All I know about this phenomenon is what has happened to me. I have had incidences of sleep paralysis countless times, but here I will discuss the two most extreme times. I am not the type of person to investigate anything too deeply when these types of occurrences greet me, I suppose because I am very questioning and fanatical by nature, and do not want to delude myself into believing anything through my passion. Together with that, I am used to scientific friends just setting things like these aside. So I tend to do the same. I'd like to make more of an effort to be appreciative for the collection of outlandish things that happen to me individually, and to research them as far as possible, but I find it hard with all the New Age bullsh!t out there, credibility-wise.
Incident Number 1:
At this stage of my life I was a healthy sleeper; I could go to bed and not wake up until morning. This particular night, I kept being woken up for some reason. After a few awakenings (I couldn't be sure of the spaces of time in between these: during sleep, a second can be an hour, and vice versa) I heard the doorknob rattle, and found that I couldn't move. I wasn't specifically terrified, I just couldn't move. I opened my mouth to try and speak, to ask who I assumed to be my brothers, what they were doing (my door was locked). But I couldn't speak. I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew I was awake again before I was even aware I had been asleep again. This time I heard the doorknob rattle again, and then I heard the key (which was stuck in the door from the inside of my room), slowly edge its way out of the keyhole, and fall on the floor. By now I was confused, and I was struggling inside to move an arm, a leg, anything, all I could move were my eyes. And then I heard the door creep open, but before I could try to move, I blacked out yet again.
There are a great many strange things about this scenario. Strange Thing Number 1 would be that the key and lock were very old school and hefty; there was no possible way that the key was falling out of the lock onto the floor on its own, and I also knew for sure that it was impossible to push the key out of the lock from the outside of my door. I knew this because my brothers used to torment me daily when they were younger and they'd chase me into my room where I'd lock the door and they'd spend a while sticking knives and pens and miscellaneous objects into the keyhole trying to retrieve the key by means of making it drop on to a piece of paper they had slipped under the door, ready to be pulled towards them, so they could open my door and ravage me.
The next morning I awoke with the distinct feeling that I hadn't been to sleep, and that things had been 'going' on, that I couldn't quite remember. I saw that my key was not in the door, or even on the floor where it had allegedly dropped. I rushed out into the loungeroom and I asked my mother where my brothers were; they were playing outside she said. I went out and asked them if they had come into my room last night and they hadn't. I went back into my room and sat baffled for a while, before resigning to the fact it must have just been a dream (conveniently ignoring the very real dilemma of the missing key).
A couple of hours later I found the key on the other side of my room. I don't know what this means. No one in my family could have done it. No one could have done it.
Incident Number 2:
I was at home during the day; I was reading on my bed. I lay down and closed my eyes, expecting to sleep, and suddenly I was thrust into this.. tunnel, if you could call it that, these lucid, sporadic, swirling and queasy lights, blinding, all colours, not at all psychedelic or amazing, just terrifying.. it was all going so impossibly and sickeningly fast and then a noise built up in my ears, it began very tolerably, a humming sound, but it got louder and louder, and more tinny and sireny and shrill, it was piercing my body and it was as though there were a few dimensions to this one sound, and the noise horrified me, I 'knew' it was going to do.. 'something' to me..
It started getting louder and screamingly painful and I thought I was going to die, that it was going to kill me, this sound which went out of the boundaries of that which human ear drums can handle, I started trying to scream in pain, I thought I was screaming but I couldn't hear myself over the noise, I couldn't move, I couldn't see anything but the colours.
I must have blacked out because I woke up later, refreshed but a little sleepy and delirious and confused, my ears stung, and I went out to my mother and asked if she had heard me screaming. She said no. My ears hurt for the next three days. Ever since then, I kept periodically getting ringing in my ears, and this sound that gives me the sense that something is 'tuning in' to my brain somehow? I used to joke that the aliens were keeping track of me, but I really don't know what it means. I get the ringing even now, but I just discount it.
I'm not sure what this means. Are they some sort of attack of psychosis? And if so, what of the misplaced key? And what of the ringing ears, although that could be disregarded as psychosomatic. Is it some psychological phenomena, some kind of manifestation yet unknown to humans? I have no idea..