Hi FluffyDinosaur. You mean you can't move anything at all, when you experience what you refer to? That sounds rather scary. The interesting thing that sounds like a link is seeing the scary stuff. Is it always the case that you see something scary before these sleep paralysis episodes? Is it part of dreams that you are seeing these things, or do you suspect something else (hallucination, or real life scary scene)?

I think what you describe sounds concerning enough for you to mention it to your doctor. I would have no idea what its cause is. Skeezyks seems to reference how one sleeps as a possible cause. Perhaps unrelated, but I certainly have awakened to find I couldn't move an arm, but I saw that as simple cutting off blood flow to nerve fibers (my arm"fell asleep" ). I'm not sure if that is what Skeezkys is referring to.

I have experienced a brief catatonia in the past. I am still not 100% sure if that was related to the mania I was experiencing at the time, or even a seizure-related symptom. My mania was severe and I was hospitalized at that precise time for it. It was the middle of the day. The catatonia happened in the ER. They sort of concluded it was related to my mania, and yet they did order a CT scan and EEG, but they came back normal. Later down the line, I did go to a neurologist and epileptologist. The former diagnosed me with simple focal (partial) seizures, but the epileptologist said it wasn't definitive. I'm not implying your situation is neurologically-based, but rather that there could be various possibilities. Were you clearly in severe bipolar episodes when your sleep paralysis happened? That would be important for your doctor to know. I assume your doctor knows all of the medications you take, too, if you take any. I would think they would also want to know if the "scary things" you saw were related from bout to bout. One might wonder if the terror is paralyzing psychologically, in a sense.