My journey into skepticism - the night I saw a shadow person

I'm not sure how many of you what a Shadow Person is. A Shadow Person is believed to be a human-like spirits that take the form of shadows and are often seen only in peripheral vision.

My experience was a bit different. I was asleep[ in my bed when I felt that I woke up, but I could not move. the most I could do was just barely open my eyes so I could see my room.

What I saw was a shadowy figure walk into my room, turn towards me and lean down over me. I could sense this being just centimeters from my nose. I could feel the movement of the bed as they put there hands beside my shoulders as they leaned down towards my face.

It was a scary experience, and after only a moment I sat up in bed and this shadow was gone. If I was at a less skeptical point in my life, I may have called what I saw a ghost of some kind, but I was skeptical at the time, so I didn't jump to any conclusions.

Everything about the experience felt completely real and if I only trusted my senses, I would have no reason to doubt what happened, but something did happen that showed me this was only a dream or other hallucination

While I was paralysed in my bed and saw this figure enter my room, I could see a window on the far wall and in the window I saw the full moon. After the figure vanished and I was able to sit up I looked out the window and saw no moon, just stars.

This episode only lasted a few minutes so the moon would have no time to move in the sky so far, unless more time had passed then I believed, but if I cant trust my perception of time how can I trust any perception I had that night.

I decided that the moon was a giveaway that it was a dream. My brain knows the window was there and it was night, so it invented something to put in the window that would not look out of place. It decided a full moon would do nicely, but it had no way of knowing if the moon was really in my window.

So when I woke up and saw reality, I could see that it did not match watch I saw just a moment ago.

And as a skeptic, objective reality matters.