I'm sure it must have been mentioned before in this thread, but I'll still want to stress that sleep paralysis can be both extremely scary and extremely rewarding - It is what you make of it!!
I had been tortured by this phenomenom on a regular basis for over 5 years, starting when I was 17. It grew in frequency and intensity over the years until I started experiencing clusters made up by 20-30 times of waking up in sleep paralysis in a row (each time thinking I'm finally awake, just to realize I am again paralyzed). Most of the time the state was accompanied by vivid auditory, visual and often very painful tactile hallucinatios.
My interpretation of these scenarios changed from simply being scared that I was going insane during the first episodes to considering it a nuisance in the early stage that followed (especially due to being wide awake after they occured which caused quite a bit of insomnia) and finally sort of accepting it as an illness, a malignant curse resting on me (the latter in a metaphorical sense). Eventually I started gaining a dim sense that what I was experiencing might be a chance of some sorts as well without having any knowledge of what would happen.
Information about it back then was very sparse and therefore years had passed until I stumbled across a forum about so called out-of-body experiences. What utter bullshit, right? Wrong!
It turned out it only took knowledge of this and reading the first 45 pages of a book on the topic of OBE's to free myself from all the terror that was accompanied by the paralyzed state and instead experience what I still consider the most beautiful experience of my life. A religious experience, an experience that changed some basic assumptions that I had carried about my existence for good.
After that I still experienced a few instances of sleep paralysis, but the terrifying electric hissing/vibrating had turned to a very pleasant humming sensation. These always lead to OBE's which unfortunately grew cloudier and cloudier until I would just find myself flying through pitch black darkness, not knowing where I was and constantly flying against invisible walls. I wasn't making any real effort either.
Surprisingly though, with less level of control and clarity during my OBE's, the sleep paralysis also disappeared altogether. I haven't experienced a single episode in about 6 years now. It was as if a messenger was knocking at my door, louder and louder and louder until I finally got the message, which was when he simply went away. I am most grateful to have been blessed with this whole experience. My eyes still water just thinking about it.
So don't be scared! Make the best of it and you will be well rewarded. For those who think this is all a bunch of esoteric bullshit, pot does a pretty good job to suppress sleep paralysis.
EDIT: Reading a few posts on this thread and being pretty positive I am not the first to mention the direct link between sleep paralysis and OBE's, I am a bit puzzled as to why this isn't being recognized as what it is. It's nothing supernatural and thousands of people are actively inducing it. Every single one who experiences sleep paralysis without doing any work to get there should consider himself privileged! There are others out there who practice years to get where you are now. The reason why you interpret this as scary is because you do not know what is happening and for what reason. So I am gonna go ahead and post two starting points for those who want to break the spell:
The book that did it for me, "Adventures Beyond the Body: How to Experience Out-of-Body Travel" by William Buhlmann:
http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Be...=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375877409&sr=1-2
A forum on the topic with 310654 posts in 36881 topics:
www.astralpulse.com/forums/index.php
A word of warning... There's a lot of esoteric babble in both the book and on the forums, don't let your scepticism ruin the chance this could be for you.
@SproutOnSmack
Feel free to shoot me a pm. I hope I don't come across as insolent saying this, but I was exactly where you are at now and I'd be very happy if you could manage to break this developement the way that I managed to. You might just be hours away from it.