About 18 years ago, I was living in a small town in Ontario as a missionary. My missionary companion and I were eating dinner with an Italian family. There was a young teenage boy in the family who was being bothered by a shadow for many years. The shadow seemed to be around the boy a lot, not just in the house. He said he could feel its presence around the corner out of our view even as we sat talking at the dinner table. Even the mother had seen this shadow. She described how she woke up in the middle of the night once and saw it pass her bedroom door down the hallway to her son's room, and that she got up and followed it and told it to leave her son alone. This constant presence made the boy depressed. They had priests bless the boy and drive the shadow away, but these were usually temporary results.
To help cheer up the boy, my missionary companion and I invited him to stay the night at our home. Now, I have had sleep paralysis experiences a couple of times previous to that night, but at that time, I did not know what they were. I would wake up seemingly conscious, but not able to move, and I would feel a depressing, scary feeling in the room. Well on this particular night, the three of us fell asleep. We were all in the same room. Some time in the middle of the night, I woke up seemingly conscious but completely frozen. I could open my eyes, and I heard this buzz or ringing. I also felt this dark, frightening presence... Much stronger than I have ever felt before. That sleep paralysis experience was the most vivid and intense of any of those experiences I've ever had. Eventually I was freed, and I could move. At first I was afraid to move or look, but I finally sat up and looked around and both the boy and my companion were sleeping. I still felt uneasy, but I went back to bed.
The next morning I asked how the boy slept, and he seemed positive.
I haven't had a sleep paralysis experience for at least a dozen years. But I always wondered about the connection of that experience happening on that night when the boy slept at our house.
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