My Third Time With Sleep Paralysis

This happened over this past weekend.

My wife and I were invited to visit with some friends of ours who had just recently moved up to Washington State for a new job. We packed our bags and took the 4 hour drive to their place Saturday morning. We arrived shortly after lunch and were greeted with the warmest of welcomes. Our friends gave us the dime tour of their new rental house and showed us were we would be sleeping. It was a cozy little room that wasn't quite set up with their guest bed, but had an air mattress on the floor with the head up against the wall, and the air pump laying to the right (also at the head of the bed), I presume in case we needed to add more air to it if it started to deflate.

We dropped our bag on the floor, and spent the rest of the evening enjoying the company of our friends and the sites of the town. We went to the Ram to get a beer and to watch the OSU vs. Arizona game. I had one beer, but my wife had none. The Ram restaurant cut our game off early, so we got our check and left. We all stopped by the store to pick up dinner and some ice cream, and then headed home. After dinner and ice cream and watched 4 episodes of Bones from season 5. I had never seen the show before, and it reminded me and my wife of a more comedic version of CSI.

Dog tired after the fourth episode, we headed off to bed, which was around midnight. I slept on the left side of the air mattress and my wife was on the right. I placed our dog's pillow next to me on the floor, in front of the air pump that was sitting there. I coiled up the corded hose of the air pump so it was out of the way of the dog bed and wouldn't bother him as he slept. Being so tired, it didn't take long before we fell asleep.

I was dreaming pretty peacefully when I was awoken suddenly by something I cannot explain, but I could sense that something was wrong. My eyes opened enough that I could see the room through my eye lashes, but I could not move. What I saw, was what looked like a small gargoyle above me. It had a long snout, and tall ears or horns. It was just the black outline of it, while its 'body' appeared translucent. In that moment I realized that it was holding me down, pinning me in place. I could not move, nor could I speak. In my head I was telling it to "Get off me, get off me" over and over again.

Still struggling with it, I started to growl at it, hopping that the noise would alert or awake my wife as she slept next to me. I felt her move over, and the 'gargoyle' turned its head and looked at her. It then did the little bounce from me over to her. I instantly heard her breathing change as it was now on her. Once it was off me, I felt my limbs regain control of themselves and I instantly sat up in bed flaying my arms around trying to 'shoo' this thing off my wife as if it was a cat. As I did this, I saw it fly up off her, up towards to the door. Part of it seemed to slip through the crack of the door at the top while the rest of it slide down the door, still looking our direction, and then disappeared from view.

My wife, was actually awake at the time I tried to 'scare' the thing away, so when she saw me doing this it totally startled her, thinking I had quite a nightmare. I lay back down and mumbled "stupid demon" as I heard my wife asking what happened. I cannot remember much of what I said what just happened, but it was enough for her to be concerned for me and she prayed for my safety. She really didn't understand what I was talking about, and really assumed that I had a nightmare, that it was all a dream, or in my head. Kind of like "yeah, yeah, sure honey, you just had a bad dream, now go back to sleep." I closed my eyes again to fall back asleep as I was still really tired.

It didn't seem much longer after that, that I was awake again, from a noise. I head, what I thought was my wife, getting up out of bed, walking behind my head, then started to fiddle with the air pump. I could hear what sounded like something rubbing against the ribbing of the hose. I opened my eyes to ask my wife what she was doing, and saw her laying there, with her back to me. I then thought maybe it was the dog. So, I turned over to look where he was sleeping. He was still curled up, unmoved. My wife, noticed that I was awake and she said that she heard something that sounded like scratching, that to her, sounded like a dog scratching on the door, or perhaps the jingling of a dogs tags as it walked.

I then proceeded to tell her that I thought it was her walking behind me and playing with the air pump (only realizing how impossible this could have been as the wall was the only thing that was behind us). At that moment I heard my dog move as his own tags hanging from his collar jingled, I looked back over at him and then noticed that the hose of air pump was fully extended, laying across his dog bed, and almost touching our dog. I grabbed the hose the coiled it back up, and out of the way. I lie back down and once again fell back to sleep.

As I feel asleep, my wife was still awake, praying for me when she head a voice behind her, at which point she felt paralyzed. Scared, she shut her eyes tight, not daring to open them. Hopping against hope that if she didn't see it, then she won't acknowledge it, that it would go away. She tried to move her hand to wake me up to help her, but couldn't move it. She tried to speak, but couldn't. Then she began to pray for this thing to go away in Jesus' name. Once she was finally released, she woke me up, and told me what just happened to her. She was in a panic, and totally freaked out. I put my arm around her as she curled up next to me, and we both fell asleep again in each others arms.

We were both awake for the fourth time that night, when our dog, which was now sleeping on the air mattress with us, yelped and practically bolted off the bed. All I could think was "Oh my gosh! What now?" We called our dog back into bed with us and calmed him down in our arms wondering what on earth that was all about, and for the last time that night, went to sleep.

As morning dawned, we ran through what happened that night and what we each experienced. I asked her if the scratching noise that she heard sounded like this, and I ran my finger down the ribbing of the air pump hose, giving off a sound that is like that of a zipper, and she agreed it was the noise she heard. I asked what it was that she heard the thing say, and she said that she didn't think it was English, but it was something like "Ogma" or "Agdma" (spelling based on pronunciation).

We didn't immediately tell our hosts what happened that night. Instead we went about the day like normal and tried to enjoy ourselves, trying not to think about the night before. Later that evening, we said our good-byes and started to drive home. I called our host when we found a place to stop for a bit and told him why we had such a bad night. He sounded uncomfortable about it, and seemed pretty sure that we must have dreamed it as they haven't heard of anything like that happen in the house before. When we finally got home, we unloaded the car, got into our PJ's and fell almost instantly to sleep.

To quote my wife, "...that was a long night".