Sleep Paralysis Demon

About

Sleep Paralysis Demon refers to a series of jokes in which people post humorous representations of the visions they have while suffering from sleep paralysis, a condition in which a person will be conscious but unable to move their body.

Origin

The earliest known post to make a humorous representation of a sleep paralysis demon was posted by Twitter user @waffpicklesicle^[1] on June 8th, 2017, though the tweet only got 2 retweets and 10 likes (shown below).

Spread

The trend began seeing much more spread at the beginning of 2019 thanks to a series of iterations on several social media channels. On February 6th, 2019, Twitter user @rhymewithrachel^[2] posted artistic renderings of what she called her sleep paralysis demons, gaining over 9,000 retweets and 35,000 likes (shown below, left). This led others to follow suit, such as user @forkfrenzy, who gained over 30 retweets and 800 likes with a drawing of their demon (shown below, right).

In March, TikTok users began making videos showing more humorous representations of their sleep paralysis demons. These include posts by @LizardKingCosplay (shown below, left) and @NoHandleyBars (shown below, right).

On April 2nd, 2019, Reddit user AHSweekend posted a picture of Ru Paul as a representation of their demon, gaining over 3,700 points in /r/rupaulsdragrace^[3] (shown below).

The jokes started getting most popular on Twitter in June of 2019. That month, popular jokes were posted by @aquariaofficial (shown below, top) and @pastelwabbit (shown below, bottom). Jokes about Sleep Paralysis Demons have been covered by Stayhipp.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References