The Bedroom Presence

Most reports supply none. Where they do, it is a dark upright shape, a silhouette, or a figure noticed only in peripheral vision.

The location is reported far more consistently than the appearance. Doorways dominate.

Stands. Watches. Occasionally approaches slowly. Almost never speaks or acts. The experience characteristically ends before anything happens, which is one of the reasons it is so hard to shake, nothing resolves.

The sleeper's actual bedroom, accurately reproduced, with the sleeper aware of their real position and surroundings.

1. Waking or partial waking, often unable to move.
2. Sudden certainty of another presence.
3. Location identified without seeing anything.
4. Rising fear; sometimes a sense of approach.
5. Resolution on waking fully, usually within a minute or two.

Dread rather than acute terror, in most reports, a sustained wrongness rather than a shock. Frequently described as certainty of being observed with hostile intent.

Inseparable from the sleep-paralysis traditions generally. As a distinct "figure in the doorway" report it is heavily represented in modern online accounts, which is a reason for caution about the volume rather than the existence of the reports.

Global. As the intruder component of sleep paralysis it is documented wherever the phenomenon has been studied.

The interpretation is where the variation lives: a burglar, a ghost, a dead relative, a demon, a shadow person, an alien. Modern Western reports increasingly describe it as a "shadow person", which is a vocabulary that did not exist before the internet and which should be treated as evidence of naming rather than of a new phenomenon.

• The intruder factor in sleep paralysis.
• Presence without percept, the phenomenon proper.
• Threat detection, firing without a target.
• Naming, and how vocabulary reshapes reports.

Recognition helps. People who understand what is happening report markedly less fear in later episodes.

Sustained dread, and reluctance to sleep. Recurrent episodes track sleep deprivation and irregular schedules closely.

Sensed-presence experiences occur outside sleep as well at altitude, in isolation, during extreme exertion, and in certain neurological presentations. That cross-context occurrence is strong support for a threat-detection account rather than anything external: the same feeling arises whenever the relevant machinery is stressed, regardless of what is actually nearby.

See the Old Hag entry. The interpretations vary; the experience does not.

The intruder factor is the most commonly reported component of sleep-paralysis hallucination. Sensed-presence experiences are documented across multiple non-sleep contexts, consistent with a threat-detection account.

• Could you move?
• Did you ever actually see anything?
• Where was it? Reports are oddly specific.
• Had you encountered the term "shadow person" before this happened?

Track sleeping position, sleep debt and schedule. This is one of the entries where the sleep log is more useful than the dream journal.