How To Slay Your Sleep Paralysis Demon (or at least make friends with it)

False Awakenings

I woke up from the strangest dream, relieved to find it wasn’t real and grateful for the safety of my bedroom in my college apartment. The morning Sun's beams streamed through the window, illuminating every piece of furniture with such clarity that I could easily make out each item in the room. It felt reassuring, and the warmth of my girlfriend lying beside me made it all the more comforting. But something was off. She had pulled the blanket completely over her head which is something she never did. I couldn’t see her face, her hair, or any of her body parts—nothing but the vague outline of a figure beside me. As I tried to process this odd detail, a strange tension crept in. I suddenly realized I couldn’t move. A suffocating sense of dread washed over me, and before I could fully grasp what was happening, the covers flew off the bed with the force of a violent gust. In that terrifying instant, I saw that the figure beside me wasn’t my girlfriend. It was a shadow—a dark, faceless form that leapt onto me, its hands wrapping around my throat as it began to violently strangle the life out of me.

Then, I woke up, again, into my room, again, except this time I was alone in my bed. Terrified by what I'd just witnessed and confused by the fact that I thought I had already woken up, I immediately started pinching myself, desperate to convince myself I was actually awake this time. Once the panic subsided, I realized what had just happened—I’d had a sleep paralysis nightmare, something I’d experienced many times before, except this time the shadow figure attacked me instead of just looming over me, watching as I lay terrified, unable to do anything to escape it.

Sleep paralysis and the night terrors that often accompany it are something I've experienced countless times throughout my life. In my family, this phenomenon is called "being rode by the hag," because the nightmare that often comes with the sensation of being conscious yet physically paralyzed involves seeing an ugly, evil figure sitting on your chest, choking you or otherwise making it difficult—or impossible—to breathe. I remember telling my mom about one of these sleep paralysis nightmares when I was younger, and she told me she had experienced it frequently too, especially when she was pregnant with me. Like many religious people, my mom attributed these occurrences to the devil, and for most of my youth, I did too. But what I couldn't understand was, why was the devil so interested in me? I mean, sure, I sinned just as much as the next person, but as far as I knew, other people didn't have shadow figures visiting them on an almost weekly basis, threatening to kill them in their sleep.

The most terrifying experiences of my life, along with the worst physical pain I’ve ever endured, have happened during these sleep paralysis episodes. I’m talking about lucid dreams where I’m trying to fight demons for my life and failing because my arms don’t work, or I’m strapped down to my bed while some evil force attempts what feels like an immensely painful operation to separate my soul from my body. For those unfamiliar, sleep paralysis is a phenomenon where your brain wakes up before your body does, meaning you become conscious of being awake but unable to move. From what I understand, our brains paralyze our bodies each night when we sleep to prevent us from acting out our dreams and possibly injuring ourselves. Simply put, sleep paralysis occurs when the mind becomes aware that it’s 'awake,' but the body is still locked in its paralyzed state.

For whatever reason, when sleep paralysis strikes—for me and many others—it’s often accompanied by terrifying scenarios, whether in the form of dreams or hallucinations. The fear of being paralyzed becomes even more overwhelming as it's paired with the presence of something you can't escape. Sometimes it’s a shadow figure—a black, featureless blob, maybe with a hat—standing ominously in the doorway or hovering over your bed. It appears to watch you menacingly, though it has no eyes. Other times, it’s not a shadow but a demon—or what your mind conjures a demon to be—physically attacking you. And in some instances, there’s no entity at all, just a different terror: a natural disaster, a car accident, or something else we deeply fear. For me, it’s often the sensation of dying of thirst, being offered water, but finding myself unable to swallow. Or sinking into the ocean, beginning to drown, yet incapable of swimming to the surface because I can't move. Or simply going through an ordinary day in everyday life except, no matter how hard I try, I can’t take a breath.

I used to think that dealing with these night terrors intermittently was just my fate, something I’d have to endure for the rest of my life. But over time, I discovered that, at least for me, there was a cause behind my regular bouts with sleep paralysis—something I actually had some power to address. What eventually led me to keep the sleep paralysis demon out of my room was first understanding why it visited so frequently, and then working to resolve and release whatever it was that made me such an attractive target. Essentially, I needed to transform my unconscious world into an environment where these entities could no longer thrive. In this newsletter, I'm going to expound on two of the scariest encounters I’ve had with sleep paralysis, explain why I believe they happened, and finally, how I got the sleep paralysis demon to leave me alone. So, read on—if you dare—and perhaps you’ll find some insights to help keep the sleep paralysis demon out of your dreams as well.

Lucifer, my love

The ex-girlfriend featured in the sleep paralysis dream I mentioned earlier and I had a particularly toxic dynamic. I’ll spare the details because I believe it’s unfair to give one-sided accounts of relationships when the other person isn’t here to defend themselves, and honestly, I was just as responsible—if not more so—for the toxicity between us. To be frank, I feel like most college relationships are pretty toxic. They often involve traumatized kids who think they’re adults, in environments that are anything but conducive to fostering real intimacy or deep connections. That being said, this particular ex-girlfriend spent a pretty substantial amount of time being listed as "Lucifer" in my phone, which should honestly tell you all you need to know about our dynamic. It was a love/hate kind of relationship. We’d have the most fun together, but we’d also say and do the most hurtful things to each other. I could say I hated how much I loved her, but that wouldn’t be true—because I didn’t really know what love was back then. But I definitely knew what hate was. And there were moments when I felt like I hated her, mostly because she wouldn’t be the person I thought she should be.

The long and short of it was this: our relationship was toxic, we both knew it was toxic, yet we found it incredibly hard to quit each other completely. We went through cycles—having a great time, falling out, breaking up, hating each other, swearing we'd never get back together, and then getting back together to repeat the pattern. As much as I wanted to, and knew I should either just be friends with her or remove her from my life entirely, there was a part of me that enjoyed the situation. When we hear the word "toxic," we tend to immediately think "bad," but toxic things can feel quite good. Just look at how many people love drinking alcohol—a substance that's literally poisonous. But that poison brings so much pleasure that we drink it, despite the obvious risks to our health. In the same way, even though I logically knew the relationship was bad for me, it felt good, which made it hard for me to consciously let go. And that’s why I think my subconscious used a sleep paralysis nightmare, featuring this girlfriend, to show me just how dangerous continuing down this path with her could be for my mental health.

The gap between the conscious and unconscious isn't nearly as wide as we’d like to believe. In fact, scientists believe that our nervous system can't distinguish between "real" and "fake" experiences, which makes sense, right? This is why watching horror movies can invoke such a real sense of terror, even though we logically know what we’re seeing isn’t "real." The same goes for dreams, which is why I think they’re so important. What we experience in dreams is just as real to us as what we experience in waking life, even if the consequences aren’t as lasting. Sometimes, a dream can relay a message more effectively than real-life experiences because dreams aren’t bound by the laws of reality, and their impact can be far greater because of that freedom. That’s why, when my ex-girlfriend attacked me in shadow form in that sleep paralysis dream, the message finally came through loud and clear: I needed to let go of this relationship once and for all.

In my opinion, that sleep paralysis encounter—and all sleep paralysis encounters—aren’t caused by some foreign malevolent entity attacking us from the outside. Rather, they are a process of our own subconscious trying to reveal an important truth to our conscious minds in a way that’s hard to ignore. After my girlfriend and I parted ways for good, I was never visited by a sleep paralysis entity again. However, I did still have experiences with sleep paralysis and night terrors, one of which I’ll share in the next section, as it further proves that these nightmares are reflections of what we’re going through—or perhaps running from—in our conscious lives.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream

The last major night terror I had with sleep paralysis came in 2015, about a year after hearing the devastating news that my mom had Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer. For that entire year, my mental health had been wrecked with constant feelings of depression and anxiety. One night, I woke up to the blood-curdling scream of my mother—a sound I was quite familiar with due to an experience from my childhood. When I was younger, I had once woken up to a similar scream from my mother, hopped out of bed expecting to find an intruder in our house, but instead found her standing on a kitchen chair, frantically yelling that she'd just seen a mouse, lol.

But this second time that I woke up to my mother screaming, two things were off. First, I was living in Oklahoma City at the time, 1,500 miles away from my mother, who was definitely not in traveling condition due to her chemo treatments. And second, I couldn’t move. Despite hearing my mother’s cries for help and seeing her outside my bedroom window being attacked by dogs, I was completely paralyzed, stuck in my bed. I had no legs to run, no arms to fight, and no voice to scream. I was utterly helpless as I watched those dogs attack my mom in the nightmare, which perfectly reflected how helpless I felt in real life to stop her from dying of cancer.

Eventually, in that dream, my mom succumbed to the attacks, and I woke up—fully this time—deeply disturbed and upset by what I'd just witnessed. But I also came away with new knowledge that felt strangely empowering. I realized that my sleep paralysis dreams and the helplessness I experienced in them were a clear reflection of the depression, anxiety, and helplessness I was feeling in "real" life. The entities, presences, and demons trying to hurt me in my sleep were representations of the entities, presences, and demons I was allowing to hurt me in waking life.

This revelation showed me a clear path to stop these nightmares once and for all: by going within, confronting, and working to enlighten the darkness that had accumulated inside me. When we don’t process the emotional trauma we experience in reality, those emotions—and the fears and desires attached to them—often manifest in our dreams. From my experience, sleep paralysis, in particular, seems to arise from high levels of unresolved fear and anxiety. Anxiety is debilitating by nature, so it makes sense that in a sleep paralysis dream, the "demon" comes and paralyzes you, taking away your ability to act. It’s an expression of the fear of not being able to control what happens in our lives.

Though my mother, brothers, girlfriends, and roommates lived in the same house as me, none of them ever experienced my sleep paralysis demons because those demons only existed within me, not outside me. This brings me to the ultimate point of this newsletter—the truth that all hauntings happen from the inside, out. To exorcise these malevolent entities from our lives, we must identify what it is inside us that they feed on and work to cleanse ourselves of those negative energy sources.

The Hat Man

Sleep paralysis and the nightmares that accompany it are experienced across cultures and have been described, in one form or another, throughout history. What I find particularly fascinating is that one of the forms the evil entity takes in these encounters is of a shadow-man in a black, fedora-style hat—a description that’s apparently consistent across people from vastly different parts of the world. I don’t believe this is caused by an actual, stylish demonic entity traveling the globe, haunting people in their sleep. Instead, I think it’s a manifestation of the collective unconscious—the idea that humanity shares a universal pool of ideas, fears, beliefs, and archetypes, and that we are both contributing to and drawing from this collective consciousness all the time.

One of these collective archetypes is the Shadow, which represents the unconscious part of ourselves, often linked to ignorance, evil, or malevolence, because we resist acknowledging and understanding it. In my opinion, sleep paralysis encounters, certain mental illnesses, and even war are manifestations of this collective shadow, which constantly seeks recognition and expression. When we refuse to acknowledge or express our shadow in healthy ways, it finds other, often destructive outlets—manifesting as night terrors or other frightening expressions.

I had a more recent experience with an ex-partner who felt like she had an evil spirit in her house whenever she was there alone but told me that whenever I was around, she no longer felt that evil spirit's energy. Now, that may have been because the spirit knew that I was such a spiritual gangster that it dare not bring its funky ass energy around while I was there, lol, but what is more likely is that she felt unsafe being in such a big house by herself and my presence made her feel more safe subconsciously which reduced the need for her subconscious fear of being alone to present itself as a haunting.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not outright denying the existence of spirits. I fully believe that disembodied entities exist around us all the time. However, I think that most of these entities are not malevolent and are generally not very interested in our earthly matters. And for those entities that do linger in our energy, it’s usually because something within us is attracting them.

All existing entities depend on an energy source for survival. 'Demons' are no different, except they don't feed on physical food. Instead, they feed on dark energies like fear, negativity, hopelessness, ignorance, greed, apathy, pride, confusion, narcissism, selfishness, and so on. Nothing can remain in an environment that can’t sustain it. So, if you need to remove a 'demon' from your home, you must starve it by first becoming aware of what within yourself it’s feeding off of, and then work to remove that energy source from your life. Through years of meditation, self-reflection, self-inquiry, and conscious healing, I've been able to bring light to most of the darkness within me.

Now, please don’t get me wrong—this doesn’t mean I’m perfectly healed or incapable of being triggered. There's still a lot of trauma in this body, lol. But what's different now is that I'm aware of the darkness within me, I spend time with it regularly, I'm not afraid of it, and through being able to face it consciously, it has much, much less of an effect on my life or well-being.

When I started my spiritual journey, I went looking for demons. I sought anything and everything that would bring me closer to Truth, no matter the consequences. To my surprise, the demons I found weren’t out in the world—they were within myself. One of the most profound and liberating discoveries I’ve made on my healing journey is that my sleep paralysis demon is me. I am the hat man. I am the figure looming menacingly over myself while I sleep. I am the entity who paralyzes myself with unresolved emotions, fears, traumas, and anxieties.

The demon that haunted me for so many years wasn’t some agent of the underworld sent to torment me for being a 'sinner.' Instead, it was the unconscious version of myself—my own shadow—begging for acknowledgment, begging for light, urging me to heal and evolve into my highest self. "The devil" has no power over my life anymore, because I called him by his true name—Micheal—and learned what he was sent to teach me. My sleep paralysis demon was only my enemy as long as I secretly saw myself as my own enemy. But ever since I made peace with my darkness and brought light to it, the sleep paralysis demon haunts me no more.

What's Going On With Me?

I feel loved. Sometimes I feel bad for mostly writing about pain, trauma, and all the bad things that have happened to me but I do it because my ultimate aim is to help relieve suffering in others through my writing and healing often requires recounting painful experiences. This is because, when it comes to relieving suffering, pain is the best teacher. But so many good things have happened to me too. I really do often feel isolated and alone in this world but more often this very same world, or whomever is behind it, blesses me with an experience to prove that I am not alone. I'm not forgotten. I'm not abandoned. In fact, deep down I know that even the bad things that have happened to me have been for my greatest good.

I've been seeing so much purple lately which, I know, isn't surprising because I own and wear a lot of purple. But that's why it's been blowing my mind—because I already see purple quite a bit so the fact that I'm seeing it so much that it's suspicious should really say something about how often it's happening. I can't help but feel like it's a wink from the Universe. What it's suggesting, I can't quite say for sure at the moment. But something in me tells me it's positive.

I recently just got back from a work trip in Charlotte, NC for a few days and it was honestly quite nice and a bit nostalgic to be back in a place I'd spent so much time in in a not so distant past. Of course this triggered reflection in me of just how much my life has changed since I left Charlotte in 2021. I never would have been able to imagine what was coming, but I knew something big was on the horizon, and I feel similarly now. I'm excited to see what's in store and I really hope you enjoyed this newsletter and that the coming days bring you something to look forward to too.

With love,

The Hat Man 💜