Sleep Paralysis is definitely responsible for so many of the 'supernatural' or alien abduction experiences that people swear they've experienced. The hypnogogic state can be a frightening and realistic hallucinatory realm and when your eye open before your body has dream imagery and emotion can bleed into your actual visual field. There should be more education about this, especially from a young age, so people will be less apt to believe what they are experience is real.
That being said, in the case of
@Michael1011 , he definitely has a sleep demon cutting his body at night and not kava dermopathy.
they used to call it "the old woman" because people would imagine it was caused by an old woman sitting on your chest, often conveniently the old woman nearby who owns some land and livestock you'd take after falsely accusing her of being a witch. (See also incubus and succubus. An incubus would ink you, on a bus, unlike the succubus)
Basically, we are all hallucinating all the time because we are asleep and dreaming most of the time. It's just that sometimes we are also awake at the same time and using our brains to suppress our knowledge of the fact that we are hallucinating and dreaming all the time. It's what our brain does. That's normal. It is (apparently effortless) coherent consciousness that is abnormal. And takes a lot of effort, sometimes that stress of repressing the hallucinations all the time really gets to us. That's one of the many reasons we need 8 hrs sleep a night and it is better to go to bed early and wake early after 8 hours, like 9pm - 5am or 10pm - 6am for overnight sleeping. Deprive yourself of sleep and the other side takes over fairly quickly.
Thoroughly agree we should tell people the truth so they are better able to handle it, and not freak out when they stumble on the truth. Of course, the truth is pretty darn freaky. Like, e.g. we never fully perceive reality, just one we construct in our heads based on minute sampling (constrained by our sensory limitations, we can't hear what dogs hear or see what bees see) of our environment and we extrapolate inside, put flesh on the skeletal frame of reality we have, based on what we expect to find and usually we're right, except when something out of our experience or expectations is there, which is also usually, by which I mean, it's a mess but it usually doesn't matter, except when it does. So not only is our memory quite unreliable, but also our perception of reality as it is happening has some extreme limitations. A man has to know his limitations. And sometimes we don't need our biases confirmed, quite the opposite.
