my first sleep paralysis experience was as a child and i thought some sort of demon was trying to crush my chest. i thought about love as a universal force and as my fear diminished, so did the intense pressure.

it’s interesting the different ways we interpret these experiences, isn’t it? in the middle ages they called it the “incubus effect” and the belief was that demons sat on your chest and could do whatever they wanted. ever read the visions of st theresa? some of her accounts sound like night terrors too, but with the “lance of god” doing the painful part. angels also could be pretty horrific. now aliens are scarier and more real to most of us… so there is certainly some cultural relativity here, but in my opinion that doesn’t mean we can just “explain” the experiences away. thanks for sharing!

Those are very good questions to ponder. I think about those same questions quite often.

I’m honestly not sure if it would be desirable if all our dreams were lucid. If everyone was a lucid dreamer and was lucid during every dream, it would certainly change how people look at the world in waking life.

Some people think lucid dreams are bad and you should allow your dreams to play out without your conscious interference, but that’s usually a sign that the person isn’t familiar with all the facets of lucid dreaming and doesn’t realize you can be lucid yet not try to control the events of the dream. You can still allow the dream to “do its own thing”.

I think studying our dreams provides us with more insight into how the mind works, as well as more insight into waking life. A lot of what happens in waking life affects us on a subconscious level, and we don’t always realize exactly how we were affected. Our dreams offer the perfect way of gaining a better understanding of what goes on at that level. But, a person doesn’t need to be a lucid dreamer to study dreams for that purpose. Just keeping a daily dream journal can help in that regard.

I don’t think every dream needs to be “useful” or needs to be analyzed for deeper signficance. Sometimes it’s nice to kick back and enjoy a dream purely for its entertainment value.

~ Kris

Do you think it would be desirable if all our dreams were lucid?

Do our dreams, including the non lucid ones, have to be ‘useful’ in some way?

This is something I am wondering about at the moment. I am just beginning to explore this in my Blog.

I found the sleep paralysis with open-eyed dreams more comforting than the alternative because at least the situation somewhat resembled a regular dream taking place in a dream version of my bedroom. I could compare the circumstances to a regular dream and the only true difference was that I couldn’t move my dream self as I would’ve been able to in a regular dream. The wide-awake form of sleep paralysis with no dreams was more frightening because I couldn’t find anything to justify the experience or anything to compare it to.

Jeff wrote “What I find interesting is that these experiences have always been deeply unpleasant for me. Why are there no pleasant versions?”

I’ve had several pleasant experiences, but I’ve noticed the pleasant versions usually occur more often when I’m able to relax into the experience and to make a very gentle effort to see through the experience to discover what’s really behind it. If I panic or struggle against the experience, it typically makes it worse rather than better.

Jeff wrote: “Our waking self is ‘abducted’ every time we sleep.”

Only because we allow it. It doesn’t have to be that way. One thing I love about lucid dreaming is how it can teach us that our “typical” dream experience is only one way to experience the dreaming mind and there are other ways of experiencing the dreaming mind that can lead to much more insight and a deeper awareness.

~ Kris

I have had similar experiences since I was a teenager…so, about the last thirty years. Paralysis with open eyed dreaming.

What I find interesting is that these experiences have always been deeply unpleasant for me. Why are there no pleasant versions? Maybe there are (like a ‘visitation’ from a dead relative or benign spiritual being) but I would call them something else? A vision maybe?

I have finally learned to recognise them for what they are as they are happening. In the last one I ‘awoke’ unable to move, aware that something terrible was clawing its way up the bedclothes towards my face. I was terrified but told myself that I was having a night terror and there was nothimg to worry about. As the creature came into view it turned into a tiny kitten. The spell was broken!

For me (even though I know rationally it is not the case) there is usually the overwhelming sense of having been visited and under attack from a very real entity, though sometimes unseen. If these experiences are of objectively real beings then the fact that when faced in a relaxed state (as in ‘Senoi’ techniques)they transform into something benign suggests that it is one’s own fear which makes the experience so awful…rather like a bad trip.

It is possible, though I have never experienced it personally, to move from sleep paralysis directly into lucid dreaming or an OOBE. The trick is to fully relax into the experience (not an easy thing to do when you are terrified out of your wits). The entities could then be conceived as archetypal guardians on the threshold of the Underworld..fears and anxieties which have to be faced before one can pass through into another kind of consciousness.

In your experience the female presences are threatening to completely change your awareness, remaking it in a radically different way. Maybe that could be conceived as a fear of such a transformation? And the nature of dreams themselves is to do exactly what they want with you. We can awake and not even remember them. Not dissimilar to what the women are threatening to do.

Aren’t all dreams ‘aliens’…always when we dream our bodies are paralysed, the dreams do what they want with us, take us to strange other-worldly places, and often erase our memeory of even having had them? Our waking self is ‘abducted’ every time we sleep.

Perhaps our anxiety about this manifests in dreaming about the nature of dreaming itself? The phenomenon of dreaming is a very bizarre one to our waking rational mind. In a night terror we are caught up between the waking and dreaming state and our anxiety about losing ourselves is presumably at its peak. The ego struggles to drag itself out of the helplessness of the dreaming state as sleep drags us back. But recognised as non threatening it can be just another portal into lucid dreaming. Our ‘night visitors’ are simply dream helpers wearing the rather scary masks we have given them.