Worst Nightmare!

Originally Posted by KnowsNothing

That sounds like textbook sleep paralysis. I get it too, albeit without the presence sitting on top of me, which, from all accounts, seems to be the scariest part :P It happens when you're either waking or drifting off, so you're in a half sleep state. When you sleep your brain shuts off conscious controls to your muscles, so during sleep paralysis your brain is awake but your muscles aren't. And since you're only half-awake, freaky hallucinations can happen.

It can be pretty scary when you don't know what it is, but for me now it's more annoying than anything. When it happens all you have to do is try really hard to move or speak (speaking usually works for me) and the instant you break it you're immediately fully awake. It seems to only happen when I sleep on my back, too...

I wonder if that's what happened to me once. I had a weird dream that some kind of monster was chasing me, I can't remember much about it aside from that. But as I was starting to wake up I could have swore I heard a evil sounding voice say "You won't escape me!" and I felt stiff and unable to move for a few seconds. Scared the crap out of me, like some kind of monster had been attacking me through my dreams and it got pissed that I was starting to wake up. Needless to say, I had trouble going back to sleep after that.

On the topic of nightmares, I don't have them very often. Infact once I had a dream that should have been a nightmare but wasn't. I had a dream that I was attacked by a panther and it had clawed me relentlessly but it eventually walked away, I stood up even though there wasn't much left of me except bone and some straps of flesh. I should have been dead in my dream but somehow I got up and killed the panther.

Jam it back in, in the dark.