Sleep paralysis

I have had just about every typical experience with sleep paralysis. Ranging from the old lady on the chest to visual and auditory hallucinations. Anybody else deal with these terrible bits?

The Skeezyks had episodes of sleep paralysis for many years... can't recall how old I was when they first started. But I was young. For many years I didn't know what it was about. I just knew that they were TERRIFYING! I stopped having them quite a few years ago though... curiously... I'd say around the time my mental health began to go to hell.

I've also had ongoing issues with sleep paralysis. It started for me when I was around 13 years old. I had read about lucid dreaming and had found some pre-bed meditation tips on how to do it, and one night while meditating it happened for the first time. For a span of about 5 years, it would happen *literally* every single time I fell asleep. I had no idea until years later that it was a sleep disorder; for the longest time I thought that I had either 1)broken my brain 2)was having some kind of psychosis 3)was experiencing some kind of horrifying spiritual experience 4)demons/ghosts/whathaveyou. I wish I could say that the terror went away after months and months of this happening, but it did not. However, I did find that if I could find the mental capicity to lean into the sensation, I could occasionally slip from that state into a lucid dream--but the entire lucid dreams took so much focus to maintain that it was exhausting.

I will tell you that making sure to exhaust yourself before attempting to sleep and exposing yourself to positive imagery before bed *can* help, but if it is causing you real mental health problems, I would highly recommend seeing a sleep specialist. I wish I had done so rather than torturing myself for so long. It has now been about 15 years since my first episode, and the frequency of the events have decreased significantly, but it still sneaks up on me occasionally--especially if I'm trying to nap. Do you find that specific circumstances trigger these episodes for you?