(Everything I say now is biased due to my spiritualist nature, I understand anyone's immediate dismissal)

Its sleep paralysis of course, but thats just one function to point at. Yes sleep paralysis took place but also loaded in the tone of people when they discuss sleep paralysis is how they feel about the existence of other dimensions/astral planes/the other side etc. If you are a believer that dreams are more than subconscious as well as a soul, then the dream realm starts to seem like a wide open expanse of possibility. I don't think theres much to be said of most sleep paralysis experiences, but I wanted to see things from another angle so I came up with a theory: -Lets say for a second that dream worlds are interconnected, or at least have that potential. -If a being in the dream world can access your dream, it must have some sort of a "coordinate" to your "location" which would probably act more like a scent. -Once in your local dream world it would also be linked to theirs, probably experiencing a blend of icons and archetypes, swirling of forms and such -because of this it would not know WHERE your body was, and thus who you really were. -by knowing where you are, and thus solidifying the blurred identity caused by sharing probability fields of dream states they can start to feed on you/attack you -Now if you have enough boring dreams where the icons match up with reality, they have a juicy white doe in their crosshairs

This would account for peoples experience of evil energy draining feels with amorphous villains changing with the subconscious. Well of course they do, we're talking about dreams. But if dreams are more real than we think, its logical to say that they do still operate on "seeing what you want to see" even while connected to other things "seeing what they want to see"

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