I've had a couple three bouts with sleep paralysis in my day. I've never had a full on bout with terror during one. Nothing like the standard "being completely paralyzed while it feels like something is sitting on my chest" attack. But they always are strange and surreal.
My last one stands out the most in my mind. It was easily the weirdest of the bunch.
For some reason, I was having one of those nights where I have this subconscious need to wake up for some reason. Like I have to be somewhere at a certain time, and I'm scared of oversleeping. I'll have dreams where I'm getting out of bed, and going about my day over and over again. The longer this goes on, the weirder my dreams get. Eventually I get to the point where I'm snapping myself into a half awake, half asleep state, which of course leads to a sleep paralysis experience.
I remember it perfectly. I snap semi-conscious in the early morning. Everything in my bedroom seems off kilter and somehow threatening. There's this weird, almost glassy haze everywhere I look, and I can hear a hollow wind sound roaring all around me. Like what you hear when you put your ear up to a seashell, but magnified to the point you can hear nothing else but. There's only one thought in my head...
...I have to get to my bedroom door.
I don't know why, but it feels like it's of the utmost importance. A life or death situation. That door has to be reached.
I lift my arm. It feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. I pull myself up, and slowly....sllooooooowwww...get out of bed. The effort it takes for me to do even that feels massive. Like I'm struggling through thick syrup.
If anyone were there watching me, I probably looked like a sloth moving in slow motion.
I take my first step. It's as slow as getting out of bed. Hard to move. But I have to get to the door. I absolutely have to. For some reason, I'm flat out scared. Nothing looks quite right, and the sound of hollowed out wind is still filling my ears. My second step is just as slow and languid as the first, despite my urgency. I manage to make it halfway across my bedroom like this, when suddenly...
:snap:
I'm awake. Fully. There's no transition. No slowly coming up to the surface of true consciousness. It was literally one second I've somehow woke up in a slow moving world of mortal terror and screaming winds, where everything seemed a shade off real, and the next I'm standing around, feeling 100% perfectly normal. I realized what I was going through, and was able to on with my usual morning routine without missing a beat. I didn't even have any coming side effects you usually get while coming down from an adrenaline rush, despite the fact I felt scared out of my wits during the entire experience.
It's not something I'd want to go through again, that's for sure.
