It’s hard to do it on purpose, but one tip I can give you is this: (this turned out way longer than I meant it to be lol, sorry)

Sleeping on your back seems to be a must. I’ve never had it happen to me while sleeping any other way. For this reason, in my experience it’s more likely to happen when I’m sick or physically exhausted, because I toss and turn a lot before I actually manage to get to sleep.

Another thing I’ve heard people say is that learning how to lucid dream can help. Which makes sense, because for one, I’ve always been able to lucid dream and I seem to have gotten sleep paralysis a lot more than most people. And two, sleep paralysis is just being lucid during REM sleep but with your eyes open.

Also something to keep in mind is that it may only last a few seconds, and you’re not really guaranteed to see anything strange. It’s not always a wild 1-2 minute long journey like in the experience I shared here. For me, a lot of the time it’ll start with me trying to wake myself up when I realize I’m dreaming, and then I’ll get my eyes open and struggle to move… Then after a handful of seconds I overcome it and go to the bathroom or something, then whoops, the door fell off and into a huge expanse of blue sky and clouds that’s somehow located entirely within my bathroom. I never left the bed, I just dreamt that I overcame the paralysis lol.

In order to see stuff that isn’t there your emotions have to get involved. It’s still a dream even though you’re using your eyes and mostly looking at real things, so the dream parts of what you see are heavily influenced by what’s going on in your head. That’s why most people see shadow monsters or “feel their presence”, because not being able to move your body when you’re not expecting it is scary, so you start to see scary things. The experience I shared here started off peaceful because I wasn’t compelled to move, I was just relaxed and looking at pretty glowing orange lines morphing into runes on my ceiling… Then the kids outside my window startled me, and that turned into a horrifying audio hallucination. Then later in the experience, I didn’t see anything scary until I realized I couldn’t have actually fallen off the bed if I were still in my bed, which made me nervous and the fan monster manifested itself.