please tell me your stories
Sure. I, personally, find it comforting to read others' detailed descriptions and experiences, so I will post my own for others to read. Hopefully you will still be around to read it. I have attempted to describe mine concisely, as it is nice, also in my opinion, to be able to read others' unique experiences more in-depth than common general, unspecific reports, since it is so difficult to find people who can relate to what we are going through.

my friends and family care about me, they cannot fully understand why i'm afraid to go to sleep.
Yeah, and the ones that claim to have it too usually turn out to just be completely off when you ask them about their symptoms. That's when I change the subject. :p

So anyway, I have been suffering from Sleep Paralysis for probably five years. I'm male and am now 20 years old. Over the years, it has only gotten worse. The episodes at first consisted only of the Sleep Paralysis. This is apparently less foreign and can be more easily related to by people, with the full-body paralysis except the eyes usually and difficulties breathing. I've always shaken myself out of them because the respirating restraint is far too strict for me to be able to go back to sleep. Meditating and remaining calm did not ever help to curb my need to take a deep breath.

Approximately between 1.5 and 2.5 years later, the HHEs (Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Experiences or, Hypnagogia, a term often even used to cover both itself and Hypnopomia) started up on me and began to develop. The symptoms, though relatively mild, were disturbing and horrifying, due to the experiences being very new to me. They included the common elements: The sense of danger, the lurking, malevolent presence, breathing problems, and occasionally the pressure on chest.

The HHEs began to develop and worsen over time. If you look up the Hypnagogic sensation features that used to be listed on "major encyclopedic site" (now removed for some reason and redirecting to the Hypnagogia page, but a mirror site can be found with the right "major search engine" search), it had a pretty huge list of Hypnagogia's elements, grouped in levels of commonness in sufferers. Now encompassing three of my senses, my hallucinations are visual, auditory, and tactile, including most everything on that entire list. After developing for so long, my Hypnagogic hallucinations now are, in my opinion, pretty severe; those hallucinations are, however, always different because they take only several of the symptoms from the entire pool to compose a unique experience every time. (From the ways I'm experiencing them, you can't really have all of the symptoms in one episode.)

Effects: Visual The visual effects are the most disturbing and constantly evolving. It pretty much feels now like I am having my dreams integrated into my surrounding real-life environment in my waking state. I will often see a certain black silhouette, which I often associate with the presence and sense of danger. Other visual effects can be warps of general vision (mostly objects around the room working toegether to look like other new, moving objects that are not alive) with varying degrees of altered color perceptions, or, last night, the first of its kind, illegible red letters being written out (looked like English) cursively in mid-air in front of my face at about a 1-foot measure away.

Effects: Auditory One of several ambient-like sounds may occur (but not necessarily every time). Some comparable sound examples include a backyard air-conditioner box running, pulsing sound effects, unfocused radio/TV noise, Hypnotoad's hypnosis sound effect from Futurama, or whining screams (reminiscent of the planet's cry from Final Fantasy VII). Also, unintelligible voices are often heard, either in a warped tone (think Starcraft's Protoss units) or sounding normal (either male or female).

Effects: Tactile Physical and tactile sensations occur as well. These rank second in intensity of mental disturbance after the visuals. Sometimes I feel like I am falling; at other times I feel like I'm being thrown around (ragdolled). A constant vibration might also be felt. When the presence and sense of danger are around, a few more possible sensations are thrown into the mix. I can feel like I'm being dragged across the bed/floor or up the walls. The silhouette, if I have a good view of it, will come up, and feel like it is touching me with a hand. Whenever the hand makes contact, I will feel a violent electric current-like sensation either in the area of contact or throughout my entire body.

Every time I go through an episode, I must shake myself out of them. The breathing problems cause me to need a deep breath. During stronger episodes, when the danger and presence are present, if I try to sit through the paralysis and observe, I will eventually crack and just start shaking myself out. Many people report thinking certain types of thoughts or touching oneself on the skin with a finger works as methods of escape, but they do not work for me. I have recently though come across one person's forum post elsewhere sharing his/her method of repetitively tightening (OPPOSITE muscle movement than that of pushing out a bowel, can't think of a better word than "tighten") and releasing the gluteal muscles combined with the sequential attempts to jerk oneself out, which seems to help somewhat.

The Hypnagogic hallucinations have developed so severely that I can go through false awakenings. Here's how it happens: If the episode is very strong, I will have a tough battle fighting to shake myself out. I must escape before I either suffocate from lack of breathing or get "consumed." I've never bothered to wait around for the latter to happen. After the fight is over, I will have either won and woken up, or lost and dream that I have escaped the paralysis (strangely, the episode, which is just as vivid as the ones that I end up waking up from, still ends), having gone through a false awakening. Also, it can happen again later on, and I, personally, have experienced three false awakenings in a single night. Fortunately, that has only happened once, but it is very distressing.

how can you just ride the wave and relax?
I can't. For the reasons listed above, I must shake out of episodes as soon as possible.

are your hallucinations (visual or auditory) ominous or benign?
Ominous or neutral, but never benign.

how long do your episodes generally last? or can you tell?
I think they will mess with one's sense of time throughout their durations, but from what I perceive while in the episodes, they can last anywhere from half a minute to a few minutes.

and your methods of coping....
There isn't much I have found that helps. Reading up on Hypnagogia symptoms and forum-lurking on sleep disorder forums (i.e. reading up on others' cases of SP with accompanying HHEs) have helped me keep my sanity.

I've finally revealed my condition to my mother yesterday in order to consider seeing a doc because the severe SP episodes are coming back after having calmed down for the past several months, and that this time around, they are being accompanied by an uncontrollable sleep schedule (sleeping 1-3 times a day for a total of approximately 12 hours total every day) and appetite problems (I become full on about 1/3 the amount of food I used to be full on a few weeks back). During the time the SP occurances calmed down, they occur once every couple weeks. Right now, however, they are occuring about every other night (starting from just a few days before my summer class started).