The Demons That Visit While You Sleep

As you probably already know, I have a podcast where I listen to true scary stories submitted by those who experience them. In the episodes, there have been several patterns that are hard to ignore, and one of them is sleep paralysis. In talking to literally hundreds of people about creepy events, this one is among the top, not just because of the state you end up in while you're sleeping, which I'm sure has a scientific explanation, but more about what people see when they're experiencing this. A version of this episode was originally published in twenty twenty one, but due to requests for many of you about this phenomenon, I've decided to share more information regarding this topic. And again the same listener discretion warning applies here. If you are sensitive to vivid descriptions of sleep paralysis, please listen at your own risk. Today's episode will have several stories about sleep paralysis with some context where I'll tell you more about some of the other theories. Quite literally the stuff of nightmares. My name is Edwin, and here so horror story. It was late even for writer Brandon Tan living in New York City. The honking in the distance had ceased. Even for a little bit, just like those tiny gaps of silence between waves crashing in the ocean. The room was dark, just like any other night, and Brandon was expecting the evening to be uneventful, like always. Suddenly, Brandon's eyes snapped up and wide lips sealed shut. Brandon tried to turn around, to move, even just a single muscle, but it was no use. Brandon was completely unable to move. The mischievous giggles he experienced got louder, and with every breath that the invisible four seemed to take to get a little bit closer and also to a darker, ras creepier sound. Brandon struggled, half aware that the sounds he was experiencing were not possible. He tried to shake himself away, his arms, his legs, but nothing responded. But then he started hearing the distant howling sounds coming closer, taking over his room with strong gusts of wind. Brandon shut his windows every single night, and tonight was no exception. Powerless, he stared into the darkness, waiting for whatever whoever was causing this to stop. It is a phenomenon unlike any other, with roots and stories about demons and ancient cultures to early written accounts back in the tenth century, but it has also been acknowledged by scientific research. It happens when you are at your most vulnerable state, sleeping, a state where our ancestors knew that we could be killed if we failed to hear the faint sounds of a threat approaching. It's part of our instincts to be aware of our surroundings even while we're sleeping. Writer Akowhiny, who lived in tenth century Persia, left behind the first written mention of sleep paralysis in a manuscript loosely translated as a guide to medical learners. It was a first of three that was written detailing human anatomy, physiology, and ways to treat many diseases. In that work, there was a chapter dedicated to sleep paralysis. The interesting thing about this is that the next time the phenomenon was clinically described it was in a published case from an unknown Dutch physician written in sixteen sixty four, but the physician did not refer to the occurrence as sleep paralysis, but rather incubus or the night mare. The faint light of the alarm clock with the numbers two fifty six a m and shine off the side of your room, illuminating nothing but the dark air next to your bed. You're awake again, but you don't know why. Suddenly, the red light that makes up the numbers goes dark. Someone has walked in front of it. In a panic, you try to turn your head to see who roams inside your bedroom, but you are unable to see it completely disabled. Now you hear someone lurking in the dark, when suddenly you'll feel her climb onto your bed, an old, wrinkled woman with dirty gray hair. Something about her eyes make her seem inhuman. You look at her as she climbs onto your chest and sits there. The pressure from her cold body is intense, and you begin to feel your lungs squeeze against the rest of your body, and your breathing becomes shallow. Your heart beat. You still have a pulse, but it's slowing down. You try to extend your neck and addust your chest to get just a little more air. You gasp and try with all your might to turn around, but it is no use. This demon be gone now. You shut your eyes and it's over. You consider yourself lucky to be going without having to look at this evil creature in the eye anymore. Similar experiences are said to happen around the Old Hag, also known as a piece of Veda, translated to she who steps, and it's said to be an old woman who enters your room and sits on your chest, making you unable to move. She is believed to be a demon or a dark spirit, sometimes summoned to punish those in their sleep who had wrong someone else. Other times they say she arrives as part of the place where you sleep. If her home is haunted by an evil entity hungry for the energy of the living, she will make herself known. Footsteps on the roof. They told you when you were young, came from the Pisa Veda where she lives at night. Then they said she strikes, And as you lay in bed, she approaches with her dirty, long nails and long hooked nose. All you can see of the tall, skinny old woman or her glowing red eyes. And did you go to bed with the full stomach? Big mistake. She's coming after you. She climbs onto your bed and begins to step on your chest. Sleep paralysis is called kanashibadi in Japan, a word rooted in Buddhism because of people used to believe that Buddhist monks have the power to use magic and paralyze each other, and in China it is called ghost oppression, with different versions of the same strange occurrence coming from different parts of the world. The scientific community became interested in the topic and formal research has taken place. Now we can finally understand why this happens to the unlucky estimated eight percent of the population that experienced sleep paralysis. Unfortunately, the amount of research is not enough to bring forth much comforting information for those who suffer from it, and what we want to know is why it happens and how to prevent it, but that's still unknown. However, there are some things that have worked as a treatment. Scientists say that sleep paralysis is where a person becomes conscious of their bodies antonia, which is paralysis of the body during the cycle of sleep known as rapid eye movement. Being paralyzed helps you avoid acting out in your dreams. So basically, if you run in your dreams, your body will not be able to move its legs and accelerate your breathing, keeping dreams where they belong until you wake up. Some causes include insomnia or if you have odd sleeping patterns, narcolepsy, panic disorders, or any type of anxiety disorder. But there are many more, and the best way to sort this out is to see your doctor and talk to them about it. Some solutions are surprisingly simple, such as getting good sleep and exercising. At certain points in my own life, I have had hallucinations after waking up suddenly, and one theory for this is that one part of the person's mind is conscious while the other is still in the stage of their sleep cycle, so reality and dreams are blurred and not in a good way usually, But it has been this way for a long time, with people making works detailing the existence of demons with drawings and detailed explanations of what they've seen before modern medicine and science helped explain this phenomenon. People believe that sleep paralysis was caused by demons, and it had been like that for a large part of history. One of the oldest is the theory of the incubis and the succubists, one that has been offered by people who have suffered from sleep paralysis also their families, and one of the largest and earliest influencers the church. When men would suffer from sleep paralysis, they would experience a combination of intruder hallucinations along with the pressure on the chest. They would explain it as feeling attacked and violated by succubist demon. A succubist demon is a female demon from folklore that visits men in their sleep and mates with the man to capture a seed. This is where the incubist demon plays a role, essentially serving as the male version of the succubists. The succubist visits a female during an episode of sleep paralysis and impregnates the woman with the demon seed that it obtained when they were a succubist. Some Middle Eastern cultures use explanations like this to explain sleep paralysis, saying that the hallucination is actually a gin, a supernatural creature romanticized as a genie. Sometimes the gin arrives wearing a hat, and if you can move and snatch the hat, you win a reward. But there are more accounts, even personal ones for me and from the researcher of this episode, that I'll share with you coming up right after this. Stay with him in an episode for a story we're received in Spanish for a podcast I make called Terrooristorius Realis, which might be out by the time you get to hear this episode. I got to shore the story that hits very close to home. The reason is that I have personally been in that house and I've experienced something that to this day is impossible to logically explain. And even though I was creeped out by the whole ordeal, it also showed me that perhaps experiences dealing with sleep paralysis or the old Hag might not be only on someone's mind, that this thing can also be a part of homes or roam around in a way that typical spirits are said to do. So you see in this house they called her a witch. And this accounts come from several stories, again personally shared with me and used with their permission. It started with a deep, buzzing, humming noise described as a deep vacuum cleaner, a propeller, or a deep throbbing in the inner ear. And it was in the middle of the night. The women in this house wakes up knowing exactly what she's about to experience. The sounds are familiar to her now. It means that something is about to show up. When she looks towards the door of the bedroom, she sees it, a shadow, standing tall against a door frame. It was moving closer. Soon the thing is closed right in front of the bed, and it looks like an old woman, hunched over with an evil smile. It climbs onto the bed, with the feeling of the mattress physically sinking where it's standing. It looms over her face and crouches down against her chest. She can feel her whole weight of the old woman against her, not allowing her to breathe. But worst of all, she is completely unable to move. Trying to shake herself awake, she blinks her eyes, the only part of her body that she can move, but that's about as far as he gets. She is completely paralyzed. Eventually, the thing gets off, steps away and vanishes, and she can move again. When I first heard about this experience, it was sometime in twenty nineteen when I had arrived to visit this home, located in the mountain region in the southern part of Ecuador. I had just gotten there after a very long flight and was shown a guest bedroom to rest before dinner time. I took the offer, climbing onto the bed and very quickly falling asleep. But at one point I was woken up by this what I described as a boy covered in clay or mud. He stood by the doorframe, looking right at me, and then started moving toward me. Again this is my personal experience. Fortunately I was able to move, and I figured it had been some kid from around the house who had gotten into the room and found some random guy sleep in the guest bedroom, so he had gotten in there to investigate. I was too tired to try to sort it out, so I turned around and fell back asleep facing the wall. This time. When I woke up and was called to go to the dinner table, I casually mentioned what I had seen up in the guest room and everyone got silent. That's when they started sharing their stories about what they had seen around the house, but mainly it was about the witch. Two of them had mentioned hearing the laughter of a boy, but the entire household knew of a thing that showed up while they were sleeping. This obviously got me very interested in the topic, and multiple people were there that had talked to me about it. And if you're interested, I'll link to the direct story once it comes out again. It's in Spanish, but maybe we can find out what it translated in the future. Since then, we've had multiple other stories that mentioned sleep paralysis and the old Hag mysteries we might not be able to solve just yet. But one question that really bothers me still lingers. Why do multiple people from around the world claim to experience the same thing, even when they have no background or have never heard of it prior to their experiences. An anonymous Reddit user posted such a story, explaining an experience that they had back when they were in their mid twenties but had already experienced it before. One night, they had their jacket hung on the corner of the closet door when they had an episode of sleep paralysis. In place of the jacket, the user could see a woman wearing it with her back turned unable to move. The person remembered that someone was laying right next to them in bed, and this person tried to yell, but nothing came out. But then the woman with a jacket in the corner of the room turned slowly to her side. They were able to recognize her. It was this person's cousin who had died the previous year. She was standing there, staring at the closet mirror. She must have been around seven to ten years old, completely unaware of the terrors that come at night. She got into bed and promptly fell asleep. But then she opened her eyes and was unable to move the rest of her body. There was pressure against her chest. Someone was trying to stop her from breathing. The confusion soon grew into a panic when her breath got shorter, the weight on top of her chest making breathing impossible. As she gasped for air, Unable to adjust her body to take the invisible weight off of her, she began to wonder if this is how her young self would go. Suddenly, she heard the familiar sound of a cat mewing and hissing, and then from the corner of her eye, she saw one of her cats walk into her room. She was able to move again. Ever since, Madeleine, the researcher that worked on this original episode, has experienced episodes of sleep paralysis about once a year. With changes in her mental health and sleep habits, she began to experience it even more, even weakly and during naps. Sometimes in her own words, I sometimes hear things, but the main hallucination I experienced is chest pressure hallucinations. I feel like someone is either sitting on my chest and holding my body down, or I feel like something is holding a pillow on top of my face trying to suffocate me. Though she can usually not open her eye, she still sometimes hears things, which can be equally terrifying. We still hear about sleep paralysis and movie such as Dead Awake and To the Nightmare, but Netflix has included the topic in a mini series known as The Haunting of Hill House, where one of the characters suffers from sleep paralysis. There we can see her own demon personified and her experience dealing with it growing up. The amount of material available on sleep paralysis is abundant, and you can find countless books, documentaries, and YouTube videos on the subject with a quick search. But beware some of these explanations are more sinister than others, and remember that you cannot unlearn what you see. Where do we go when we dream? How do we see what we see when we're sleeping? And how does our mind wanders to such unusual places? For centuries people have asked these questions, and for centuries more they've come up with explanations that involved evil entities, demons, and other creatures to explain our nightmares. But it is different when these come to life, when we see them there in our rooms, in the darkness of our safe place, the old hag, the demons approaching, ready to climb on top of you. As you feel your lungs get squeezed out of air. You try to breathe, but you can't. And then they leave, and you're left there in a state of fantasy and reality, wondering if you may have discovered another realm. No, you think to yourself, there must be a different explanation, you say, after all, in the end, you get to choose what you believe. But you often wonder where do we go when we sleep, or worse, what visits us when we sleep? I ever experienced sleep paralysis? Let me know. My contact information is in the description of this episode, and I would love to continue learning about these experiences. This episode of horror Story was produced by me Edwin Kauarrubias, with research and writing by mattel Inguera. For more information and to connect with us, find the show on horror story dot com or use the links in the description of this episode. To find us on TikTok and Instagram. To get these episodes without ads, try out scaryplus dot com. It'll also be supporting the production of these shows. It's free for two weeks and then five dollars a month, and you can cancel at any time. Look for the links for scary Plus on your app right now. Anyway, thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone. See you soon.