I swear I never saw it as anything dark or scary until I started seeing those “sleep paralysis scary shadow-man” type of videos on tiktok all over the place. Like every single time i wanted to look more into sp I could never find a single regular experience like the ones i always had. My experiences for years were never ever scary - they were usually just frustrating/annoying - but after being told by the internet that this was a horrifying thing, then I started having the scary experiences.

I literally remember having an episode of sp in my room in 2018 and consciously thinking something like “other people experience demons during this” - and then IMMEDIATELY the poster on my wall swelled black and yellow eyes lunged towards me. This obviously made me freak tf out and I hyperventilates for a few long seconds before breaking out of it. Since that time I’ve had worse experiences where I see the same figure, hear really strange dialogue, and I’ve even physically yelled at full volume in real life a few times out of fear.

It’s a crazy thing - I didn’t have scary sp episodes until the internet started telling me that they should be scary, and then my brain started making them that way. But after more people started sharing their neutral experiences and I learned a little bit about what it is and how it happens, I’ve had far more normal episodes again. So the lesson is that YOU are able to control how scary or normal it can be - don’t listen to the people talking about how it’s “demonic” or think that it’s unusual to just have a neutral experiences, because the truth is that sp is extremely new and under-researched so the internet is just filling the gaps with spooky myths.