I was baptized, received my first communion and I am confirmed. I never read the Bible. I did all of this when the other children did while in school, same as everyone. I am 25 years old now. Since my confirmation I haven’t go to church, I haven’t prayed and I haven’t been to confession for the last 10 years. Since I was 14 I have had sleep paralysis 3 times a week (approximately, sometimes once, sometimes twice) and I haven’t been able to get rid of it.
Everything has changed in the last year.
This text will be long because I have to tell you how I got to where I am now with all the facts and situations that happened to me.
If my math is correct, I’ve had over 700 or 800 sleep paralysis episodes in 10 years. I’ve seen everything I shouldn’t have seen. Huge black figures, some kind of negative presence standing next to me that I can’t see. All the worst. But one thing was always common to every sleep paralysis episode, everything I saw was black or dark gray, no other colors (this is important for later).
I tried everything to get rid of sleep paralysis, I slept 10+ hours for 3 months over the summer holidays, paralysis again. I lived like an Olympic athlete for 3 months, paralysis again. I didn’t go for tests but I talked to people who are doctors and they all told me that it is a medical (neurological) phenomenon and that no one knows the real cause of it.
When I was maybe 16, my religion teacher showed us a documentary about a former Satanist who rejected Satan and started believing in Jesus. In that documentary, the former Satanist talks about how he liked to cast some kind of curses on people who didn’t respond to him. One day, a Christian band came to play on his street. He says he tried the same thing on them but it didn’t work and that he saw some kind of yellow light around them, like a golden dome. Which was like a difficult fantasy to me at the time. I didn’t believe it for 5 seconds.
Right after that, a few weeks later, I had a sleep paralysis that was something I’ve never had before. I woke up on my back with my head tilted (probably because I was asleep on the phone). I woke up in sleep paralysis, and I could barely open my eyes. Anyone who has had sleep paralysis knows that it takes 100 horsepower to open their eyes a centimeter. After I opened them, there were 5-6 people/figures standing in front of me and you could only see part of them from their necks to their waists. They all had white dresses and wooden crosses on them. Like altar boys in a church. It was the first time I’d seen color on a figure in sleep paralysis. I froze, they moved their hands towards my head. I felt like all the people I knew had died at that moment. I started crying uncontrollably, a 16-year-old boy bursting with energy, I was crying. I started calling out to my mother out of fear of the unknown, but she couldn’t hear me because in paralysis you think you’re shouting, but in reality you’re just screaming inside yourself. I came out of paralysis and it went away.
I was so stupid then that I just kept sleeping, and many years passed after that.
While I was at college, I met a girl and in conversation she told me that she had had sleep paralysis a few times but that since she started praying it had disappeared. My stupid head rejected the possibility of registering that fact in my brain.
More years have passed. I was 22/23 when all this started, which is why I am writing to you now.
I have sleep paralysis again and I’m already on edge, something is going to happen to me. The problem with sleep paralysis is that when you come out of sleep paralysis, you can’t fall asleep right away because you’ll fall back into it. You have to stay awake a little so you don’t get into that cycle of paralysis. I had paralysis and stayed awake, I was thinking deeply. I was thinking about the Christian band from the documentary and about a friend who said she prayed, and I thought to myself, I’m not going to die, I’m not going to burn, I have nothing to lose. I pray for the first time in 10 years.
After my first prayer in 10 years, I didn’t have sleep paralysis for 3-4 months. Nothing.
But being the talentedly stupid I am, I didn’t continue praying.