PSA: How to Deal with Sleep Paralysis

This is my personal experience

I haven’t had to deal with the really horrifying sleep paralyses some people have reported but I know they exist. Just going to state from firsthand experience there are things you can do besides just wake up that don’t require moving your body so please think of those and do them. This is a slightly weirder topic than even most of the sci-fi stuff and real-life speculative topics I like to mention off and on and, despite keeping Sturgeon’s Law firmly in my thoughts, I have an increasingly negative opinion of Substack’s patrons as being largely a bunch of extremists (even though I also think that’s just true of the Internet in general.)

I don’t want to feel personally responsible for not telling people about this fact if anyone gets raped by a sleep paralysis demon or something (nothing that horrifying has ever happened to me but I suspect that’s because I used different advice than what seems to be so-called common knowledge and never had any idea that I would have to physically wake myself up, which is also entirely a reactive measure and not a proactive one anyway and won’t stop you from just spontaneously finding yourself in that state without any events leading up to it) because they were trying to wake up and couldn’t do it in time, not even neo-Nazis of Substack or whoever other person I think really badly of.

Learn to control your mind first and your body second. Even if you’re being suffocated in real life and that’s causing your sleep paralysis, you can go for possibly a few minutes but certainly a few seconds or a minute without air, but if you’re experiencing horrific things that’s not the result of you going without air or whatever your physical body is going through, that is the result of the content of your mind. So please learn to control that first. Waking up can wait what’s probably literally half a second to spare you being just permanently traumatized or broken seeing how time perception of the subjective world seems to go in such states.

More specific advice on a few specific things I do think you should do in that case is in the note, I don’t want to rewrite it here unless it gets taken down, in which case I’ve saved it. Most of the specific things are particular observations. People forget this but observations change your mental state. There are also proactive things you should do but you should really be able to imagine what they would be based on your specific situation. I mean, they’re called sleep paralysis demons, what would you do around a demon if you couldn’t move? Use your head. Literally, think of things you can think and ways you can think that demons wouldn’t like (the possibilities are endless and it’s really not a super specific thing,) doesn’t matter how real or imaginary you think it is, because the sign is not arbitrary, and you can’t just imagine whatever you feel like or you wouldn’t have ended up in that situation to begin with.

If you have no clue say a little prayer in your head basically and think of the demon and God both hearing it, I don’t think it’s a super strict requirement on what you have to say whatsoever like it has to be the Lord’s Prayer or the rosary or whatever, or go visualize some kind of holy symbol like a cross or something to do with God or whatever in the same way. Also pay attention to what you were thinking and feeling before then since just a physical cause doesn’t necessarily lead to the nightmare kind of stuff and don’t do that again, and pay attention to the specific details such as what the entity or entities looked like (which can actually be something deceptive like a living or dead relative or anything at all,) how close they were able to get (if they were just staring or could come over etc.,) those kinds of details matter a lot in stopping it from happening again in the first place if it happens because it should be abundantly clear if you look at them and don’t consider it just some kind of random fever-dream that it had to do with what you were thinking or feeling or planning before it happened and you need to stop that.

Sleep Paralysis and the Monsters Inside Your Mind | Scientific American

Once sleep paralysis occurs, it is subsequently interpreted through the lens of fear, leading to more anxiety and unwanted awakenings—and effectively, more sleep paralysis. This vicious cycle—which I call the “panic-hallucination model”—continues to feed into itself until sleep paralysis becomes chronic, prolonged and, worse yet, potentially psychopathological.

That’s basically the thing: if you can’t stop it from happening in the first place it’ll eventually just turn into the absolute worst nightmares possible regardless of your starting point. I don’t believe this article has the whole picture because it only says the discrepancy between people in Egypt and Denmark having negative outcomes is by twice as much. Congratulations, if you believe sleep paralysis is a brain glitch instead of a djinn you’re half as likely to hallucinate something traumatic. How about just make that chance 0% by trying to stop yourself from ending up in a state of sleep paralysis to begin with and recognizing it’s a mental thing first, not a breathing thing first, so if you do end up in that state you can minimize it. The way to do that is mostly just to not think bad things though and then if it happens pay attention to what those bad things are and replace them with good things ASAP, not to just try to wake up so you feed some weird cycle of it happening again and again but worse. Then, there are lots of weird myths about sleep and dreams. I’ve heard you can’t die in a dream but I’ve died in a dream once and then I continued to have a dream about being a ghost and I’m still here. Unless I’m the person who doesn’t know I’m dead. Hmm. Kidding.