Hiya Nexus,

I want to share a weird experience I had yesterday and hear your thoughts on it.

I was laying in my bed with my left side of my face facing the ceiling. Trying to fall asleep, I could feel myself gradually relaxing and getting there. Suddenly something unexplainable happened to me.

As I was laying I felt what I could only compare to a big cat crawl up on the right side of the king size bed I was on and proceed to sit on my head, the latter of which produced a muffled "thump" sound. The contact was not direct - it felt like there was a thick pillow between us. In the first moment this happened I observed my reaction to be as if I had a cat, and as if that same situation had happened multiple times in the past (as it probably does with cat owners). But then I immediately realized I do not have a cat at home.

At this point the weight on my head started increasing rapidly, as if that "cat" was gaining weight in a geometric progression manner - every next second the weight tripled. I immediately tried to move and get this thing off of my head, but found out I couldn't move a muscle... I was paralysed.

At this point breathing became harder. I was panting for air and my heart rate was increasing quickly. A thought passed my mind that someone is trying to suffocate me with a pillow, but then my rational mind gained strength and reassured me that since I was paralysed and couldn't move, then most likely this is a dream, as I've had such dreams in the past where I am fighting someone and I'm trying to swing at them for example but my ability to move a muscle is obliterated into obscurity.

A quick thought passed my mind that sleep paralysis (which I've never experienced so far) had occurred. I couldn't see anything (for which I was grateful, knowing some of the horrors people have seen during sleep paralysis). I consciously decided to stop struggling and panting for air, and just relax and breathe deeply and calmly, and let this extremely weird feeling event pass.

The weight on the left side of my head was immense, it was crushing me. I relaxed and took a few deep breaths. At this moment, as if that "thing" realized that I had achieved some sort of calmness and acceptance, the weight on my head decreased substantially, and I started hearing (and feeling) a sound in my head. The most accurate comparison I can think of is the sound skating on black ice produces - some sort of muffled laser sounds.

The volume of those was increasing with every next instance of the laser sound. This scared me, and I started struggling again. The sounds stopped, but the weight increased. As if something was forcing me to sit calmly through this deafening, spine-chilling auditory spectacle. I relaxed again, and the sound returned. Each instance louder than the previous. I could literally feel my skull resonate with this sound.

As the sound volume increased to the point it consumed all my thoughts and being, came a final excruciatingly loud laser sound that snapped me out of this state, and I found myself on the other side of the bed, laying on the other side of my body. I was covered in sweat and my heart was pounding. Overwhelming fear took over immediately after I woke up. I looked around the room but found nothing weird in sight. I soon fell back asleep.

The next day as I woke up (which was 2 hours ago from the time of writing this), I noticed that I could feel a sharp pain in my left temporomandibular joint (the thing that connects your jaw to your skull). This really made me wonder what the hell had happened to me that night. Was is just sleep paralysis? Or was I "probed" by some sort of intelligent alien life form?

I wonder what the answer is, but I also wonder if I can handle knowing it...If anyone can share their thoughts or similar experiences that'd be great.

Be well, my brethren.

I've also had sleep paralysis once or twice in my life (one memorable one) and it also involved an animal. In my case it was a deer, standing next to my bed with his/her head looming over me.

It was a day or two after I had done a little ketamine and it seemed to be saying, "You shouldn't have done that."

Why must it be either/or sleep paralysis or entity contact? One extreme is some purely materialistic phenomenon with no meaning whatsoever and another is a purely spiritual phenomenon. Why can't it be both? A combination of the two? Why can't "sleep paralysis" be a symptom of entity contact?

And why do we feel entitled to understand what it is? Many people have many questions about experiences like these, and the answers seem to barely scratch the surface of any deep understanding of it, in my view. Maybe we are not meant or able to know at this time. Perhaps it doesn't matter, anyway.

Sounds like sleep paralysis alright. I used to have it all the time as a child, these days I'm dead to the world in about a minute

If you haven't experienced it before it can be quite frightening, especially if you've never even heard of the mechanism itself. I think the fear and terror it invokes is less to do with the body and more to do with the ego; it worries it may be about to die. The mind then fills in the blanks and projects on to the experience, in your case a cat. The fact you woke up on the opposite side of where you thought you were clearly shows the projection ability.

I believe entities can be sensed to a greater degree when in that pre-sleep state or other inbetween states of sleep, but their influence is subtle. What you 'see' tends to be your own projections overlaid on top of what is actually there (if they are there) - they may be formless in reality. It's not like they decide to be a cat, alien, witch or whatever, it's that they are able to see the contents of your mind somehow, or perhaps 'weak spots' and just trigger the imagery which invokes the greatest response. Having had many sleep paralysis experiences there's only a handful where I felt there was something messing with me and the underlying feeling of it, terror and emotion aside, was that this entity was clumsy, primitive, like some sort of primitive sea creature on a rock, like it didn't really understand 'human-ness' - I can see why people might label it as 'probing'.

After a bit more pondering on what happened, as well as discussions with friends, I'm pretty sure what happened to me was a mixture between sleep paralysis and dreaming. I say a mixture, because I wouldn't define myself as completely awake during this event. My mind was very foggy and it didn't seem like I was absolutely conscious and awake.

I find it fascinating how albeit terrifying (it took me 5 hours to fall asleed the next night out of fear the same would happen, but worse), I find the experience extremely interesting and mysterious to a level that I wouldn't say I never want it to happen again. The latter reminds me of that Jordan Peterson lecture where he spoke about a rat that encounters a cat while searching for food, and upon rushing back to the safety of its burrow and calming down, it consciously returns back to the very same place it encountered that horrifying abomination earlier out of what scientists believe is pure curiosity and desire to understand what the fuck did it see.

The parallel with people consciously wanting to experience the often horrifying event of sleep paralysis is very obvious. I wonder how much of those events are pure illusion, and how much are things that are actually happening to us in a realm between waking life and dream world. That thin line of mystery, fear and humbling acceptance of how little we actually know about the way our own minds work.

I don't feel privileged or entitled to know what happened, as RhythmSpring guessed. I want to know for the same reason a scientist wants to know why what he observed happened the way it did. Curiosity, desire for knowledge and hope of getting closer to the unknown, as exposing ourselves to the unknown almost always expands our perspective and, ultimately, the perceived limits of our consciousness.