I used to suffer from sleep paralysis a lot due to stress at work+depression, i had 2 reocurring dreams every damn night, both were looping back endlessly until i realized i was dreaming and forced myself awake.

One was that i felt being chased by an invisible entity and as i felt it closer my legs were getting heavier and heavier until the entity caught up to me, at that moment the dream restarted.

The other one was me just chilling at bed, you know that moment when you wake up but dont want to get up, but completely unable to move and again i felt an entity watching me and getting closer and closer until i "woke up" only to realize i am still paralyzed and another loop begins.

Fortunely, i got so used to these that i managed to identify pretty fast when i was in a dream so i could force me to wake up easily. Also these dreams stopped happening since i quit that job and moved from that place.

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...)

The spectre of Youtube haunts my dreams, because there's often this recurring segment where it feels like I'm watching a youtube video, with a computer... that makes up most of my dreams

Sometimes I just see my house and other places I recognize around here and there...

Note: thinking about it, I'm not that imaginative in my dreams, now that I think of it...

One notable one was me doing parkour/roblox-style obby to escape from zombies but then caught me and I turned into a spectator/ghost or something and I moved around the place...

In a 2nd dream, I was escaping from my school, on a go-kart, only to wake up and realize the school bus I was in was nearing school itself...

3rd dream and actual nightmare, due to me watching a movie where some wasps mutate to turn humans into disgusting wasp-like creatures like them, I think I remember my dad turning into one in my nightmare...

I wouldn't describe it as a nightmare, but I once dreamt that I got banned from War Thunder (a game developed by Russians) for supporting Russia in the ongoing war

It's a few years ago now, but I used to have a recurring nightmare about having a nuke or bomb dropped on me.

Usually it was by human bombers, but sometimes it was alien ships. I especially remember this one time when it started with having a picnic at a park, but then the clouds part and there's this massive, planet-sized ship hanging over us, and I hear the scary, whistling sound and see the bombs falling just before I wake up.

A while ago I dreamt I was being killed over and over. Another time the people getting shot nearby made it into my dream from a movie about the founding of the CPC. Neither were that bad. I haven’t had any scary dreams recently, but my gf keeps getting chased by a microbiologist in theirs. Last night I dreamed of a Christian camp with a lake and random computer parts scattered about. The counselor was passing out weed and for some reason “weed” was a pepper shaped cattail.

Whenever I'm stressed I get some very scary and vivid nightmares of being attacked by large dogs.

But other than that I also constantly have very realistic and boring dreams that feed me inconvenient false information.

Just the other day I completely dreamed up a couple of comments from a colleague about a project, and was very confident that they actually had said that until I went back in the message history to double check.

The worst dreams are the ones that follow you while awake.

2 days ago I had a nightmare of an alligator attacking a building and the people in the building were being dicks to the alligator for fun, then a rescue team came to evacuate them, but everyone was having so much fun annoying the alligator so the team had to say "leave immediatly, don't worry if you don't leave right now with us, we won't be back to recover you" and like damn

I very very rarely ever remember my dreams, with the sole exception of panicking over thinking I forgot to drop a university class in time or forgot some assignment. I haven't been a student for about 20 years, but it still comes up regularly.

Had a dream I shot myself for failing 2 exams in a row. Of course that would never happen irl for two reasons (I'd never fail an exam, and I'd never shoot myself), but it was a weird dream, kinda unsettling.

Pointless speculation:

You have been very honest with some people and they did not like the truth.

There are two really horrible nightmares I remember, but I think it's best to not share them and instead share some funnier ones.

1. There was a variant of the "every copy of SM64 is personalized" story wherein cartridges included a laundry tag saying either "machine washable" or "non-machine washable". The "machine washable" cartridges included, like, blood letting and a level taking place in a bloody human intestine (and yes, it was hyperrealistic).

2. I was getting stalked and harassed in some way by a super hacker called ERIUQSENOLISPE, whose name was ASCII art made from "every slur in the world". The name is "Epsilon Esquire" backwards, by the way.

I dreamt once that I wanted to kill myself because I wasn't married yet. I was on the edge of a building and there I realised I didn't want to marry. When I stepped back I stumbled over a pebble and fell down and died.

I have reoccurring nightmares about shootout in forest followed by big explosion.

The worst nightmares I get are always consistently about my dogs being hunted down/targeted by some sort of flesh creature. Once it was what I can only describe as a flesh “horse” (tall with four legs, long neck, and long face but nothing else horse-like) trying to break into my house to kill my dogs, not me, my dogs. Another was set in my home (again) but instead of it just being me and the dogs there was some sort of family gathering being hosted, so a lot of people making food, dancing, laughing, but not me. I was busy scrambling around searching for my dogs because I knew there were flesh monsters outside (this time instead of a “horse” they were more humanoid but still crawled on all fours) and I couldn’t find my dogs. My house is very small but for some reason in this dream it was gigantic with twists and turns and weird alcoves that don’t exist in my actual house. Nobody was scared of the creatures outside, its as if they didn’t know they existed, so I was on my own trying to find and protect my dogs. Thankfully I did find them and they were fine but of course my girl dog was trying to pick a fight with one of the creatures. She did this in the horse dream too, the “horse” attempted to crush her with its front “hooves” but I managed to grab her and run inside. It just stood outside the sliding doors staring. For some reason these creatures don’t care about me at all, they always want the dogs.

While I try not to put too much meaning towards dreams (the non-lucid ones) these ones are pretty explicit about my anxiety surrounding my dogs and how I feel powerless to protect them sometimes. My girl dog doesn't live with me right now due to my grandma forbidding it (lung issues), having the boy is enough for her so my girl has to stay with my dad a little longer. So because I’m not there to protect her I worry a lot that one day I’ll get a call saying something bad happened to her. This anxiety most likely manifests in my dreams in the form of supernatural flesh monsters.

Once I’m finished my undergrad I’m going to try to do my masters in another province and move both dogs with me, its hard not having them together and I know they miss each other because whenever I say my girl’s name in front of my boy he gets happy and when they see each other when I visit my dad they can’t contain their excitement. Every time I leave to go home my girl always tries to wrestle her way out the house and into the car with us. It’s devastating but I know I’ll get her back soon. I don’t have these nightmares as often anymore, thankfully, and all my lucid dreams star the dogs and they’re always safe. I know my dad is taking good care of her too, he’s just waiting for me to give the signal.