You wake up and you can’t move your body, a shadowy figure looms over you, but it feels too real to be a dream. If you’ve experienced this, you might have had a sleep paralysis hallucination.
It sounds like the start of a horror film: a shadowy figure at the end of your bed, a faceless presence sitting on your chest. It doesn’t matter which of these terrifying scenarios plays out when you wake up from a deep sleep, they all have one thing in common: you can’t move, run away or cry out for help. You are fully conscious, yet you are frozen to the spot and unable to escape your sleep paralysis demon. So what is going on?