Was it a Demon or Sleep Paralysis

By unusual circumstance I happen to know quite a bit about the Bible and Christianity. When I was sixteen I had an experience that had a profound effect on me for many years. At the time of the experience I was a devout Christian attending Warm Beach Assembly of God church in Stanwood Washington.

Here's what happened. I used to share a bedroom with two of my sisters. One night my eight year old sister Shelley began crying and she told me and my other sister Roxanne that she heard bees. We tried to comfort her. We explained that there were no bees in the house and that bees don't come out at night. She kept crying for a while but soon fell asleep.

Probably less than 15 minutes after that I too heard a loud buzzing noise. I felt like something had griped my body and I was unable to move. I felt an evil presence in the room and I thought that a demon was trying to possess me. I was afraid. I tried to speak out loud and rebuke Satan in the name of Jesus but I was unable to. I begin to pray and rebuke Satan in my mind. Eventually I was able to speak and I began to rebuke Satan out loud. The noise went away and I was able to move again.

The experience terrified me so I decided to turn on the light on and read the Bible for a while. I never did hear the buzzing noise again but each night for months I would sense an evil presence in the room and I would read the Bible and pray to comfort myself. It wasn't long before I had read the whole thing. Eventually I concluded that an evil spirit was trying to harass me but that there was nothing that it could do but frighten me, so I decided to ignore it. After a while the fear went away but the habit of reading the Bible did not. I am not sure how many times I have read the Bible but it is several. Some of its books I have read more than a hundred times.

Some people that I have shared this experience with may have thought I was lying or perhaps mentally ill. Most people don't tell me what they think. However one day I shared this experience with someone and she told me that she had experienced the loud buzzing noise and inability to move repeatedly in childhood and had discovered that it was a condition called sleep paralysis. I have read several web pages on the phenomena and have concluded that what I experienced was in fact sleep paralysis. The only doubt I had regarding this interpretation of what happened was that my sister Shelley also heard the same buzzing noise that night and that was the only time I have ever heard it. So perhaps it was an evil spirit. Or perhaps something we ate that night made us both more susceptible to sleep paralysis.

What do you think?

ADDENDUM March 4, 2011

I have recently read that the vaccine for the H1N1 virus has increased the narcolepsy risk for those aged between 4 and 19 and probably affects those with a genetic predisposition toward narcolepsy. Because of this I now suspect that my sister and I have a genetic predisposition toward sleep paralysis and the simultaneous experience was triggered by a virus.