I never thought this would happen, but it did. I’m 16 years old and I recently had my first sleep paralysis experience around a month ago. It came at random and I’d like to mention I’m healthy and have no sleep disorders, it just came suddenly. I was going to sleep as always, being a school night I had to go to sleep between 9 and 10 PM. Yeah, I have a bit of a bedtime routine but it helps, especially since I do running and need to recharge. I ran that day feeling more tired than usual. Whether that caused it to happen, I don’t know.
Anyways, I proceeded to bed as I always did and stayed up a bit on my phone because I couldn’t sleep. After an hour- hour and a half, of being on my phone and checking my socials, along with my mother sounding annoyed and telling me to go to sleep, I decided to get some rest and eventually dozed off into sleep.
I woke up at a certain point in the night, I knew it was still night as the room was pitch black, with the charger port light at the bottom of my desk and the smoke detector light slightly illuminating the room. Along with the minuscule amount of moonlight creeping into the room. I tried picking up my arm to pick myself up from laying down, but I couldn’t. I tried to move my toes. Nothing. The position I was in was laying flat and my head was turned slightly to the left, facing the white wall but I only saw darkness. The only thing I could move was my eyes. Then I felt something. You know that feeling when you hit your funny bone on something and it feels like a sharp tingle? That was happening throughout my entire body.
Then, I felt a sense of floatiness, like I was floating up from my bed, levitating mid-air. Suddenly, an image popped into my mind. This might sound stupid, but the image was The Intruder from the Analogue Horror tapes The Mandela Catalogue. Specifically, the image was the one with the man showing a smile with a VHC static filter and a white background. The image in my mind was so vivid and real. I then started to feel a sense of impending doom, like someone was coming to my room and rapidly approaching. I didn’t hear anything but I felt in great danger and I started to freak out. I closed my eyes, as that was the only thing I could do, and tried to ignore the feeling. It worked for a while and my sense of floatiness went down, but the same image of The Intruder kept popping in my head like that was the only thing I could see but it was in my mind. The feeling of floatiness and the feeling of the sharp tingle came back, along with the sense of impending doom. I kept my eyes closed and shut them tighter. At this point, I was aware I was in paralysis and knew I had to be chill and not scared to pass the experience. I thought to myself to be calm and relaxed, urging myself to not think of that image. That man. It worked and I finally felt my body relax and the feeling of floatiness and tingle disappear. I went back to sleep right after.
I woke up in the morning, and slowly got up. I remembered what had happened that night and felt a bit scared and ecstatic. Scared in remembering the entire thing and a bit ecstatic that I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time. I told my mother and she agreed it was sleep paralysis. That was my first time experiencing that and knowing how it feels, I’m a bit spooked about what next time will be like. If there will be.