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Deeper into the restlessness

"I sleep - long - two or three hours - then a dream - no - a nightmare embraces me.
I feel like I'm lying down and sleeping... I feel it and I know it ... and
I also feel someone approaching me, looking at me, feeling me, moving on...
Kneels my bed on my chest, takes my neck in his hands and squeezes...
Squeeze ... with all his strength to strangle me.
I, I wrestle, bound by this gruesome impotence, which paralyses us in the
Dreams; I want to cry, - I can't; - I want to stir, - I can't; -
I try, with terrible efforts, panting, to reject this being
that crushes me and chokes me, - I can't! And suddenly I wake up,
scared, covered in sweat. I light a candle. I am alone
After this crisis, which is renewed every night, I finally sleep, quietly,
until dawn. "- (From:" The Horla ", Guy de Maupassant)

Sleep paralysis is the one thing that makes you doubt the reality in one of your safest environments, only a small part of the world's population has to experience this phenomenon once or several times (only 15%). The scary thing about this is that you and your body can no longer distinguish what reality is and what it isn't, you can't move or barely move and you feel like you are experiencing a true nightmare.

Sleep paralysis is something that is stimulated in the phase of your REM sleep. REM sleep is the period in the night that you sleep the deepest and when the possibility of dreaming appears. This is where the experience of sleep paralysis often begins. Because I experience what it is like to have this sleep disorder I share my experience in contrast to what else is possible.
If I 'suffer' from sleep paralysis it is usually not connected to a dream, from what I have read this is the case. This disorder can have different expressions. The thing you feel and or rather not feel is your body at that moment. Your body is not really paralyzed but is in a kind of resting position where it is not possible to move. During this experience, only your brain, heart and lungs are still 'awake'. Because your brain activity is normally lower when you sleep, you are officially still awake during this experience. I just can't distinguish very well in the fact that I really can't move or maybe it does not have my attention at the moment. What I do experience are the hallucinations, these hallucinations are often the same for a certain period of time. The thing you could say is that after a few times you can assume that what you see is not real, but unfortunately that is not the case.
As an example I have seen a policeman in the corner of my room for a couple of months. Well, one of my friends is a policeman, but that doesn't make it any more comfortable. I also couldn't find a reason for why I see what I saw. You'd say a policeman would stand for safety but a strange man in your bedroom doesn't make anyone happy. Actually that's also the most common hallucinations, male silhouettes.

Staring at it is what frightens me the most. This is accompanied by sounds I hear like footsteps on the ground and tapping. These sounds make me stare at the hallucinations. With staring I hope to realize that these sounds are not coming from the hallucinations. In the end I spend the whole night stressing on this, there were times that I could not sleep without light or could not sleep at all.
Because this disorder seems so realistic and people are experiencing this for the first time, it is difficult to finally be convinced that it is sleep paralysis. Often people think that they experience something psychic, I feared this myself before I knew that I had this sleep disorder.

The frequency of this disorder is very variable, I can suffer from it for weeks in a row but it can't occur at all for just one week. The strange thing is that it depends mostly on where I sleep; in my own bedroom it happens the most, which is actually quite weird. In strange places it also happens faster but when I sleep at my friend's house it never happens to me.
The sounds are something I hear most of the time and often first, from footsteps that go around my bed and windows or doors that are rattling. Often I hear the sound of my gate, accompanied by the masculine silhouette; this looks like an intruder from outside.