As with everything, sleep paralysis is most unbearable in its incipience. You feel a terrible proximal dread shortly before your body seizes up. After registering what is about to happen, you are left to anticipate the excruciating dilation of time; during the ordeal, seconds seem like minutes, a perceptive shift which feels eschatological. Once the paralysis has introduced itself to you, the host, it creeps stealthily from the gut outwards into the limbs and eventually conquers the extremities. There might be time to utter a brief cry before the final surrender which leaves you protesting soundlessly and flailing movelessly.