…Which it actually is.
Luckily, I’ve never had this happen to me.
I hardly ever dream. Or should I say, I hardly ever remember my dreams.
I have a weird thing though. I like bad dreams. I don’t have them very often, but I find them very exciting. I’ll wake up, realize it was a dream, then try to go back to sleep to continue it.
Its like watching a horror movie.
Granted, if I was having crazy sleep paralysis, I doubt I’d like it very much…
I asked my parents if they’d ever had something like this earlier. They say they haven’t, but my brother has. My brother alledgedly dreamt he was unable to move when he was lying in his bed one night, when I snuck into his room and started strangling him and next morning he was convinced it really happened. I haven’t asked him about it but that freaks me out a little, although he may have just been blaming me for a nightmare as he often does. When I had the ‘dream’ with shadowy guy, I initially thought it was my brother.
I’ve had a few… most recent ones too… strangely enough they don’t scare me though.
There’s only been one time that it’s scared me. somebody came into our house in the middle of the night and walked into my room, closing and locking the door… just as I woke up, he brought the knife down on me.
It wqas really strange… I startled awake, body jolting. Scared the shit out of me because my bedroom door was open. (My bedroom door is closed during the night.)
That’s bizarre… I’ve had the same dream. Well, probably not the same dream, but certainly a similar premise. I dreamt that I had superhuman abilities (I read a lot of X-Men back then :P), and could suddenly fly. I did it first accidentally, and then when I tried to practice it, all I could do was hover for a short moment, or jump an extended amount. It really frustrated me, while exciting me that I had any abilities at all. 
The worst nightmare that I can remember involved neon toys, so don’t feel too bad. It’s not the subject matter that makes it scary, it’s the events around it.
In my dream, there were these new toy guns on sale at the toy store. They came with a target that was made out of the same sort of plastic as a “Twister” mat. You were supposed to hang the target on the wall, and shoot at it, and a colored mark would appear on the target where you shot.
My friend and I decided (in the dream) to go to the toy store and get some, since it’d be kind of fun (I was about 16 at the time, so we were old enough to drive, so it was fairly realistic at this point). We got to the mall, and bought the guns, when he decided that we should play around with them in the mall, since they were just toys. He pointed his gun at someone (his was neon orange), pulled the trigger, and the person’s skin turned neon orange, the person froze in place, and fell over dead. My gun was neon pink, so I tried it too. Again, the person turned neon pink, froze, and fell over dead. At this point in the dream, the severity of the events hadn’t yet sunk in, so it just seemed like playing a game, like Laser Tag or something. Pretty quickly, though, the mall security started to shut down the mall due to the mass murdering going on. We casually walked toward the door, and the guard asked us what we had. We showed her the guns, which she regarded as toys, and she let us go home.
At home (still in the dream, mind you), my friend decides that we should put the guns away for good. Before he could do so, another friend arrived at my house, who decided that he and my other friend should have a gun duel with them. Neither of them seemed to realize how dangerous that was, so they wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to stop them. Soon, one of them (the one who wasn’t with me when I bought the guns) killed the other. Out of anger, I grabbed the other gun and killed him. That’s when I woke up.
It sounds really goofy when I spell it out like that, but it scared the crap out of me at the time.
I get this all the damn time, always on the weekends when I sleep in. I’ve learned to get out of it though, just breath in and out heavly or go back to sleep.
As far as dreams involving it, some are witches holding me down with magic when I was young. Now a days I can feel it about to happen when I’m in that half-sleep state.
Oh yeah, for some reason I remember Screwey Squrel, Sonic the Hedgehog, and for Duke Nuk’em being involed in dreams involving “kanashibari”
Man, just typing this sounds REALLY weird…
Yeah, I’ve had that happen to me. The red glowing eyes from the closet door used to be what the subject was… more recently, it’s people I know holding me down and feasting on my innards. I didn’t know that this was a common thing, since a lot of people here seemed to have experienced it.
Almost all of them are fucking scary, but this one time I couldn’t move because a naked lady was perched on my stomach. I wasn’t really all that aroused or anything, and neither was she, but she was just kinda sitting there. If I could speak, I would have asked her to move, but eventually she just flew out the window.
I tend to have just weird dreams. Nothing actually particularly scary.
The funny thing is that it’s happened so much that it’s not scary for me anymore, just really annoying.
I get this alot, but i wake with a jerk, as if i just hit my bed.
Last night i kept dreaming that i was waking up, and going back to sleep, repeatedly, yet when I do do that in never dream. The dreams i dreamed when I dreamed I was asleep werre extreamly surreal. In one I thought I got shot with something, then was covere in tiny beatles, before running into my kitchen(I cound still see despite the beatles) and screaming, then i woke up.
I never actually woke up during the night though, of that I’m sure…
… Vyse, with that spelling I’m imagining you covered with miniature versions of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Note the difference in spelling: Beetles, Beatles.
Holy crap, that happened to me twice when I was younger I think and I thought iwas really strange. Thank God that never happened to me again.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a lucid dream like ya’ll have described. I hardly ever dream I think, or dream of anything scary. I remember I woke up in my bed and every part of my body felt like it was a thousand pounds. I couldn’t move my head or anything. I had absolutely no idea what the heck was going on. I didn’t see anything freaky I don’t think, so I feel worse for those who do. That crap would scare me.
Thanks Sat: You’ve made me bury one last mystery of my childhood that had me worried for a bit. I seriously, seriously, don’t want to go through that crap again.
This thread’s not too old yet, so I’ll add on. I ran across a link to a newsstory while browsing through the usual run of skeptics’ websites earlier:
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050709/bob9.asp
It’s lovely piece describing the manner in which people interpret sleep paralysis as a religious experience, with a little etymology for nightmare thrown in too.
I had an excellent Beatles joke until i realized there were more posts on the next page. :thud:
Anyway, crap like this happens a lot to me. I have been having this really weird dream that I am some sort of Dragonball Z person or something, in that I can fire energy out of my hands and stuff like that. This doesn’t make sense to me, since I don’t watch the show and am not a big fan or anything. Oddly enough, I can only do the energy shooting stuff in the beginning of my dream when i am not aware I’m dreaming. When I move into a lucid state or whatever it’s called, I just start yelling out “kamehameha!” for no reason while everyone just stares at me like I’m freaking nuts.
Also, I’m naked.