When I was 16 I had a spell of sleep paralysis that lasted around 3 months. It started with me having a hard time falling asleep. Eventually, I would start to drift off and when I would wake back up I would notice a dark figure in the corner of my room. I have heard that people can not move when they’re having an experience, but in my case, I don’t know if I could or not I just had the feeling that I shouldn’t. Similar to a spider crawling across you and you didn’t want to provoke it. This happened for about 3 months with some variation.
The figure lacked a very solid form and kind of blended into the darkness; however, twice I distinctly remember noticing that the figure had on a hat because I could make out the brim when it moved in front of my window. For the most part, what I had named my shadow demon stayed in the corner, but one time the figure moved across my room and say at the foot of my bed and stared at me. I didn’t want to look away so stared as long as I could only blinking when I had to and eventually just fell asleep. I have heard theories about these events being a result of people manifesting them from things they have heard or seen. I don’t particularly believe this because when this happened to me I had never heard of sleep paralysis or that people had hallucinations of shadow figures. I had never heard of the Hat man until I was sharing experiences with a friend who had night terrors and he mentioned seeing a man in a hat. After finding this we Google man in hat night terror and that’s when we learned that it was a worldwide phenomenon. I tried to tell my parents about this but at the time I was taking an acne medicine that was really helping me and they were going to make me stop taking it because they thought it caused the sleep paralysis so after a day or so I lied and told them they stopped. This went on for about 3 months and finally ended when I started sleeping on my couch instead of my bed. This experience has really messed up my sleep schedule and for the longest time, I would only sleep a few hours a night because I hated sleeping. I have only now 3 years later started to have a more normal sleep schedule. I hope by posting this someone can relate to it or at the very least be entertained by my story.