One night when I was 16, I woke up and realized that I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I could barely breathe. I was already panicking when I noticed a figure, wreathed in shadows, moving toward the foot of my bed—out of my line of sight. That's when the whispers started, all around me. Then I felt hands moving up from the foot of my bed, groping me through the covers, harder the further up my legs they reached, as the whispers got louder, until suddenly everything stopped and I bolted upright, sweating, screaming, and searching for a now-vanished intruder.

That was my first experience with sleep paralysis, a condition in which a sudden awakening from REM sleep causes an inability to move or speak. An episode can last from a few seconds to a few minutes but feels much, much longer. It's usually terrifying, no matter how many times it's happened to you before, because your brain is struggling to react to paralysis while in a confused state of blended consciousness, between dreaming and waking. An estimated 8 percent of people experience sleep paralysis at least once in their lifetime, usually when something disrupts their sleep patterns. The vast majority of sleep--paralysis episodes come with a side of auditory, visual, and tactile hallucinations, often of spectral intruders. (Some people even experience sexual abuse or pleasure at the hands of their sleep demons, perhaps because REM is also associated with automatic erectile activity and increased vaginal blood flow for no clear reason. Hence, incubi, succubi, alien probes.)

But I'm part of a smaller subset who, due to various underlying biological or psychological issues, experience recurrent sleep paralysis—up to once per week in my case, frequently featuring the same assailant.

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After more than a decade of research, experimentation, and terror, I found a mix of exercise, meditation, and sleep-hygiene diligence that helped lower the frequency of my episodes. By my mid-20s, I got them down to one or two per year. But in early 2020, as I faced a series of new life stresses, my strategies started to fail. I told a friend that I was seeing my shadow demon multiple times a week and that it was driving me mad. Without missing a beat, she asked, "Why not just take control and fuck your sleep demon?"

That was her flip way of turning me on to the idea of treating sleep paralysis by learning to lucid dream, or regain awareness and control while dreaming. Most of us have had this sort of dream at least once accidentally—you know, that uncanny feeling of suddenly realizing, Oh, this isn't real life. I'm dreaming right now. But a small group of enthusiasts, known as oneironauts, try to induce them regularly for fun, self-improvement, or introspection.

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The idea isn't as outlandish as it might seem. University of Adelaide sleep researcher and lucid-dreaming guide Denholm Aspy, Ph.D., has for years helped people learn to lucid dream, in some cases to overcome severe, recurrent nightmares by confronting their torments in this safe space, then demystifying, dominating, or dispelling these demons. He tells me I should be able to do the same thing by slipping from sleep paralysis directly into a lucid dream. "You can have a conversation," he says, in which you ask the demon, " 'What are you here to teach me? How can I make peace with you? What do you need?' With nightmares, once people have that resolution or dialogue, many are reporting that they no longer have those recurring nightmares anymore." It sounds fantastical. But it also sounds deliciously subversive. So, of course, I've been trying it.

For decades, oneironauts have used lucid dreaming to treat sleep paralysis and the anxiety it can cause. They have a ton of techniques for initiating a lucid dream, such as "reality testing," with which you train yourself to regularly ask, Am I awake or dreaming? and to perform scheduled checks of ordinary objects like clocks and mirrors, which often distort within dreams, during waking hours. (Think Leo's spinning top in Inception.) The hope is that these metacognitive checks become so automatic that you'll do them in your dreams as well, realize you are in fact dreaming, and be able to take control from there. But oneironauts suggest there's only one technique relevant to my needs: wake-initiated lucid dreaming, or WILD, a method codified by lucid-dream researcher Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. It entails jumping straight from a waking state into REM sleep while keeping your conscious mind active. Unfortunately, for most it's one of the hardest techniques to master, given the difficulty of holding on to conscious awareness while transitioning into REM sleep.

One of the last stages some WILDers experience before entering a lucid dream is the onset of REM paralysis while they're still awake. Which is basically sleep paralysis without instinctual terror. So from a WILDer's perspective, waking up in a sleep-paralysis episode is like jumping straight to the edge of a lucid dream. Provided you can overcome the fear and confusion of sleep paralysis in order to fully harness the state, that is.

This is easier said than done, given how primal and all-consuming the fear within an episode can be. Oneironauts and sleep--paralysis researchers have outlined mindfulness tactics for tackling this fear. And it took me several tries to get them to work. It was a slow process of waking up to the instantaneous, blaring Klaxons of fear that signal I'm in sleep paralysis and immediately, forcefully thinking, You are having an episode, while taking deep breaths, five seconds in and five seconds out. (This can be challenging if you are also having trouble breathing as part of the sleep paralysis.) With practice, my thoughts slowly grew firmer and my breaths more measured until I was able to focus on them more than the fear. But that calming effect just sent me back to sleep without maintaining my conscious awareness.

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So I added another layer of focus—on my right big toe (taking a cue from Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: Volume 1). A tattooist taught me how to do this years ago during a 12-hour sitting. In the clarity of deep breathing, you can zero in on minute sensations in one body part and through that focus block out other stimuli, such as pain or fear. When fully awake, you might occupy your mind with a simple task, e.g., slowly wiggling your toe. But in sleep paralysis, you have to find other ways of keeping your mind active, like trying to vividly imagine the rest of your body spinning around the axis of said toe. It's both a distracting and an engrossing fantasy. Just the trick for a calm, conscious slide back into full REM sleep.

Yet once I reenter a full sleep state, I can achieve awareness but not control. This is common no matter which path you take into a lucid dream. Control is often elusive and fragile, vanishing if you're too excited. Trying to fly or have sex with a dream being, Aspy says, are two of the most common lucid-dreaming fantasies and two of the most common ways people get too worked up and booted out of lucidity. This lack of control is frustrating. It's like living as a lagging game avatar.

Getting stuck at this point wouldn't matter if I only wanted to neutralize the terror and anxiety of sleep paralysis. Sleep scientists tell me that repeatedly overcoming my fear in the moment could slowly override my automatic reaction to episodes, turning them into benign or even pleasant experiences, like a good mushroom trip. But I'm after a full, controlled lucid dream, because, I've come to realize, I want a shot at confronting my demon on my own terms more than any other possible outcome. That's why I went down this path so readily at my friend's suggestion.

Aspy thinks I need to work on stabilizing my dreams. He tells me to try to clap my dream hands together as soon as I realize I'm dreaming and rub them vigorously for about 20 seconds to fill my mind with a sense of sensation and control. I'll do this the next time I have an episode, whenever that is. But that might not be the right trick for me. Finding the perfect individualized formula to make any lucid-dreaming method click can take months of work, and maintaining the ability to escape from sleep paralysis into a controlled dream takes constant practice.

I've waited years, though, for a shot at staring down my demon. And maybe all I need is one solid lucid dream to gain as much power over it as it's long had over me. So what's a few more months of spinning around my right big toe in the middle of the night?

This story first appeared in the July 2020 issue of Men's Health.