https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ACtMP7NHMg

I was taking a nap and was thinking of slipping on a banana peel for some reason and jerked by body back. I couldn't move and everything was black. Literally thought I died by thinking I slipped on a fucking banana peel.

happened to me when i was a kid and i thought i was dead and started crying like a little bitch boy

I don't get sleep paralysis but when I get colds sleeping feels like I have no lungs and cannot breathe, even though I can actually breathe mostly fine

I never had an episode of sleep paralysis until the summer of 07 or 08 (Honestly can't remember which) when I tried acid for the first time.

Since then, without fail, I will have an episode if I fall asleep on my back; If I sleep on my side I'm ok. Another trigger is an extreme lack of sleep of being super stressed out.
Usually I will hear a loud metallic ringing sound and an odd pressure near my kidneys, I can HEAR AND FEEL when the episode is coming and I can't do anything about it. For some reason my mind associates the sound with the color grey so I will see the color flash up in my minds eye (kind of like seeing spots when you close your eyes at night).

Possibly the most frightening hallucination I ever had was I went home after a long ass day of work, shut off my lights and passed the fuck out. The ringing and pressure points came and I opened my eyes, magically the lights were on and my door opened. In walks my mom with a pillow in her hand and she proceeded to place it over my face. The hallucination felt so real that I actually stopped breathing; I could not move or or scream and I was just in a state of panic. When I finally snapped out of it the pillow over my face was gone, my mom was gone, and the lights were back off.

Don't think I've ever had sleep paralysis and if I ever did it lasted for less than 30 seconds.

Not sure if counts as sleep paralysis if you can't move your arms but you can move your legs or the other way around. Have had that happen a few times didn't panic though cause I was able to start fully moving them again in less than a minute anyway and could still typically move something like my fingers or toes barely.

I did panic though when I was 6 and woke up and couldn't open my eyelids. Started screaming after trying to open my eyes for 5 or 10 minutes. Eye boogers dried up on my eye lashes keeping them shut, took about 10 minutes of rubbing water on my eyelashes to be able to open my eyes. I had really bad allergies the day before that likely caused it.

only time I've had sleep paralysis in recent memory was on a plane

It was pretty terrifying because my dream was about a terrorist group planning to hijack the plane and take us all hostage, when i woke up i still thought i was in my dream but was unable to warn anyone as i couldn't move no matter how hard i tried.

Not my most pleasant flight ever :/

never experienced one of these unless mine were really mild/cant recall. im that person who falls asleep anywhere in matter of seconds. but i do remember having some really vague and wierd dream/hallucination throughout my life. all i see is strings, vines, anything that can be extended really long as i just see them going far away from me as time passes. this happens when my eyes are closed but i do recall i didnt move at all during these

Don't watch this if you have sleep paralysis, about 10 seconds in I was already getting scared thinking of what kind of horrible experience I would have if my brain remembered it during a sleep paralysis episode. Sure enough at the end the narrator says "you should not have watched this, it's in your subconscious now".

I can control myself in all of my dreams and often recognize when I'm dreaming, but it never helped with my sleep paralysis. My sleep paralysis normally begins with a kind of rushing wind sound that precedes the arrival of some monster after an unknown amount of time. Sometimes the wind is quiet and slowly gets louder and it's like a timer, sometimes the wind is deafening and I just panic trying to wake up. I'll be awake in bed and hear the sound and immediately begin breathing as hard as I can, up until the point where I think it might wake my parents in the next room, just in an attempt to wake myself up. Only once has the "monster" actually got to my room. The wind sound went dead quiet, and I heard its feet outside. It took two slow steps from my door to my bed and I could literally hear it breathe out and felt its hot breath on my arms (I later decided that that was likely because I had my ceiling fan on high and my arm out of my blanket). I legit started crying and had to get out of bed for water, barely slept the rest of the night and didn't sleep well for a couple weeks after. I still get absolutely covered in goosebumps just thinking of the sound it made outside my door, and sometimes even feel like I'm about to throw up. That was my worst one, as I normally am able to wake up before anything really scary happens, but it still terrifies me each time, struggling as hard as I can to wake up before that thing appears again.

I also had one where I was having my chest crushed from behind and couldn't breathe, but it was really short and it woke me up so it wasn't bad. But yeah it sucks, don't sleep on your back because some muscle in your neck relaxes and closes your windpipe and your brain, due to being in danger mode thinks you're being strangled.

I've experienced it anywhere from one to ~five times a year since I was 13 years old in varying degrees. Sometimes it's full-blown dreaming until I lose consciousness again and wake up in the morning or half an hour later, sometimes it's a dream which slowly fades until it stops and I'm awake and lucid again. Then there are times I just can't move or where I wake up looking at my alarm clock and feet and it feels like they're a million miles away and my arms would have to be as long as the Chinese Wall to touch them. Sometimes little things just don't seem right, like a gardening trowel on top of my keyboard or a raspberry vine growing over my bed.

The first time it happened I was close to panic at first, but it turned into what I still consider the most important experience in my life. All the occurrences since then have been very meaningful to me and often occured when I was feeling mentally tired and served to refresh my mind. Recently though, I've been having a very unstable heart rhythm and I had an episode of sleep paralysis while this was going on. It wasn't fun, but I realised that even if I had physical control it wouldn't have been any better and I think all-in-all I was less worried and stressed than I would've been if I were awake for it. Then again I might just have dreamt it because it's happened before when I was awake, like a memory manifesting in a dream or something.

sometimes happens to me

its spooky when im like "ok i need to get up out of bed now" but i physically cant

I feel like I have something like this sometimes, but it's mostly lucid dreams and sleepwalking. After either one of those episodes I wake up and freak out.
My girlfriend definitely has sleep paralysis though. She feels like her bed is in an earthquake and she is trapped there and can't move. When she first starting having them, she thought it was a ghost or demon trapping her and trying to attack her. Then I told her about my lucid dreams, and she figured that was it.

When it happened three or four nights in a row, she decided it was sleep paralysis following late-night research after the 4th episode. She doesn't freak out or scream during/following an episode anymore, she just kinda rides it out. She thinks her's is linked to stress, because it only seems to happen when she's really stressed out, which is often.

I think hearing about other people's issues might help, so I'll show her this thread. I might not have the same problem, but I feel for everybody with any kind of sleep issues.

Black figured man is the most common lucid dream when you feel he is choking you and you can't move.What happened to me though was a bit freakier than that.

I was waking up and could not move at all when I saw my mother taking out a glass out of my room then closing the door behind her,I got the feeling of repeatedly falling down ( can't really explain it better than that) and could move again like 10 seconds after she closed the door, went to look for my mom but she wasn't in the house,when I called her she said she had gone out 4 hours earlier...

Sleep paralysis can be a really interesting subject. For one, what you dream about often depends on what you're scared of(in my case, it was being stuck in a fire and eventually having to breathe in the fire). A few cultural ones have already been mentioned in this thread: alien abduction, terrorist attacks, plane crashes, old hag, demons of varying nature. I remember a Japanese friend telling me that in Japan, it is often described as an old woman with a lantern and a knife standing by your bed while you cannot move and that it is called 'kanashibari', which I can only translate as 'tied up in metal'. In the Philippines there is a phenomenon known as 'bangungut', which is a demon sitting on your chest and pushing the air out of your lungs. And I'm sure at least some of you have heard of a succubus(or the male variant, incubus), which in some historic descriptions were also known to sit on people's chests as they slept. Even the word "nightmare" finds its roots in such a demonic creature.

If you then consider that, for example, alien abduction reports didn't start until humanoid grey alien media were created and it depends on where you come from what kind of form the "ominous person strangling or crushing you" takes, you can clearly see that it's all between your ears and that you are basically creating your own experience by drawing from your subconscious fears and/or traumatic experiences.

It's also quite intriguing to note that a lot of other symptoms and triggers are similar in people who experience sleep paralysis. The feeling of the body being out of proportion, abdominal pressure unrelated to chest pressure, incoherent colour observance, stressful times before an episode, watching a scary film, having to endure long periods of high adrenaline levels, a consistent lack of sleep resulting in a physical shutdown, etc.

Sometimes it is kind of funny to see what our brains get up to when you can isolate one area of them and have the rest at idle.