I have severe sleep paralysis since a child... sleep paralysis is related to the sightings of shadow people as well as temporal lobe epilepsy. I have both... though it was overall a scary thing, I channelled as well the experience into art... So I paint the creatures I have seen, even if they're figments of my own fear. I even made an entire illustrated music album about it... it's called "The Underliving" (living but not alive) which release quite a while ago. So I always thrill to see other fellows writing about it... when this was a problem as a child there was no internet and struggled a lot, now I understand the physiology about it and embrace it and incorporate it into my own art. In fact if you google Shadow people many sites use my illustrations to "portray" them.
I learned to lucid dream as a safety mechanism but my problem relies in severe sleep paralysis though.
Congrats on your @curie by the way, really deserved