“sleep paralysis” is a very bad name because it implies nothing more than simple motor paralysis, but phenomenologically it’s more complicated than that: awareness of the body is significantly suppressed but not completely. you can tell that some things are still clearly on “this side” of the unawareness and show up all the brighter. i find that with the gross body cut out then the subtle body is usually pretty luminous during sleep paralysis with chakras extremely obviously flaring on and off and of course, the eyes and ears of the subtle body seeing wild illusions the baseline for which is just noisy white light but which can cohere quite surprisingly with a little practice.
in this respect it mimics a light jhana. you enter the first jhana by attaining “access consciousness”, which you do by picking a meditation subject and concentrating on it until bodily awareness becomes a background. at this point you locate a pleasant vibration in some chakra or some part of your subtle body and shift your concentration onto that, whereupon this nice feeling develops into “piti” – vibrations, raptures, lights etc.
this is the same territory as sleep paralysis but entering it from a meditation is different from entering it after a nightmare.
a few days ago, the first of may in fact, i entered this territory in a sleep paralysis like route when i was kicked slightly into awareness by the dawn bell i have my phone make every morning, at which i usually pray the Angelus. my awareness spontaneously focused on the bell and amplified it to take up all of aural awareness which made my third eye pop (this being where visionary stuff usually localises itself) but when i started to pray, per the conditioned response to the bell, my heart chakra also popped off, generating piti which flared for a while and then calmed down into a loong freeform astral-wandering hypnopompia type which must have lasted three hours.
“sleep paralysis” is a rly bad name for it.