Hi everyone, I’m new to this community and wanted to share some of my personal experiences to see what other people who have experienced this might have to say about it, I had no idea this has happened to other people until literally last night where I stumbled on a YouTube reel of a pastor talking about sleep paralysis, and ironically in the comments, everyone saying they’ve had many experiences parallel to my own where they had sleep paralysis and once they called on Jesus in their mind, were released from it. I’ve had this happen many times where either I was simply frozen in bed, and I was aware of something being in the room with me. My mind & thoughts would feel ultra sluggish but would always instinctively call for Jesus and this was happening long before I chose to become a devout Christian. Other times I would be experiencing getting seduced by a “familiar” spirit or what I think is a succubi trying to feed on me taking on the form of a person and trying to seduce me into having sex with it (same result I’d realize it and call on the Lord) one of the comments I saw in the reel thread was to research the hat man and I discovered this is a widely experienced phenomenon not isolated to just me. So here are my encounters :
Encounter 1 :
The first time I encountered the hat man, I was on some kind of short school bus sitting in the back, there were a couple of other people in other seats sitting silently, and there was a strange pinkish-red glow coming from outside into the bus windows. I had a weird hybrid of both first and 3rd person-esquires views of only the inside of the bus. The hat man was sitting in the passenger seat right behind the driver near the front, facing towards the middle aisle with his back facing the window (he appeared as if he was sitting in a wheelchair) he had on a jet-black wide-brimmed hat, a black coat, black gloves, and really dark sunglasses with a pasty white complexion on his face and looks sort of like a man in his 50’s or 60’s with visible signs of being older in age (the only skin I could see is his face and he appears this way every time I’ve seen him, he almost reminds me of a character out of the matrix)
He starts talking to me and offering all these grandiose things like fame, wealth, prosperity, and money (I’m not sure why, but it makes me think of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness by the adversary) so I interrupt him and I asked him, “Do you confess the Christ?” ( 1 John chapter 4 of the Bible tells us to test every spirit to see if they are from God, I also want to mention that this stuff happened BEFORE I was more familiar with scripture) to which the man hesitated for a moment, looked a bit uncomfortable and then continued to talk ignoring my question and continuing to offer me things. At that point I calmly said, “Okay then, in that case in the name of Jesus I command you begone.” (This sort of thing has happened many times in sleep paralysis dreams and other encounters and has always freed me from whatever darkness I was experiencing in the dream space)
What happened next happened really fast, the man let out an angry inhuman roar & morphed into this strange flesh-colored demon, and swiped at me. Its claws fell short right in front of my face because as it did so right after I spoke the command, the bus door opened; I felt a gust of wind, and the creature pretty much got vacuumed out,. Right after that, I woke up.
Encounter 2 :
The second encounter with the hate man, I was sitting in a chair in a dark room, think of your stereotypical old school interrogation room; I couldn’t make out anything beyond the circle of light cast from the ceiling lamp above where I was sitting and the hat man was standing in front of me asking me questions & attempting to threaten information out of me. There was something I said back to him in defiance (this detail is hazy but I vaguely remember it not being anything of importance) and he smiled, gave me a rebuttal to my challenge and I woke up after that.
Encounter 3 :
The 3rd and final showdown I last had with the hat man began with being on a sunny ocean beach, the sky overhead was a pretty blue. I was myself as an adult, and with what I vaguely remember was a kid version of me, I think like 6 or 7 years old. I told him let’s go splash around & play in the water, so we ran towards where the waves were lapping up onto the sand & the beginning of super long bridge that came up out of the sand, stretching beyond across the ocean into the horizon. So after we got onto the bridge and splashing around for a bit, kid me got this scared look on his face for a moment, got my attention telling me we needed to get onto this gazebo-like structure on the side of the bridge so I followed him lightheartedly saying “what’s wrong? Let’s go back to the water!” And turned around, looking our towards the horizon which looked cloudy, grey, and dark off in the distance. The hat man was standing in front of me in his trench coat, suddenly there was a strange flash and there was a vast army of weird grayish skinned people with zombie-like expressions on their faces behind him. I remember suddenly feeling really protective and then I shouted directly at the hat man, “By the authority in the name of Jesus Christ I command you be gone!” And the moment I did that, I woke up from sleep.