Sleep paralysis doesn't include "hallucinations" unless you're (still) dreaming. Which is normal, but you can be awake and completely body-aware too. I'd say the second are a little more frightening or alarming if you didn't know what was going on.
I've probably had dozens if not hundreds of similar episodes. Not as much anymore ( in my 20s and on ) but when I was in the last year of high school / first year university I had
tons of those things every day. I mean I would go to the library between classes, put my head down and *zap*. I just eventually thought screw it and didn't bother worrying about it because they don't interfer with rest or sleep ( the opposite, they only happen when you're extremely relaxed/at rest anyways ) and didn't bother me in any tangible way.
Like dreaming it's not that hard to change or end whatever just by doing so. If you don't like it. It might take practice and what else you do during the day seems to matter. *shrug
I know that in high school I used to run religiously ( hours and hours of it per day ) just because I could and that was what I liked to do / enjoyed at the time. It was 2 hours at an evening, 1hr over lunch break on the track ( because the school had two of them, indoors and outdoors ) and other types of physical exercise.
Since exercise lowers blood pressure and heart rate over time I found for whatever reason, that sometimes increases the chance of sleep paralysis.
For some reason they stopped being a problem in later years. I know now you can control them and they're a regular phenomena so I doubt I would get bothered by them as much these days but I don't miss them at all either. lol
I sometimes get sleep paralysis without the hallucinations, but about five years ago I had a bad experience with it. It was right after I had heard the story of the hag and I was anxious about falling asleep. At that point, I hadn't tried to move in a while and I suddenly had to...uh...go, for lack of a better word. I tried getting up and wasn't able to move, so I knew I was right about to fall asleep or something and didn't resist it.
I listened to my family creep off to bed and when my brother turned on the bathroom light...I saw it. Through the light coming through the crack in my slightly-opened bedroom door.
It was a dark figure with a witch-like appearance. It frightened the hell out of me and I made all attempts to go to sleep. The hag didn't do anything except watch, and I quickly fell asleep. I woke up suddenly at around 4 or 5 am, screaming my head off. My entire family actually came in my room to see what was going on. But I remembered the hag. I remember that she lunged at me at the very last waking moment I remember. And I remember she was in my dreams...no...my nightmares.
I actually requested to sleep in my brother's room that night. It wasn't that I was afraid of seeing the hag again...it was that my brother's room was positioned in such a way that the light from the bathroom never reached inside the room. I wouldn't be able to see the hag in the dark if I did get sleep paralysis again. And having someone else in the room was a bit of a comfort as well.
....though compared to another incident that happened a bit more recently, this is a cakewalk. I would have endured this hundreds of times before...
Nevermind. I've spooked myself.
I've had to move living/home addresses twice in my life so far, both into appartments and out/away from a prior home that was a hell that nobody in their right mind would stay in longer then they had to.
The first night I moved into my first appartment; I had an episode that your description reminded me of a little.
Except... the bitch wasn't at the door way she was already on me when I became aware of it. If I was mobile I would have taken a swing at it. >_> But I wasn't out of it so completely that I mistook it for reality at that point. I knew what it was at least.
Appearance wise she looked sort of semi-youthful/young, at least a small stature. ****ing big eyes. 0_0 a white bandage wrapped over one of their upper arms ( below the shoulder ). Sort of crouching. Also, was not clothed other than the bandage. In some indescribable way I think if you'd put a pointy hat on her at that point she'd make a perfect witch. (Except she was relatively young looking.) Shoulder length strait black hair.
She was gazing right at me when I realized she was there at all, which was ****ing creepy at first but after a moment of re-orienting myself, somewhat less. After a minute she looked down and a hand appeared out of nowhere in mid-air in front of her and pointed "down" with it's fingers at me. And I was ticked off at that point and struggled and they all vanished just like that.
These days I actually do tend to get pissed off by either "bad" dreams ( more so dreams that are retarded in content then dreams that are literally of nightmarish quality ) or any similar episodes like that.
They're annoying.
When I was in high school, they were not. They did not contain any retarded things like naked witches or scary old hags. The only thing they contained was what was already real. ( me, half-asleep, in bed or face planted a desk, the room I was in, and if necessary others going about their business quietly and most of the time not even that. ) I prefered that more.
Regardless of the exact cause I don't tend to take fake/unreal b.s. elegantly, I consider even bad dreams to be a waste of my precious, finite, limited, time: that you only have once and can't get any more of once it's gone. I consider all of those things wasting it.
)
