as for waking up while dreaming, well i try not to do that, if i realize i’m dreaming i go lucid and take control i’ve actually managed to turn nightmares into pleasant dreams, (like throwing freddy crouger down a coal grinder)
As for sleep paralasis, don’t panic instead stop and picture yourself floating a little out of your body then settling back down into it. The theory behind this comes from some more obscure lines of thought but the technique itself works. Its almost as if you wake up so fast your mind doesn’t quite fit back into your body corerctly and you just have to reposition it
I’ll join the semi-lucid crowd. I fairly often become aware that I’m dreaming, and can take partial control over things, usually by “spellcasting” with a high failure rate: sort of mentally stating how the dream should go next. The longer the dream continues, the better it works, but it’s often quite intermittent at the beginning.
Interestingly, the semi-control sometimes (usually?) precedes the awareness that I’m dreaming. I suspect that may actually be what causes me to figure out that it’s a dream. Once I know I’m dreaming, I can trivially wake myself, but I usually choose not to.
I only have sleep paralysis lasting into my waking state (everyone except sleepwalkers has it while asleep - it’s what keeps you from punching out your spouse/cat/whatever while you’re dreaming of being Rocky) if I’m suddenly shocked out of a dream, and even then only for a second or two. I can’t ever remember it lasting long enough for me to become consciously frightened of it – that would be awful.
It happened once when I was a kid. I had this really bad nightmare where I was locked in a burning house with my older brother and Sean Connery (I guess I’d seen a Bond movie recently or something). My older brother kept laughing at Sean Connery’s attempts to escape and I got more and more afraid until I basically told myself that well, I’ve tried everything else, there’s only one way out now, only one way to get through this, and that’s to hope this is a dream and wake up from it. It worked.
A few months ago, I had a rather silly nightmare (it involved Zombies and a Thai takeaway… it was really quite silly). At one point, I started laughing in my dream, and distinctly remember telling myself “Oh, just wake up!” And I did.
Since then, I’ve forced myself awake out of several nightmares. One of them was really rather bad, and still in the middle of my dream, I said aloud “You have to wake up now, before it gets any worse,” and I wrenched myself awake. Dunno what happened to give me the ability to do this all of a sudden, but I find it rather handy.