Reddit mentions of The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Publications of the American Folklore Society)

I've seen the old hag. I "woke up" in my old apartment from a stress filled deep sleep. I saw my bedroom (lifting my head off the pillow) as clear as day but I couldn't move or talk out of fear. The old hag was floating there in front of my eyes, a few feet from me. We made eye contact and she shouted and laughed followed by the line "You don't belong here!" Eventually I was able to lay my head back on my pillow and my whole body vibrated or buzzed as if my body had gone to sleep.

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When I woke up I googled something like "witch nightmare" and eventually found out about sleep paralysis. That's when I found this book https://www.amazon.com/Terror-That-Comes-Night-Experience-Centered/dp/081221305X

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Reading it made me feel a little better because this is a pretty common one to have. Good luck friend.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/081221305X

I would highly recommend The Terror That Comes in the Night, a book with a wide range of supernatural assault cases. Some of them do fall in to sleep paralysis, but the author makes note that there are a wide range of other things that may happen, things like you have experienced and more. It's refered to in the book as old hag syndrome. Hope this helps.

Yeah, seriously, it's just a brain misfire, happens all the time. REM sleep is more or less hallucinations while unconscious. Sometimes the images, sounds, and even smells, that the brain dreams up during sleep can keep firing off, even when you just wake up.

It can happen as you start to fall asleep, and as you start to wake up.

The user who mentioned "sleep paralysis" is half-right, in that sleep paralysis (when your skeletal muscles that automatically turn off during REM don't come back online immediately at waking) often happens at the same time as the waking REM images/sounds.

To read more: The Terror That Comes in the Night, a book both about discovering that sleep paralysis/REM hallucinations are a real (and harmless) thing.

AND a book about the importance of empirical methodology even, and especially, in the face of "creepy" and supernatural-seeming experiences.

TL;DR: it's the hallucinations that come with a common sleep snafu. You can safely ignore this whole incident as a brain fart. Also, there's no such thing as demons, and nothing's out to get anyone. It's all OK! Except your bastard brain, which sometimes plays tricks on you and hallucinates wildly while you sleep.

I'd have no idea how to write a 10 paper paper on sleep paralysis with what I just know. I haven't read them, but I'd look into these two books since I think they're written with a more scientific/anthropological background as apposed to some of the other super natural explanations. You'd probably get some good ideas from the way the books themselves are formatted.

Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-Body Connection (Studies in Medical Anthropology


The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Publications of the American Folklore Society)