They Came For Me Every Night – The Spiritual Cause Behind Sleep Paralysis

The night has always been mysterious.

It signals beings from other worlds, present but invisible in the daylight, they are made known when the night appears. Ghoulish and dreadful until dawn returns, they challenge the minds of earth citizens through terror and dare. This is the Hour of Sleep Paralysis, when you struggle to wake up, screaming on the inside, held down with force by cold invisible hands, the mind alert but the body paralyzed, when terror takes over…

Have you experienced it?

I have written on Sleep Paralysis before but as with everything, there is an update. So I decide to write about my personal experience with this phenomenon that I have had all my life and tell you what is causing it!

When I was a child growing up in Kingston, Jamaica, I suffered from sleep paralysis. It was awful and terrifying. I would wake up hearing my parents in the kitchen but be completely unable to move my body or call out to them. In my mind I would pray, beg God to release me — and eventually He would. But the time in between was horrible.

This continued throughout my entire life, happening several times a week. It felt like suffocation, like death was imminent. Each day I would dread nightfall because nightfall meant sleep, and sleep meant…

As I grew and evolved, I came to understand that I carried a spirit that could discern. Some part of me never truly slept. While the body rested, another part of my being remained watchful — and when something otherworldly entered my home or environment, that inner defender would immediately alert me to wake up. This was one kind of experience.

The other was my spirit returning to my body and struggling to re-enter it. In other words, the spirit had left to walk and roam, and when it was called back, the body slowly stirred with its returning energy — but the spirit outside had to find a way to realign with its vessel. Whether it came back to do battle with whatever lurked nearby, or simply to wake the body, the process was the same. There were times I was fully awake — eyes open, thoughts sharp, completely aware — yet I could not move a single limb. I could see the room, hear the birds chirping outside my window, feel time passing — alert and present in every way.

And then, just like that, I would be released.

What is that? I used to wonder.

One night, I was restless. My children were all asleep and I roamed the house like the resident duppy. Something I couldn’t name kept me from settling, and then something told me to go to my daughter’s room. I lay down beside her. There was a dresser in front of her bed, and as I closed my eyes — I was not yet asleep — the dresser began to move slowly. From the wall behind it emerged men, perhaps ten of them, all dressed in tattered, worn clothing. Each one carried something — sticks, 2×4 planks, baseball bats and other makeshift weapons. They were old and strange, like figures from another time. (It frightened me then, though I find myself chuckling as I write this now.)

One of them, dressed in tattered white, spoke directly to me: “Every night we come to […], and we will never stop until we get you.”

It was a direct, deliberate threat to harm me.

And there, at last, was the answer — the reason for the sleep paralysis that had plagued me since childhood. It continued until I found a remedy. It still happens, but nothing like before.

But the difference between then and now? I have the answers now.
Just hold on, and let me tell you.

As a spiritualist, many people have told this to me: they suffer from sleep paralysis. However, none have ever told me of how frequent they had it like I did. Was I exceptional? Why did they terrorize me this way? When I was in Africa, my daughter had a dream that she saw me in my bedroom and a host of many different giant otherworldly beings formed a line from my closed bedroom door all the way downstairs to the living room waiting to hold counsel with me.

I was in my room attending to some other worldly looking being. Hmmm –tapping my index finger to my lower lip while gazing into oblivion– what am I? Thoughts flying through my mind. Am I some kind of duppy slayer in spirit land? or some kind of duppy whisperer? duppy defender? or duppy therapist? or the Uhtred of Duppy Kingdom?

Ok, ok, this is a serious topic. Her telling me her dream hit me hard, because that night I had several sleep paralysis experiences. So whatever she had seen in her dream was what I was going through or had went through while she was dreaming, isn’t that cool?

Beings of all sorts seeking my counsel…. so perhaps Duppy diviner? Dancehall artist Beenie man’s song “who am I” began playing in my head.

Ok enough of this musing let us come to a conclusion:

–> Sleep paralysis is tethered to the outer worlds. It is completely spiritual, science can never figure it out.

There are certain people who carry very bright light and will, like a moth to the flame, they attract many beings not belonging to this world. They seek light and of course can see the light that you have. It attracts them and they wonder “Who is this thing? This human shining so radiant.”

They are drawn to you because of who you are. This is one and perhaps the main reason for those like me who get them often. Your spirit always finds its way back home, but entities cross into our world all the time and there are some of us who are not one hundred percent humans (some benevolent and others not so much). The being can see through to who you are even if you do not know yourself. It is a horrible experience but if you have had it, know that there is something special about you.

Here is how I know, beyond any doubt, that these are experiences from beyond our world — encounters with entities not of this earth.

As a child, in the thick of a sleep paralysis episode, struggling to wake up, I would hear something. A voice, or a presence communicating with me. Often it would say: “Calm down. Do not panic.” Other times: “Call upon Jesus” — which, at that time of my life, was my faith and my framework.

One night, the Voice gave me a secret power name to call upon. I called it. I woke up instantly.

My mother was a deeply spiritual woman. On certain nights when I was young, she would touch my forehead with something green and minty-smelling before I slept. Those nights, I rested peacefully. But on the nights she forgot — I would wake up screaming in terror.

When I traveled to Africa, I began waking up with mysterious marks on my body. Wounds that resembled laser burns and scratches scattered across my skin. Deep and unexplained.
The old men in tattered clothing — the ones who had threatened my life — never returned to my sleep world. Yet I carried a quiet, inner knowing that they were still somewhere, watchful from wherever they were. I was never a superstitious person. But something deep within me always knew that what was happening to me was not ordinary. It was tied to a world invisible to human eyes.

I want to be clear about something now, after all the jokes about duppies and duppy kingdoms.
I do not believe sleep paralysis is about the dead.

I believe it is about a corridor — a passage that exists between this earth plane and other planes of existence. A path we travel when we sleep. And as we move through that corridor on our way back home, all manner of things can happen.

Some entities have no right to enter our world and they use that corridor to try. Some have authority — like spiritual customs officers — to stop us and check our papers, to examine who and what we are. Some cross over alongside us, curious about our environment, wanting to experience what we carry. Some are drawn purely by your light, and your struggle to wake is simply your spirit trying to escape their presence.

And then there are some who come to deliver something — a download, a knowing, a gift — that you will only understand later. Something that, in time, will help you heal yourself, or others, or the world.

The experience, though it feels like a nightmare, is not always an attack. Sometimes it is a calling. The corridor is real, and not everyone who walks through it does so the same way.
The experiences, as terrifying as they are, exist for the benefit of something far greater than ourselves.

The word benefit may be shocking to the human mind, and I understand that. But I speak always from experience — from the living of life, not the theorizing of it. Some call it teaching. I call it simply sharing what I have walked through.
Most of the greatest lessons arrive wrapped in pain. In terror. In agonizing, unforgettable experience. It is only later — sometimes much later, when you are finally able to revisit the memory with a calmer mind — that the revelation comes. What was that teaching me? What did I gain from that suffering? Some people see it immediately. For others, it takes years. But the understanding always comes.

Through the terror I faced repeatedly — from childhood into adulthood, pinned down by unseen and gnarly-handed things — I have come to understand that something was always being deposited into me during those episodes. Lessons. Warnings. Knowing. Downloads.

One Sunday night — early Monday morning, around 4 a.m. — sleep paralysis came for me six times in a row. My husband at the time grew exhausted from shaking me awake each time, and finally let out a very Jamaican expletive, because the man could not get a moment’s rest. (I laugh even now as I write this.)

We eventually settled back into sleep. I closed my eyes — and there, standing in the corner of my room, was a figure dressed entirely in black. Telepathically, he instructed me to ask my husband to turn his back, as he had something to discuss with me privately. I reached over and said simply, “Turn your back.” My husband turned without question and went straight back to sleep.

The spirit moved forward.

He greeted me with “Bon soir, Madame” — and I knew immediately I was in the presence of a Haitian spirit. The room was dark save for a small night light. He stood before me in full black with a felt hat, his face hidden in shadow. Yet his energy was unmistakable — I was safe, and he meant me no harm.

He apologized for disturbing my night. He had a serious matter to bring to me.

He came to warn me about a client of mine who had requested something of me that was not right — something I had no intention of doing regardless. He told me to send her a clear message: back off. He then explained that he had attempted to enter my home with a host of beings who travel with him, but they were turned away at the threshold. Only he was permitted to enter. He apologized once more, then walked slowly backwards out of the room.
His arrival had triggered my spirit six times before he could gain entry — and that is what created the sleep paralysis. A warning. A disturbance in my field. And then, finally, a conversation.

All manner of things can create this experience. But as I have said — downloads often accompany them, and this is part of what balances the suffering of those who endure it.
I have written on this topic before, but I feel compelled to say this now: we are entering a new earth. And in this new earth, these encounters will multiply.

New beings will begin to introduce themselves to those who are open. The veil is thinning, and not all that crosses through it comes with bad intentions.

Perhaps in another writing I will offer remedies — practical ways to manage the effects and protect your space. But for now, I hope this has brought some understanding, some comfort, and perhaps even a little courage to those who have suffered in the night and wondered if they were losing their mind.

You are not losing your mind.
You are just more than you know.

Peace and Love,
Obara Meji