Hi Carole,
This is nothing to worry about, and you can put aside all thoughts of intervention from the spirit world.
I’m a former neuro nurse, and have also had sleep paralysis and related phenomena for over 50 years. I’ve researched the whole area, especially over the past 25 years, when internet access became freely available.
What you’re describing is clearly related to sleep paralysis (SP). There are several different possibilities, which I’ll go through below:
The most likely explanation is that you were in a state of SP every time this happened, but without being aware of it. Not everyone is aware of being paralysed during these episodes. Many of us have a kind of hallucinatory “dream body” which we can move. Some of us (including me) are aware of both “bodies” - the real one paralysed on the bed, and the other one moving around. However, many people are only aware of one or the other. This could account for you thinking your eyes were wide open, when they’re normally shut during SP.
Since about half of people with SP also hallucinate during episodes, this would explain your seeing these faces, as well as hearing the footsteps. I also hallucinate during SP, but my hallucinations are mainly tactile (touch). However, the thing about hearing running footsteps at the start of an episode rings a bell, as I often get that too. Incidentally, SP hallucinations can affect any or all of your senses.
Another explanation is that SP episodes frequently evolve into lucid dreams - i.e. dreaming while awake. This often happens to me. Although my SP hallucinations are only auditory or tactile, once I get into the lucid dreaming state I start seeing people around my bedroom too. However, there’s usually something wrong with the room. Often it’s the outside light that’s wrong (wrong time of day) and sometimes the entire room is reversed.
Finally people with SP often experience another kind of sleep-related hallucination. This is where you wake quite normally, not into SP, but you can see something or someone quite clearly. I used to get these a lot when I was young, but not so often these days. I was more likely to see miniature items of furniture, but I would sometimes see full-sized human figures. When this happens, the “visions” tend always to appear in the same visual field. Mine used to be dead-centre, but it sounds as if yours always appear to the left.
I always find a good way of checking whether these scary “people” are really there is to look somewhere else in the room and see if the image stays in the same place in my field of vision. However, there are exceptions to this rule, and the hallucination can stay where you first saw it. The scariest exception is when you appear to wake up in a completely different room from the one you went to sleep in, and can actually look around it! Fortunately, this is very rare. It’s only ever happened to me once, when I was sleeping in a totally dark room - something I usually avoid.
I think this covers all the possible explanations, all of which are SP-related. It’s worth noting that quite a lot of people experience the last one without ever having had an episode of SP. It’s generally thought that this accounts for a lot of “ghost sightings”.
Not many scientists have interested themselves in SP and its related phenomena, in spite of the fact that 5% of the population are estimated to have it. However, those that have studied it think it may be triggered by electro-magnetic influences - but only in people who are susceptible.
This might explain why your neighbour’s son sleeping on the other side of the wall experienced something similar. There could have been some anomaly of the wiring running in the wall. In my own case, I always had my most severe SP-related episodes when sleeping in my parents’ house, which was about 50ft away from overhead high-tension cables.
If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to post them here, or send me a private message via this site.