Its the middle of the night, you are trapped between sleep and wakefulness, you look around the room and everything seems to be in order, but a heavy feeling of worry overcomes yourself and experiencing shivering visual… this is the scary side of sleep paralysis.
Rodney Ascher has come to scare viewers with The Nightmare, a documentary about sleep paralysis, an condition that affects just over 6 out of every 100 people and consists of the inability to move any muscle in your body when you wake up, even though you remain fully conscious.
Those who had to suffer from sleep paralysis expressed the great desperation that they would feel during these episodes not being able to even ask for help.
The documentary The Nightmare explores the dark side of this spooky illness, interviewing 8 people on camera while bringing their experiences to life in a way that could conceivably induce nightmares in casual viewers.
One by one the sufferers share their story and their nightmares, some claim to have come face to face with a shadow man, who visits their bedroom every night walking right up to their bed, bent over, and stare into their eyes from a distance of about one inch.
Another of the subjects mentioned he was able to prevent having sleep paralysis by sleeping on his side. This position seemed rather uncomfortable after some time and the moment he decided to relax and sleep on his back, a red, tendril-y tentacle appeared on the ceiling.
When asked about including a more scientific approach to its documentary, Ascher said they found some scientific studies on this topic, such the one in the UK Mirror which had an interesting theory about how the entities people saw during their episodes could be a projection of their own internal body map and into their immediate surroundings.
However, Ascher did not think science could provide a reason why we see these specific experiences.
Have you ever experienced something such as sleep paralysis?