Sleep paralysis

My dreams had been largely terrifying as of late – they sometimes seemed to have overlapped with reality in a manner that it gave a sensation of surreality. It seemed so real that when I woke up, hours later I would still be immersed in said sensation, walking around in a daze pondering whether my dreams had been real. And then there was the violence – my last dream last night recounted a horror tale of three shooting incidents in my college, the last of which I personally experienced by playing hide-and-seek with the gunner wtf (and my barely known Malay collegemate sacrificed himself to save me wtf).

On Tuesday morning, I experienced something that quite shook me – far worse than said dreams I mentioned above. I was doing my usual routine of taking a quick nap after breakfast (don’t ask me why, I have weird routines rofl), and as I slowly roused from sleep, my mind hovered between consciousness and subconsciousness. I was faintly aware of my surroundings, and as I tried to sit up, I felt my entire brain tensing up, like your muscles would after you exercised for the first time in months.

I tried to get up, my two hands lying horizontally but both limbs felt useless and devoid of energy. I panicked for a bit, not wanting to be a complete vegetable at such a young age (and having not done a billion other things), and the story of people who felt something/someone sitting on them and they couldn’t get up from sleep surfaced in my mind (this was explained away scientifically but I can’t remember the specifics).

I don’t know if that experience was like the same story I heard over the years, but I felt powerless, weak, and I just couldn’t get up. Mind you that my mind was still in its semi-awake state but I remained conscious of all these facts.

I did the breathe-in breathe-out routine to relax myself and tried once more to lift myself up. It worked, and I’m not a vegetable wtf.

Suffice to say, it was a really bizarre experience.

Edit: Forgot to mention that the first thing I saw when I awoke to my sleep paralysis was a Chinese newspaper floating in front of my eyes wtf. Now that was even bizarre, but Wikipedia says hallucinatory elements in sleep paralysis is normal heh.