats evil . He looked at me like I was bugging out . So as we talked he was on the couch and said hes going to nap I said okay thinking nothin of it because I thought the spirit wouldnt justify what I had told him. But as he took his nap I played playstation 3 in about 20 minutes he woke up and said he was attacked I saw it in his eyes and he swore to evryone knowing im sensitive about this he wouldnt lie about that. He told me that the spirit took him to a dark realm which he could not move until he chanted in arabic I rebuke u in the name of jesus . In which it freed him and he awoke. I dont know evrything but I know the spirit world is real and we are vulnerable to these experiances when we are far from god . Anyone that reads this just know that jesus loves u and will always forgive you for whatever sin u commit . Just after u repent to not continue on that path and gain a sort of conciousness to do better starting with yourself and become a child of light not of darkness. I can go on forever about this but I dont type very good so anyone get something from this please give feedback.
Hi. I have myself experienced this type of sleep paralysis whilst dark hooded creatures were chasing after me, I was about 6-8 years old at the time. I noticed that if I screamed nothing would come out, however I could clearly hear the screaming and groaning of these creatures. Even weirder,the ghost hunters have caught something similar on camera at the eastern state penitentiary to what I experienced and a lot of people have accounted experiences of these same creatures, has anyone else seen these beings? However the sleep paralysis just suddenly ended, and I have had no other experiences at my present age of 22. Though there is still a heavy presence in my room back at my mums address. which my partner has even picked up on, but it has been there all my life, and thankfully I don’t think it can get to me. Though it was such a scary experience, and I will remember it for the rest of my life
Oh and to reply to Kevin my room was also exactly the same as if I was waking up normally, I could see my alarm clock, I could feel the duvet on top of me and I could feel the mattress! Very real and frightening experience.
Stumbled on this page looking for an explanation for a similar experience. In my case I triggered it myself when I was awake and I know exactly who my dark shadow is. I’d be interested if any of you also experience this in waking condition or know who your shadow is.
Hi. A couple of weeks ago I had a horrible experience with sleep paralysis. I suddenly woke up in in the middle of the night in my bed to see a woman (she wasn’t really black, I could see her face) who was looking at me from the corner of my room. Before I knew it, she was on top of me, choking me. Naturally, I tried to move or scream but I couldn’t move a single muscle or make a sound. Then she suddenly disappeared and I could move again, as it if nothing had happened. Should I be worried? This hadn’t ever happened before and it hasn’t happened again. Was the woman a figment of my imagination or was it something else? Please, any help will be most welcome
Hey I wanted to share my experience, seeing how I have not yet seen anyone with a full similarity. Starting from the beginning I am a recovering addict, finally beating it after about 5 years of trying. I have had many encounters with death including a trip to the hospital from my drug use most recently and have always felt as if I have had been saved a few times by someone watching over me.
Anyway, to the night it happened I was having a very intense dream in which my sister was in trouble and these things were after her, and I ended up finding her hurt and screaming for my parents and not knowing what to do when they didnt come. So I decided to run to get them as I couldnt carry her and she was unconscious and the things were coming, but as soon as I got back seconds later she was gone and the room I left her in was completely devoid of anything. Looking back after the dream seemed oddly like a test to me? Not sure why I just got this strange feeling that it was a test. I screamed in agony as I realized I had let her be taken or die or whatever.
I wake up, Im groggy and still calming realizing it was just a dream when I turn my head to the left side of the room I see a dark figure.
It was very short, maybe 4 and a half, 5 feet and very slender with long arms. This is the strangest part I havnt seen anywhere else.. The being had an elongated skull, and gave me the appearance of an alien as soon as i saw it. It was completely black, devoid of any features, like a black hole it was consuming all light. It was standing at the foot of my bed and I had my window open, so right in front of my open window at the corner of my bed. It seemed startled when I noticed it, like it was not expecting me to wake. When it noticed, it began moving its arms over me in very rapid and precise movements, but completely unhuman. It moved so quickly its as if it was in an altered state of time, its arms would be in one spot then another, almost the way someone looks when viewed moving quickly in a blacklight. No movement, they were just here, then there, then in another place. As soon as I saw it I tried to scream and it began its arm movements over me, then I tried to get up and felt my body paralyze completely, and finally I started blanking out like I was being forced into unconciousness. The rapidity of its movements and the way I could not even see it move just where its movements ended and the alien like physique near my open window really freaked me out. I blanked out completely like a g-force push on my consciousness almost, then instantly woke and it was gone and I ran out of the room. It completely felt real, Im 24 and never have experienced anything like this. I have had double dreams and all but I was in my bed and looking around my room and it did not seem like I was dreaming before I saw the being.
The next day I was riding my bike along the side of a main road, with oncoming 50 mph traffic pretty constant coming towards me. Suddenly my bike had a nut pop loose and my handle went left and wheel went right throwing me right into oncoming traffic. Somehow there was a lull in the constant traffic I had been riding near, and the one car coming head on swerved just in time, and somehow I didnt fall even with no direction control.
I feel almost like the being cast a protective like spell or something on me, thats what I get from the whole experience. I was extremely scared when I saw it, but I felt no evil just frightened to wake up to such a thing I think. And then for the near death experience to happen literally about 12 hours later really had me thinking it somehow put a barrier around me knowingly. Its extremely strange, and this is the only time I have ever had one of these dream paralysis or visions or anything.
So I get either angel or demon, but I feel like it was testing me in the dream beforehand and somehow protected me from that crash.. But why did it look like an alien in form? Could not make out any features but that it was solid and the outline of it, because of its darkness, like a black hole it was as if it sucked in the light from around it.
Anyone have anything like this or some insight? Would much appreciate it, thanks!
-Nate
I’ve been fascinated to watch as this post of mine has become a magnet for people to share their own experiences. Thanks, all.
Addressing some people’s specific questions:
Andrés, you ask, “Was the woman a figment of my imagination?” Since your story sounds like a classic variation on the so-called Old Hag experience, which has been known cross-culturally by many people, I think the best answer is: Yes, but that doesn’t mean the woman wasn’t real. The real meaning of your question devolves down to the question of the imagination’s reality. If something is imaginary, does that make it utterly unreal? Or are creatures and events in the imagination real in their own right, but in a way that’s different from objective reality? When you felt assaulted by this spectral woman, where exactly was the boundary, the division, the borderline, the limen, between your subjective sense of identity as the assaultee and her reality as the assaulter? These are some of the questions that occur to me as most pressing, and not just theoretically but quite practically. I strongly recommend seeking out some writings by Jung on the objective reality of the psyche, and by Patrick Harpur on what he calls “daimonic reality,” and by David Hufford about sleep paralysis, as you’re trying to sort through what happened to you.
Nate, your experience sounds both fascinating and horrifying — just like my own. I recommend some of the same reading I just mentioned to Andrés. The alien appearance of the being you encountered may well be a metaphor — a living, real, existential one, not just a symbolic one — for the fact that the being is ultimately a part of your own psyche, or rather that you’re both part of a wider psyche, or perhaps that it arose/arrived as a kind of literalized visitation from and encounter with your own shadow self in the Jungian sense. In other words, the fact that it looked and seemed “like an alien” may indicate its relationship to you-as-ego, to you as your customary sense of being a self known as Nate. Alienness means utter, absolute otherness. As I describe in my article above, I experienced my own shadow figure as an anti-me, as my anti-self, my absolute antithesis, the negation of Matt, my own personal soul-sucking black hole. Following the clues provided by the very seemingness and the very vocabulary that we spontaneously use when describing such things may be the golden thread to arriving at some sort of understanding.
I too stumbled upon this by chance when trying to figure out a similar occasion.
I’ve been having sleep paralysis bouts since I was a child; I just didn’t realize what it was until my college years. I’m 20 years old and I’ve progressed from just hearing sounds to being able to move away from my body. It feels as if I’m projecting myself from my body when this happens… Usually my room is void and empty, or I’ll hear non-threatening sounds (sometimes I get creepy whispers but I usually wake up).
Just last night however, I felt a presence lurking in the corner of my room and I felt the urge to almost cast a, for lack of a better word, a “power-up” in an effort to take control of the situation; however, in doing so I became paralyzed and only my peripheral vision could scan the side of my bed. I saw a figure in a white/beige gown walking, in a hunched manner, along the side of my bed, its hair went down past its knees and it was making wavering breathing sounds… I immediately started that pseudo-hyperventilation associated with sleep paralysis… thankfully my brother in the adjacent bed, of whom shares similar experiences, heard me and called me out of it.
Creepy. Rather Creepy.
I wish you the best with it, Ash. Don’t be afraid to let it change your worldview.
Oh man! I’ve had sleep paralysis since I was about 12 years old (I am now 22). One night a couple months ago I had the scariest sleep paralysis ever. I was in my boyfriends bed and woke up around 5 am. He left for work at 4am. As I woke up to turn to my side I saw a light float into the fish tank we had for some baby turtles. I lied down on my back and put the blanket in front of my face so I wouldn’t see anything. I woke up about 10 minutes later paralyzed. I didn’t think much of it since i’ve had it so many other times before. Anyway, about 5 minutes later I turned to my side facing his door and noticed two dark shadowy figures standing there. I got instantly scared and horrified. I have NEVER felt like that before in my life. I closed my eyes as fast as I could and when I opened them again they were standing even closer. I was so scared I could barely breathe. I remember peeking through part of the covers and seeing one of them walking toward the edge of the bed and I felt the bed kind of fall through like someone was climbing into it. I was so scared I couldn’t even scream. I think I fell asleep right after closing my eyes as tightly as I could. I have no idea what happened after that. I didn’t remember the incidence till around noon that day.
That’s an excellent description of the real thing. Thank you, Winter, and good luck with it all.
My husband had just left for work it was about 4am, and all of a sudden, I see this goblin looking thing (almost like that white creature in lord of the ring-precious) but a dark black image come and whisper in my ear. I started to sing church songs (I did this as a child whenever I was scared) to try to scare it away. It wouldn’t leave, so I got up and chased it out of my bedroom and into the living room. That’s when I saw about 20 zombies/dead looking people congregating in my living room. All I can think of was to open the door and tell them to go home. That’s when I realized I was actually still laying in bed, but I felt like I was being held down and couldn’t move. Also found myself repeating “go home”. I finally broke away from the hold and felt this numbing paralyzing feeling throughout my body. I got up out of bed, got ready, and left the house at 5am… Is this the same thing as sleep paralysis? Why was I able to get up and leave? I don’t recall how I got back to bed. Please help. I’m terrified.
Hello Mr. Cardin,
I just found this article, while looking for answers to my experiance two years ago. I was at school, it’s a military college in the north, and while there, I experianced multiple events with the paranormal. Two moment of living on the campus never scared me more than anything. The first would be a demon chasing and taunting me for a few weeks and the second is my sleep paralysis episodes. Now I was on the bottom bunk in the room and my roommate as asleep in the top bunk, the door was to the left of the bunks and would hit them if the door was opened. Well this happened to me two nights in a row, I awoke suddenly from a pretty good dream, to see my door opening up (it’s a heavy fire door) and we’d have the door unlock because we trusted the people on the deck. So as I was watching the door open I thought it was going to be one of my buddies coming to get a cigarette, but I see this 6 foot 3 slender, black figure glide into my room. It’s face was pail, and almost looked like an opera mask yet the eyes were wide and black. I could look around, but I couldn’t move, I tried to yell to my roommate to see if he could see the same thing I was seeing, but I couldn’t speak. As I was trying to yell it notices me looking at it, it turns to look at me, we make “eye” contact and dives face first into my face and I fall asleep. I wake up the next morning feeling different yet still the same person, the day seemed smooth and yet dark. I thought it was just some crazy dream, but when it happened to me again that next night, I knew it was something dark that wanted something. Supposedly on that campus, theres a demon, ghosts and other “things”, yet I didn’t know how to deal with it. To this day I haven’t had any episodes, so I guess the “being” is a part of me and has what it wants. What are your thoughts?
hi.i have just found this site and find it very intresting to read about so many similar expiriences.im 26 and have had sleep paralysis since i was a child.im a serving british soldier and untill a recent tour off afghanistan the expirience had always been qite similar.as i child i would always complain about a dark figer at the end of my bed whith a head shaped like an anvil(it even became known as anvil too my mother)and i couldnt move.some times i would just hear somthing in the room and i would open my eyes only too see the shadow and not be able too move.this continued for most of my adult life untill i was away on tour with my battalion.with out going in to too much detail was in my sleeping bag in a deep sleep at the end off a paticularly dificult day.i could feel someones breath on my face.i opened my eyes and was stuck as usual exept there was a very angry arabic man breathing very heavily in my face and the shadow was sort off stood behind him.i was so terified.i had almost come acustomed to the usual state but this re awoke the fear and has been the same ever since i have returned.i now dread this happening even more so and sort off get the feeling that some how the shadow has brought this man too terify me to the point that my fear turns to aggression and i scream and try to attack but cant move untill i snap out of it and sit up.this does not feel like a dream or even sleep it seems very real.but it is comforting to know people are having similar expirences.please give your view on this.and i also appologise for my awfull spelling lol.
I was forcebly shaken awake by something i had a pressure on my chest keeping me down, i couldnt move except my eyes but i did not see any thing at the time which was the most scariest even though i could feel something sitting or holding me down. I couldnt talk scream or whatever but i tried reciting the lords prayer i my head and i could move, it was the most teriffing experiece ive ever had, I have not had another attack as of yet i fhink due to me sleeping with the rosery under my pillow at night. I am not a religious person i dont go to church but something happened to me that night and it didnt like the fact i calked apon god! ta zoex
Hi, I have been reading through every ones description of this sleep paralysis black shadow figure which looks to me like a dark hooded, grim reaper like , which I have been experiencing since I was 12 I’m now 25 but the worrying thing is matt, though what your friend betty said.”so that its host’s outlook, mindset, attitude, and overall view and experience of life are tilted in a certain dark-ish, anti-life direction, is worrying cause if this is true it can effect your daily life and if this can thing can be stopped
Hello there. I’ve had similar experiences as well and find it odd that all of these stories are similar. The same dark cloaked figure is in most of these posts. If I want to be scientific about it by referring to them as hallucinations, why don’t they differ from each other? It doesn’t make sense that they would all be eerily similar.
I’ve had sleep paralysis off and on since I was 13 I believe. And it’s always been the same. I feel as though something is sitting on my chest, and I can’t speak or move. My worst experience was this past year (i’m 28) and my sleep paralysis turned into an OBE. At first I was being pinned down but then it was as if my spirit had left my body. Then a dark cloaked figure started chasing me throughout my apartment, violently thrashing at me. I was terrified and angry at the same time. So I started screaming at the figure and I began to chase it out of my apartment. I was saying prayers as well but i’m not very religious and I’ve never gone to church before. I finally chased the figure out of my apartment and haven’t had an episode since.
I’m pretty terrified this will happen again.
What struck me as odd was how realistic the “dream” was. I’m not even sure it was a dream. I’ve never had a dream where I was in my apartment and everything was exactly as it is in real life. I’m talking little details in my apartment. I try and tell myself it was a dream…but it was so real.
Hello,
I had this experience happen to me many years ago when I was 19 years old. I am 33 now and have not had anything like this happen since then, although, at times I have had the feeling like there was some kind of presence in a room with me. This presence that I had felt from time to time was not a good presence, conversely, it was more of a dark and evil presence, which would give me a very uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. Anyway, back to my experience.
I remember clearly and vividly the entire experience. At the time of my experience I had been a drug user, but I remember that the night this happened I was completely sober minded. At first I had told a few people about this and they would accuse me of being on acid, high, or drunk but I insisted I was not. Most people do not believe that I am telling the truth.
I was lying in my bed, I remember it was very late at night. Everyone else in the house had been sleeping for awhile. With the bedroom light still on, I dozed off fully clothed. Like many people have posted before me, I experienced a very vivid dream. I remember standing in a dark abyss. It seemed almost as though, although it was me in the dream, I was my spirit or soul standing in this dark abyss. The darkness was infinite and I remember not being able to see my hand directly in front of my face. The feeling that I got from this darkness was complete emptiness and hopelessness. A feeling that I felt deep within my soul and all around me, utter loneliness. Then I heard an eerie whisper that said, “Help Me!” After I heard the voice I saw a vision of a small boy, blindfolded, and bound to a chair in front of me. I could see it clearly as though there was a spotlight shining down upon him, as something you would see in a rock concert or a play. Then I heard the voice again! This time it was louder and seemed to be standing next to me whispering directly into my ear, “HELP ME!”
I then immediately woke up frightened and terrified. As though the dream were not frightening enough, I looked to the left of my bed, and there stood what seemed to be a dark cloaked figure standing directly beside my bed. My first thought was that my eyes were playing tricks on me in the dark. I turned my head to the right, and then left again, and I saw this figure clear as daylight. It stood about 6 to 7 feet tall. It had no face, no arms or legs. It was just fully cloaked from head to toe, almost that of the image of the grim reaper but no skeleton. Just as soon as I began to realize that this thing was real, it began to bend over me. I tried to move but could not. I tried to scream but could not. In fact I was screaming at the top of my lungs and only a small sound came out, like that of a small groan, kind of like the sound the boy in the “Grudge” makes.
Frightened and terrified I closed my eyes and began to pray to Jesus. I just remember repeating over and over in my head, “Help me Jesus, Jesus please save me,….” When I finally got the courage to open my eyes back up I saw this cloaked figure standing back up at the side of my bed. It then began to float, not walk, down toward the foot of my bed and then out of the door. When it got into the doorway I could clearly see this figure in the hall light. When it was gone I remember sitting up in my bed hyperventilating.
The strangest thing about this, other than the fact the the entire experience was strange in and of itself, was the fact that when I fell asleep in my bed, the bedroom light was on. But while this figure was there the room was dark. Then when it left the room was light again. I don’t know what this thing was, like I said, this has not happened to me since then. Though at times, I do get this strange feeling that there is something in the room with me even though I can’t see it, but the same feelings I felt when this (I call demon) was present is the same feeling that this unseen entity gives me in the pit of my stomach. Ever since that night, I have slept with a nightlight on the side of my bed.
Another strange thing is that, this happened to me while I lived at my mother’s house, and since then my sister-in-law stayed in that same room and said she saw the same thing, only not as vividly as I can recall it. Since then I have become a Christian and can’t help but wonder if this happened to me to test me or whether this experience has some greater significance in my life. It is a total mystery to me.
THIS was much disturbing I have never in my life ever heard of this as well as go thru this, But last night I was so scared, a black mass appeared in my room over to the left of my bed, it mas horrific sounds and i was frozen I could not move but I remember feeling a vibration in my chest, I keep pleading the blood Of Jesus and it went away, and I was able to move again, but I have never been so tired in my life.
For the past year ive been having nightmares of a black shadowy person. one of my dreams was that I was at my bestfriends and it was quiet when all of a sudden she pointed to a corner in the room and when I looked there was a black shadow person standing there as soon as I seen it. it was almost if it was choking my j couldn’t breath in my dream or out. when I thought I woke up I was laying there and couldn’t move or speak I was like that for a good 30seconds and then it stopped and I could breath as I tried to catch my breath my door creaked I thought it was just my imagination from the dream but in the last year ive had at least 40 of these dreams. they no longer scare me as much but last night I had one and decided to see if I could find anything on it and what do u know I did. I’m not sure what it is but I wish id stop.
how the f… can u make such a intresting topic boring you are one of the worse writters ever
applegeese fore teh bad writting dark shadow ill triy too beteter thaks.
I had an experience a few years ago.
I had fallen asleep only to wake up around 3AM and not be able to go back to sleep. I started to watch TV, then I felt really sick to my stomach very suddenly. I actually threw up which surprised me because I wasn’t really feeling bad at all before that. I turned the TV off and thought maybe it was because it was so early in the morning. Either way, I had an unusually calm and content feeling as I lay there ready to fall asleep. I felt the presense of one of my late Aunts, which was comforting to me because I hadn’t felt her presense for many years prior to this night. I heard a high pitch noise, then out of no where I hear an evil whisper (female) in a language I didn’t recognize. I opened my eyes and above me was a dark shadow figure, darker than dark – I mean like the blackest black you can imagine. Once I saw it, it started to come at me over and over, each time it ‘hit’ me I would hear a very resounding noise. I remember struggling to try and get away, but I was not able to move. I tried to scream to my daughter, but my voice was gone. Then my body started to convulse and I just remember thinking what the f*ck is happening. The thing kept hitting at me and I finally was able to muster out leave me alone, whether I lipped it or I thought it, the attack stopped and I could move freely again. I felt really drained physically and emotionally, but I picked up my phone and sent a text to a friend saying I was just attacked by something. I did end up falling asleep because I was so drained. A little while later I had this weird dream, but it wasn’t really like a dream since I had a certain awareness I don’t normally have. I looked at my door, my cat walked in followed by my dog followed by a black and white cat I never seen before.
When I woke up in the morning, my kids walked in the door and said guess what we found? I replied, a black and white cat? They asked me how I knew. I just said I had a feeling.
I’ve never had this experience again and hope that I never do.
I have sleep paralysis on very normal occasions , once I fell asleep with my eyes open & I seen a 3 foot shadow with a top hat on , it very much resembled the neighborhood watch logo & when I seen it , it looked at me & as it walked towards me I tried to hurry up & wake up but I couldn’t , I was face to face with it & it laughed a mischievous cackle that Ive never herd & will never forget before it went into my forehead , when I awoke I knew it was real but nobody believed me. Another time I awoke around 3am , I fell asleep on my stomach & I awoke on my stomach but I could see my entire room , all of a sudden I felt cold hands on my back , it felt like somebody was putting Bengay on my back , I knew I wasn’t alone by this time so I asked it “who are you” & in a demonic whisper it replied “I am the sign of death” & I replied “I am the light of Christ” & it got off me & I woke up , then immediately I was filled with an overwhelming sadness so I knew I was dealing with an upset or sad spirit , I protected my room with sage the next day I realized I’m at war with dark forces. So the last time sleep paralysis happened to me , these very very extremely smart kids came from the stars & what they told me about myself is a entirely different story but my connection with them was telepathic & their knowledge of things was indescribable they answered any question I had , there were 4 of them & i can only remember two of them the bigger boy & girl but they all 4 actually told me these dark shadows are like the vampires that feed off of us & they helped me chase down the dark shadow entity that stood in the crease of the corner of my wall , they came into my room & the shadow figure tried to run & together we killed it , right across the street from my house & ever since then I haven’t had sleep paralysis , however Ive been tirelessly studying the supernatural because I believe there really is something else out there & idk if those kids were really real , somebody respond please .