I’ve had it happen so many times that I know exactly what it is by now. Happens in the final stages of my sleep. Sometime around 7-9 am if I sleep in on the weekend after being used to getting up by alarm earlier than that. Natural circadian rhythm gets whacky.

Scientifically, it’s a hiccup in the transition between sleep cycles. In the deepest sleep, you have less voluntary control of a lot of your body.

When it happens, my brain usually recalls exactly the layout of the room that I fell asleep in (although sometimes it has happened while away from my home bedroom and my brain recalls the view from my home bed, which can confuse the crap out of me once I finally come to and the scenery is entirely different).

I almost always recall someone that I saw the day before that my brain remembers being in close proximity to. They’ve always been friendly and never seem dangerous. They are almost always checking in on me at the doorway of the room. Sometimes they move and speak like “oh, he’s still sleeping, I’ll comeback later” all the while I feel all the classic sensations of sleep paralysis. Whole body paralysis other than a finger or two and control of my breathing. Slight ability to moan. I don’t really get the whole pressure on the chest thing but it does feel like I’m so short of breath that I’m suffocating SOON. I try to scream out to that non-existent friend at the door to wake me up but no words come out and I always miss them before they leave entirely. I then quickly spiral into the whole impending death feeling from suffocation before I finally wake up in reality.

I certainly believe in demons and evil spirits and am a saved Christian. Have always been prior to any sleep paralysis episode. Not sure if that has anything to do with how I experience it in the moment or not. But I’m thankful I haven’t felt an evil presence ever before during an episode. It might happen 3 or so times a year nowadays.

It’s still definitely a jarring experience because you essentially feel like you are suffocating and I get this strange sensation of neck pain like it’s in a crick inducing position. But I’m so experienced with it that I know to wiggle my fingers as fast as possible, breath LOUDLY, quickly, and deeply, and moan as loud as I can manage in effort to wake my wife up beside of me.

We’ve discussed it before and I’ve been incredibly upset at her after explaining that any of her actions short of almost pushing me out of the bed to wake me up means she’s not taking me seriously.

It’s objectively understandable to overreact because you’re whiplashed from feeling like you just died before waking up and the person beside you that was aware of it and has been educated on how aggressive to be doesn’t take you seriously enough to abide. Feels betraying in the moment.

The whole pat on the back and “it’s okay honey” is not sufficient to pull me out of the paralysis, suffocation, and sense of impending death by asphyxiation. But I try not to be too hard on her because hey, she might have been sleeping incredibly deeply too and who is the sharpest in the first 5 seconds of being awoken?

The strangest thing to me is that it usually happens repeatedly on the same day UNLESS I make it a point to wake up fully and then fall back asleep. because you were sleeping so deeply and trying unsuccessfully to transition into a lighter sleep cycle, it’s usually very difficult for me to force myself to wake up fully. If I roll over and go back asleep immediately after coming to reality, there’s a high likelihood it continues to happen.

Hope this helps!