craziest night experience

After a long day of classes, a physical workout for ROTC, and a 6 mile run at night, I arrived in bed at midnight. I was so happy to sleep because my body was so tired. After a couple hours of sleep, my mind woke up but my body was still asleep. Crazy things were happening to me in my sleep. I first felt like my body was being pulled down my bed. I felt there was a demonic presence in my room and this frighetened me the most. I paniced and try to get out of bed, but my body was frozen and could not move. I tried to scream for help, but I could not speak, it felt like I lost my voice. After ten minutes, my body finally woke up and I was able to move. My body was still tired, so I closed my eyes for a minute and then my body went back into paralysis. These occurences happened repeatedly throughout the night until my alarm clock rang at 5:30am. It was the most frighening experience in my life.

I looked up the symptoms and charcteristics on Google and found out I had sleep paralysis. I then looked up sleep paralysis on wikipedia.com and it said under the symptoms and characteristics section that it "occurs when the brain awakes from a REM state, but the body paralysis persists. This leaves the person fully conscious, but unable to move. The paralysis can last from several seconds to several minutes after which the individual may experience panic symptoms and the realization that the distorted perceptions were false." It also says that you can suffer horrible hallucinations and having a sense of danger.

I felt very frightened from the hallucinations I experienced, a figure hoovering over me looked like a dark shadow. I heard voices saying "they were coming to me." This is what caused me to panic and made me want to get out of bed. I did some more research online and it showed many blogs of normal people experiencing the same symptoms. I felt like I was in the middle of my dream and in reality at the same time. My whole "dream" occured in my room. Wikipedia.com said that "Several studies have concluded that many or most people will experience sleep paralysis at least once or twice in their lives." I am very interested in this and wonder if it will happen to me again, but hope it doesn't.