Frequently, when I drive at night, I “see” things that are not really there, especially when it is really dark with side lights around and on coming traffic. Its something I accept and deal with, sometimes I slow down, I would much rather run something down than swerve into the left lane or onto the shoulder. Last night me and KD were coming home and conditions were perfect: no moon, oncoming headlights, headlights in the rearview, and a street light to the side. All of a sudden, a black shadow ran in front of my truck and was gone. I just maintained speed and direction and as I passed, glanced to the side to make sure nothing was there. When it was gone I told KD that that one really looked real and asked if something had really passed in front of the truck. “You saw the ‘black dog’ again, didn’t you?” , she asked and we started reminiscing about long nights on the road in the past and all that. I’ve been thinking about it since then though. What makes me see shadows that aren’t there? And is this does this happen to other drivers at night?
Maybe it’s an afterimage from a street/car light.
Maybe it actually was some sort of animal, not necessarily a dog but maybe a cat or a bird.
Maybe it was a shadow being.
Maybe it’s retinitis pigmentosa.
Etc.
Maybe it’s drugs.
A truck driver told me that he was once driving across the Nullabor Plain and slammed on his brakes because he saw a guy rowing a boat across the road.
He put it down to the drugs.
You need to consider the complexities of human vision. It takes a really tiny input to cause an interpretation of a complex whole- look up gestalt. For instance, a few pin hole lights on the main body joints allows someone to even make a good guess at the sex of the person at the other end of a darkened gym. There is a genetic bias towards recognizing animal shapes and movements as these are potentially threatening- hence the brain will overinterpret for animal shapes and movements. I used to be a birder and would be convinced that I could see a definite wildfowl at the limit of my vision- get a scope on it and it was just a few clors and shapes that stimulated my ‘wild-fowl’ template.
It is also worth googling for ‘face recognition’ as that is deeply embedded and gnetically based.
Hope that helps.
When staring at a blank wall or into a clear sky or towards some other source of constant illumination, do you ever see dark, largely translucent bodies composed of cells and fibers? They are called floaters and are cellular schmutz that accumulates within the vitreous humor.
Anyway, it’s possible that a floater briefly passed in front of your field of vision and your brain interpreted the momentary change of brightness as a running black dog.
I sometimes think I see animals/people in the shadows as I drive at night. It’s usually on a road that has little or no street lighting.
I think it’s my brain trying to recognize shapes (like faces, etc.) in the shifting shadows. It does make me paranoid whenever I go down one particular road, because I did hit a deer there three years before.
I just try to stay as aware as possible, not driving if I’m fatiqued. (I’ll stop and take a 10-minute nap if I’m feeling droopy.) Staying aware helps to dismiss the shape recognitions from real objects I need to avoid.
And they’re bloody annoying, I’ve had one constantly for years now, annoys the hell out of me when I remember its there.
Sounds like a Barghest. Or a Black Skuck.
I have had this happen on a few occasions when I was driving very late at night and was very tired, always on a highway when my speed is constant and there’s not a lot of traffic. It freaked me out. I have concluded that, based on the circumstances, I was having very mild hallucinations.
It seems to be a misinterpretation by the brain of what is there, particularly shadows. The experience is generally that of perceiving something, either an animal or a person, in the road, although there was never clear visual perception of it. I once just had this sense of a person right in front of me, and went for the brakes and then a fraction of a second later saw that it wasn’t there at all. It wasn’t that vivid visually but it’s as though the brain was trying to sift through what meager data it had and concluded there was something there that I didn’t actually see.
I usually see a bicyclist on the side of the road. Usually it’s just a quick vision and then I realize that nothing is there but one time I was driving on a lonely stretch of highway at night and I swear there was a bicyclist in the road so I gave them a wide berth and looked over as I passed them and no one was there. Another car was coming up a ways behind me so thewas lit up enough to see in my rear view mirror that the bicyclist hadn’t fallen over in the road - they were never there. I just figured it was a ghost.
How is we’ve made it this far without someone including this link.
I spend most of the summer driving a truck, sometimes late at night under less-than-totally-awake conditions. I’ve seen similar artifacts.
Whatever you do, don’t sign any contracts with it. You may have a difficult time getting out of it.
That movie really was a dog, too.
Not sure if floaters fits in this case.
I am very familiar with floaters. First got them at the age of 50. Scared the shit out of me. Thought I was going blind. Turns out I wasn’t going blind. Floaters are a natural part of aging it seems.
Still have them at the age now of 60 plus. Only time they become very evident is on a white beach with a blue sky above. -------floaters all over the place. Still scares the shit out of me.
Most times I don’t know I even have floaters. Especially at night.
Don’t think the OP has anything at all to do with floaters,
No, no, it’s just
Sirius Black, in his Animagus form
What’s a shadow being? Sounds like something out of Neil Gaiman. One of the things he put in a drawer and didn’t send to the publishers.
I’ve got floaters, and have all my life. I’m more than used to them (but they still piss me off sometimes - but I never mistake them for something else). But at night I see “black dogs” sometimes. I just figured it was down to my brain overprocessing - taking random shifting shadows and trying to turn them into images. The same way people see patterns in patternless objects.
Woof!
-Joe
I have never seen a black dog. I have, however, seen gigantic black spiders walking in the pitch black fields after being awake for over 56 hours and driven home from the airport by my folks. But knowing my state of exahustion, I figured they were only halucinations and laid back down to try to sleep.
It’s possible that it might have been a dark patch on the road. Around here, you see lots of dark spots where the road was patched with asphalt or tar. They can be rather annoying because they look like debris in the road (fun thing to see on a highway when you’re doing 80MPH)
When I pull all-nighters at the campus library or computer lab, I do tend to see phantoms in the corner of my eye while riding my bike accross campus (they get to their very worst at around 6:00AM) I’ve learned to just ignore them, or give a quick glance to make sure I’m not gonna intersect with another bicycle (the only things on campus at night that can move fast enough to be a problem for me if I see them in the corner of my eye while riding a bike).