Wow, a lot of really good information here about sleep paralysis. I sadly know about this subject all too well. On average, every single night, this happens to me or maybe even more than once in one night.
The techniques I have used in the past to get out of it is wiggling my toes or fingers and that helps, but not all the time. More than often, I just have to jerk myself out of it.
The most recent occurance of this was just last night. I was having a nightmare where I was in my bed and there was this black thing on the other side, which was basically a ball of blackness. Well I stupidly went to investigate and it lached onto my long hair and that's when I woke up. I was on my back, in sleep paralysis so all I could do was lie there. While this is going on, it begins with just a feeling that something is about to get me, but then I actually do see something. Kinda like a small black creature by my door. By this point I'm basically panicing and I'm trying my hardest to move, fail several times, and then finally do move. When that happened, I looked to the creature to see it back at my door and it slid out of the room even though the door was closed.
This is nothing short of normal for me and has been happening for several years now. It's kind of upped in intensity and occurs more often nowadays though.
It has only ever happened on my back, but the quickest was for me to get to sleep is on my back so I exchange going to sleep quicker with most likely getting sleep paralysis later on. Also, if it happens and I get out of it, if I just lie there in bed, within a few seconds I'm already paralyzed again, so I always try to shift position and sleep on my side when this happens.
Of course, if I have just awoken from a particular horrifying experience, I usually quickly turn the lights on (which helps wake me up and the hallucinations leave quicker too) and just lie there in bed surveying the room, calming myself down. Eventually I will turn off the lights and go back to sleep, but if the hallucinations were incredibly horrifying, I won't sleep the rest of the night or it'll take me a while before I feel comfortable to turn off the lights again.
Almost always when this happens it's after I have woken up from a few hours sleep or even just a few minutes sometimes (which happened last night; only asleep 30 minutes and it already happened). And it's always accompianed by hallucinations which are always scary and vary in degrees of how horrifying they are. Last night's was pretty scary, but not too bad.
As I said this happenes on average once every night. So some nights I don't have it and others it occurs 3+ times in one night. In effect, I try not to think about it when I am falling asleep in fear that I may induce it. However, I'm not afraid to sleep; I value my sleep hours very much and if only I didn't have sleep paralysis, it would be very enjoyable for me.
It's most likely going to happen again tonight, but there's almost nothing I can do to stop it. I just have learned to live with it.