help me figure this out...

[drifter god]

ok, im just pulling this from a blog i just posted, but read it and tell me im just having nightmares. this is rather new to me. ive had nightmares in the past obviously, but never like this. i realize this might sound a little laughable, but well, i dont know, and it freaked me out a tad.

so about 20 minutes ago i was standing in the doorway of my room feeling shaken and ready to collapse into a ball and scream. right after that i seriously considered calling a doctor. right before that i was lying awake in bed and my mind decided to take a nice detour and ... well i think im going insane/starting to hallucinate.

so to explain what actually happened.. for the second time..

i was lying awake in bed. something woke me up or i just woke up whatever. ive been lying there for about a half an hour trying to get back to sleep, but i cant. i roll over facing my room and all of a sudden something happens. its like something slips in my mind, i cant really explain this but its almost as if i can 'feel' something go wrong in my head, and right as thats happening im looking into my room and there is what i can only imagine to be a massive very angry purple-brownish boar thrashing around in a rage of some sort. and as im lying there, fully conscious and trying to pull my eyes away, im frozen. mentally im literally trying to rip my head the other way and in the process of trying to pull my sanity back everything starts shaking, mildly at first, and then it builds up and very soon the whole room is shaking extremely violently.... then right at the peak of this shaking it stops i jolt the other way and im hyper-alert. if this exact thing hadnt happened about a week ago i would have just passed it off as slipping into a bad dream or something. so i got up, and thats when i went and stood in the doorway about to scream.

last week...

the reason i didn't just continue lying in bed is because last week something very similar happened, and it continued to repeat itself until i got out of the room. again i was lying in bed. something had woken me up and i was rather hyper alert. i kept hearing this sound, a taping or something. i would focus in on it and all of a sudden it would start getting louder, and louder, after a few seconds it was extremely loud and then the shaking would start like i described earlier. once the whole room was shaking like a fucking 8.0 earthquake i would jolt out of it. now last week when this happened i was just like.... WTF!? and i just laid back down and thought about it, and then i heard the sound again and the whole process repeated itself... about 4 times. so you can see why today right now i just jumped up and freaked the hell out.

so that's my story. i would love to say that its actually just me having a really fucked up nightmare where i think im awake before actually waking up, but.. i don't think so, this isnt like one those fuzzy 'did it really happen' kind of memories remaining in my head.

so yeah, im fucking nuts.

EDIT:

ok, so the more i think about this ive decided that i must have been in a state of waking sleep/twiligt sleep/etc. and that its something along the lines of night terrors. now ive never had night terrors, so i really dont know, but that makes more sense to me. :-/

there it is.

[Enforcer Talen]

During high school, I had a series of ultra realistic repeating dreams.

They eventually went away when I lowered my stress level and started excercising more.

Im not a psychologist, so I am hesitant to comment on any of the meanings in the dream, but I will point out that similar vivid dreams have occured to other people.

[Ritterin Sophia]

It's very, very simple, get help from a professional.

[drifter god]

ok i think i found my answer. sleep paralysis. bottom of the page.

http://www.nightterrors.org/dis.htm

[Shroom Man 777]

Yup, that's it. Be thankful you didn't see any weirdo shadow people.

[Turin]

ok i think i found my answer. sleep paralysis. bottom of the page.

http://www.nightterrors.org/dis.htm

I'm not a psychiatrist so take anything I'm saying with a grain of salt, but I have a history of sleep paralysis myself and what you've described sounds very similar. It started in adolescence, at which time the hallucinatory aspects were rather vivid and frightening. Since that time, the HSP has been infrequent and I've mostly had the CSP described in your link.

Shroom Man's comment about "shadow people" is dead-on with some of the hallucinations I've had. Susan Blackwell, author of The Meme Machine, has posited that HSP is responsible for so-called "alien abduction" experiences.

[Ariphaos]

Yup, that's it. Be thankful you didn't see any weirdo shadow people.

I hit one once. It just started hissing at me.

Rather comical after the fact but it's scary as hell.

[Elmca]

I used to have very vivid nightmares many years ago, including dreams where I dreamt I was in bed, but awake. I was taught a technique called lucid dreaming. It wasn't 100% effective, but it helped quite a bit.

In lucid dreaming, you become aware that you're dreaming. It sometimes helps to wake you up or at least lessen the terror when you realize it's only a dream.

There's a FAQ and some techniques at

http://www.lucidity.com/LucidDreamingFAQ2.html

that you might want to check out.

[Master of Ossus]

I had that once, when I was a kid. It was not fun.

[Cyborg Stan]

I remember having sleep paralysis once. I woke up in my bed, and somehow I knew there was a boy, made of shadow under my bed. It was dangerous under there for some reason (possibly because I'm not exactly light and my bed was kinda falling apart apart) and thus I had to get him out of there. Despite the fact he was probably half my age and was so famished that he probably weighed no more than 50 pounds, I could not even budge him slightly no matter how hard I tried.

Eventually I determined he was just being an ass and fell back to sleep.

[Stark]

Sleep paralysis is fucking horrible.

[Rye]

I had sleep paralysis once, I had my eyes closed, but I dreamed that I was in my room and could see stuff like normal. I knew there was a gigantic face in my wall, the malevolent spirit of the house or something, and in my bed there was an attendant shadow man that was going to rape me. It was fucking awful, my balance was reacting like there was actually someone else in my bed, displacing the mattress. I woke up and it took a while to go back to bed.

I think it may have happened once when I was really young, too; My very first nightmare that burned itself into my brain. I dreamed that all my plastic tools were flying around the room like dinosaurs, the light socket in the ceiling went for me like a snake, and finally I rolled out of bed after trying to pick up a (nonexistent) pen on my duvet, and I saw a filthy drain in the floor at the side of my bed.

The shadow thing is an interesting recurring theme in sleep paralysis, I wonder what causes it?

[fuzzymillipede]

I believe this has happened to me only once. I was laying in bed, and for some reason I knew something bad was going to happen. Also, I was unable to move any part of my body except for my eyes. Then, all of a sudden, something's hand grabs my foot and tries to pull me into my bed. After that I woke up.

[Darth Wong]

Christ, that sounds terrifying. I wonder why I've never had experiences like this. For that matter, I never have nightmares either.

[Stark]

This phenomena is the only time in my life I've felt true brain-crippling, teeth grinding, incoherent terror. Waking up in the middle of some delusion about immediate suffering and being unable to move any part of your body, speak, or think straight is absolutely horrible. It hasn't happened to me since I was quite young, and I didn't know what it was until a previous SDN thread on the topic.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

I've had sleep paralysis experiences for about 12 years or so. I've never had much in the way of hallucinations, but the inability to move anything fills me with a dread like drowning. I was able to open my eyes once, though I couldnt move anything. I can also control my breathing during the episodes. I've always tried to breathe more rapidly, hoping that maybe if I get my heartrate up a little, I might wake myself up. I call out for help, but barely any sound comes up, and nothing intelligible at that. The last time it happened Jessica was sleeping next to me and actually heard my cries and woke me up by touching me. What a relief that was; nobody had ever been there before to hear.

[Grandtheftcow]

I've had two odd experiences where I was sleepwalking but semi-conscious. My bedsheets moved and shifted like lava, I'd touch the wall but found my hand would go in it a few inches before I actually touched the wall, kinda like a hologram and the floor moved and shifted like blades of grass and my balance was terrible. Oddly enough it didn't bother me and after awhile I just went back to bed.

Most of my dreams are common day to day activities and nothing of interest, though you do get a weird feeling when you realize what you're doing is exactly what you had dreamed about previously.

[Winston Blake]

its like something slips in my mind, i cant really explain this but its almost as if i can 'feel' something go wrong in my head, and right as thats happening im looking into my room and there is what i can only imagine to be a massive very angry purple-brownish boar thrashing around in a rage of some sort. and as im lying there, fully conscious and trying to pull my eyes away, im frozen. mentally im literally trying to rip my head the other way and in the process of trying to pull my sanity back everything starts shaking, mildly at first, and then it builds up and very soon the whole room is shaking extremely violently.... then right at the peak of this shaking it stops i jolt the other way and im hyper-alert. if this exact thing hadnt happened about a week ago i would have just passed it off as slipping into a bad dream or something. so i got up, and thats when i went and stood in the doorway about to scream.

last week...

the reason i didn't just continue lying in bed is because last week something very similar happened, and it continued to repeat itself until i got out of the room. again i was lying in bed. something had woken me up and i was rather hyper alert. i kept hearing this sound, a taping or something. i would focus in on it and all of a sudden it would start getting louder, and louder, after a few seconds it was extremely loud and then the shaking would start like i described earlier. once the whole room was shaking like a fucking 8.0 earthquake i would jolt out of it. now last week when this happened i was just like.... WTF!? and i just laid back down and thought about it, and then i heard the sound again and the whole process repeated itself... about 4 times. so you can see why today right now i just jumped up and freaked the hell out.

Oh yes, that sounds familiar. Much milder, no hallucinations though, whenever it happens to me and I go paralysed I just get this massive sense of dread and there's this sound like a racecar is getting closer and closer. I tend to either fight the sound back or let it wash over me knowing that it'll stop soon. The really annoying part is that afterwards when I try to fall asleep again it just happens again and again.

[Lettuce]

I've actually had them since I was a kid. They actually stopped until recently when I became a super insomniac.

...Mine usually consist of the sleep paralysis and either some sort of falling sensation or this weird feeling that my bed is eating me.


the wiki page on it gives some pretty interesting info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompia

[Ariphaos]

Christ, that sounds terrifying. I wonder why I've never had experiences like this. For that matter, I never have nightmares either.

There has been some evidence pointing to EM interference causing it.

For me, there's a period of 'lost time' where I don't even recall being sleepy, but must have fallen asleep anyway. Usually around four hours or so. I don't get sleep paralysis during these (possibly because I'm able to separately coordinate my physical and in-dream actions), but I can't make any sound. I'll bang on the walls, kick and scream, but no sound ever comes out.

The first major night terror I remember was an alien visitation, when I was 4 or 5. A gray alien slowly stood up from under my bed... then went down again. He looked a bit like the guy pictured here:

www11.brinkster.com/code10v2/ufo/main/aliens/img/grey01.jpg

Except with yellowish skin, a bit larger / more slanted eyes, no brow ridges or nose protrusion, and no nostrils (there were slits, though). I'm not quite sure how tall it was, really...

The second one I remember was a similar sort of visitation, almost ten years later, but this time, I woke up in my bed and everything was pitch black. But, I could see something off to the side of my bed that was even darker - pure shadow, just watching me. It had the exact same shape as the above guy. This time I tried to thrash and scream, but nothing came out. No noise at all.

...

My family had a very hard time convincing me those incidents weren't real. How could they? Far as I know, the only other people who understand how terrifying this is, is other people who've gone through night terrors. I've had my life threatened before, by people nutso enough to carry through. Doesn't compare.

Awhile later (almost another decade) saw a program (I forget its name), that mentioned the idea that these sort of things could be caused by electromagnetic fields. One piece of evidence they pointed to was a meteor falling over Spain, and half the crowd saw the Virgin Mary, the other half saw a UFO, the camera saw a rock.

...

So, I'm a lucid dreamer and such, if a zap can do it I should be able to do it on my own, and did.

I was 'awake', again, another pitch black room while I'm in bed. A 'shadow' of a more typical grey alien - a lot smaller than me this time, was standing next to my bed.

So I tried to hit it. My arm passed straight through. It started bending over, almost snake-like, and started hissing at me - also snake like. I forced myself awake and it was gone.

I've had a lot of night terrors since, but I just force myself 'awake' now. Sometimes it takes a couple such forcings.

[Shroom Man 777]

Christ, that sounds terrifying. I wonder why I've never had experiences like this. For that matter, I never have nightmares either.

Just reading those give me chills. The closest experience I've got was waking up after a dream where I ended up tripping into a pitfall. I lurched out of the bed with that feeling in your gut after you ride one of them falling amusement park rides.

Why don't you have nightmares?

[Darth Wong]

Christ, that sounds terrifying. I wonder why I've never had experiences like this. For that matter, I never have nightmares either.

Why don't you have nightmares?

I don't know. Is it a bad thing that I never seem to have nightmares? Maybe I have them but I don't remember them when I wake up in the morning.

[Xenophobe3691]

I don't know. Is it a bad thing that I never seem to have nightmares? Maybe I have them but I don't remember them when I wake up in the morning.

Hardly, I never have nightmares or anything of the sort. The whole business seems strange to me.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Now that I think of it, though I'm sure there's no simple causal relationship one way or the other, I wonder if there's a correlation between religious upbringing and persistence of nightmares or similar experiences. I could imagine a slight subconscious enhancement towards fearing those things when you're raised in a tradition that not only tells you that these beings are real, but will get you if you're not good enough.

[Turin]

Christ, that sounds terrifying. I wonder why I've never had experiences like this. For that matter, I never have nightmares either.

Why don't you have nightmares?

I don't know. Is it a bad thing that I never seem to have nightmares? Maybe I have them but I don't remember them when I wake up in the morning.

It's probably not a bad thing. Dreams seem to just be part of the brain's system of memory reinforcement, so there's no real significance to exactly what you're dreaming. Presumably it just means you're usually well-adjusted or something if you never have nightmares.

I haven't seen any research on it, but if I had to guess, the "shadow man" phenomena in sleep paralysis is the result of mirror neurons. There was a recent article in The Economist (sorry, I only have the print version) that mentioned how test subjects that had their mirror neurons electrically stimulated experienced the sensation of a "shadow man", which was really an exterior projection of their own self-image. The human brain is fucking weird like that.

As long as folks are telling their little stories, my sleep paralysis experiences were really terrifying, as others have described. When I first started getting them, they included a huge shadow man standing at my bedside (speaking in some kind of distorted foul language), immense pressure on my chest, a droning sound like millions of bees, and a swooning feeling like I was falling. Sometimes instead of falling I would feel like I was being lifted off the bed and pulled towards a pool of black liquid overhead, where I would experience a drowning sensation. Pretty awful.

After maybe 6-7 years of sleep paralysis experiences, I learned to "go with" the fall or lift, so that I could return to sleep (often "passing through" the aforementioned liquid) and then turn it into a lucid dreaming experience of flying. Which was enormous fun, as it requires a highly relaxed and meditative state to perform... if I try too hard, I start to sink! In my mid 20's the frequency of the experiences has been reduced greatly for some reason, so I rarely have the opportunity and I'm a bit out of practice.

Frankly, I'm really glad my father is an atheist and raised us to be skeptics, because as it was I thought as a teenager that I was being visited by some horrible demon at night (the hallucinations are very distinct from nightmares... you know that you're semi-conscious). But in the morning I always knew that couldn't really be the case, as there's no such things as demons. I can't imagine how I would have felt if I was raised to be a religious teenager... that would open up an entirely new level of terror.