Sleep paralysis as I've experienced it mostly happens while trying to fall asleep, sometimes it happens when I wake up. However, you can't move at all most of the time or speak during sleep paralysis. Sometimes you can manage to move your fingers or toes, or let out a strained whisper. Every time it's happened to me, I had full awareness of what was happening. Sometimes nothing happens, you just stay still. Other times you experience visual hallucinations, even more rare you experience auditory illusions, and you can also feel things that aren't there.

Most of the time I've seen something with sleep paralysis it's been a dark-black humanoid figure with smoke emitting off of itself looking over me. One time I was able to see until my vision gone white and there was some distortion in the middle with a sound also occuring, though I cannot remember what it was, spooked me though. Once when sleeping on my stomach I recall feeling like something was crawling around slowly on my back, when I got out of sleep paralysis nothing was there.