CW: probably(?) incredibly scary dreams/nightmares to many people. Venture forth carefully I guess. Hard for me to gauge scary levels of my own experiences

I have (diagnosed, btw ™️) narcolepsy. It's somewhat famous, maybe infamous?, but in my experience few people know anything about the reality of living with it. It's treated as the "haha, guy go sleep" disease.

Well, that's certainly part of it. The other part, before you're diagnosed, which for almost all suffers is mid-20s and onwards (symptoms manifest and become worse and worse for people into adolescence and peak in your 30s. Lifelong, chronic) is a living nightmare, pun... intended?, of totally unregulated sleep/awake cycles. The problem with my brain, literally, is I don't have normal sleep cycles. When I go to sleep I enter REM snap immediately. Within a couple minutes, unlike almost humans who have cycles of deep sleep and REM throughout their sleep.

So the TLDR is unmedicated I will have no sleep schedule. I will always be asleep but always awake. I would sleep (this is absolutely zero exaggeration) 10-16 hours per day, sometimes more, never less. How does one function like that? You don't. You sleep at work, you sleep driving (...), you sleep on the toilet, while reading, everywhere.

Going from consciousness directly into dreams, btw, is the exact perfect recipe for nightmares (also cool good dreams sometimes). I used to tell people my nightmares until I saw their reactions and I stopped.

For example, I had (past tense because now I'm medicated) no less than three unique sleep paralysis demons. Oh yeah, I had sleep paralysis multiple times a day, btw. It became so normal to me that I quite literally no longer felt the impending doom often associated with it...

Demon one I guess I'll call "my girlfriend demon." (I've never named these before, but just for descriptions here). This demon would visit me mostly when I was napping or regularly sleeping. It's impossible to explain why or how, but it always gave off a feminine energy to me, hence the "gf demon" nickname. In my dream's eye I would feel and see, never clearly of course, the dark figure, small in height, standing at the foot of my bed usually. Sometimes off to the side in the curtains of the window. At the worst times, directly beside me. Staring at me. Encroaching upon me. Slowly suffocating me until I woke up, heart racing, sometimes punching at air and pillows.

Another demon I had was "closet guy." Ah, classic closet guy. He'd visit me standing in or in front of my closet. Staring at me facelessly. A dark shadow, tall or maybe the same height as me. As I drifted from sleep to consciousness and back and forth he'd sometimes get closer, sometimes stay away, always filling me with dread and the feeling that can only be described as doom.

Another reoccurring hallucination (did I mention that's a symptom?) I had was sound based rather than visual. The worst time was also the first time. Over 10 years ago now, I took a nap on my couch after an early day at work. I mean I got off early for some reason. I laid down, snap, instant nightmare realm. I heard this fucking pounding. Pounding, slamming, pounding on my door. Enough that should have burst the hinges off and whatever hell creature was behind it should've come in. But they never did. The pounding noise just went on and on for what felt like hours but was probably a couple mins of REM. I was in full on sleep paralysis. I tried to roll myself off the couch. I tried to move a finger, a foot, nothing worked. I knew someone or something was trying to kill me. Was it my roommate? Why was he pounding? I'm trying harder than I've ever tried to just move anything. To wake up. To get up. Eventually, of course, I was able to move my fingers or foot or whatever and the paralysis breaks and I'm fully awake, heart racing with no fucking clue what the fuck just happened and wondering if it was real or a dream.

On the good side of dreams, I used to have what people call lucid dreams all the time. Now, spoiler, these always devolved into absolute hellscapes. Like some monkeys paw shit. "You can dream anything you want and control it..... for a while. Then everything becomes warped and more and more demonic as your control slips." I can't remember right now any specific dreams like this beyond like, yes, full horny mode, lots of sex dreams. Very vivid dreams. The type where the dream person is so real that they basically are just real. Even years later there's a woman in my dreams that I could swear is real. I've ridden the bus with her hundreds of times, held her hand, she's practically my girlfriend. I guess the definition of good dream is subjective though since I enjoy that dream very much.... then I wake up to reality, which now days is loneliness. Hmm.

My world, which used to be like a waking dream, in the sense that I was very happy, had a gf, very in shape, etc. but was haunted by these constant nightmares and paralysis events, has now inverted. My nightmares are now my day to day life. I no longer dream. Not memorably anyway. All that's left is the nightmare of this world, worse than any my sleeping mind could ever create.

(I'm self censoring the absolute worst nightmares (outside of paralysis) because they're 1) based on real and horrific events that don't need to be gone over here but did happen to me... or around me rather (spoiler: seeing people murdered) and 2) the specifics would make me too uniquely identifiable. Suffice to say, imagine you saw people, plural, murdered in front of you irl and you get to relive that nightly for years. Luckily I rarely dream anymore...)