These are the “minidreams” you have in between being fully awake and asleep. I’m really into words and language, so mine are often thoughts of words, poems, origins, etc. The poems that I come up with are incredible… too bad I never have the presence of mind to get up and write them down. I’d probably have forgotten them by then anyway.
Last night, I drifted off into a fairly elaborate explanation (to myself) about the role of mathematics in writing. I marveled at how in every other aspect of life, math has a big role. As in, beauty is often quantified by how symetrical the object is, music is all about math, etc. I “discovered” in my little pre-sleep dream that in order to write a masterpiece, one had only to find and follow a mathematical formula. I drifted off planning my Nobel Prize speech.
Does anybody else remember their common hypnogogic hallucinations?
I always have scary ones. Once there was a demonic child figure in a long white nightdress glaring at me from a corner of the room while demon imps raced over and around my bed. Another time I lay petrified in bed listening to heavy footsteps walking around upstairs; they came slooowly down the stairs, the door creeped open, I saw the profile of a scarred demented psycho killer peek around the doorframe - and then I finally jerked myself fully awake and remembered that there was no upstairs and no door. I’ve heard breathing in my ear and people calling my name, I’ve felt my blankets being pulled on; once I heard my daughter come down the hall, felt her climb up on the bed, put her hands on my hips, and lean over me to see if my eyes were open; something she does all the time, but after I woke up I remembered she wasn’t home. I’ve also floated around my house, which was quite interesting, but when I try to steer myself outside I either wake up fully or fall into a deeper sleep. And I always feel like I’m freezing while they’re happening.
I’ve been interested in trying some lucid dreaming, but when these things happen I’m usually too terrified to do anything but struggle to wake myself up; I can’t move or scream, and they seem to go on forever. For some reason they only occur when I’m sleeping on my back; I started a thread in GQ about it a while back, trying to figure out why, and the general opinion was it was most probably being caused by mild sleep apnea. So I just don’t sleep on my back anymore.
Marlitharn, wow, we have the same dreams. Although I never really get to see the demons or the presence, except just outside my perception, or I can feel the mattress move when they sit on the bed behind me (of course I can’t move to see them). I also “get out of my body” and go flying around, and I have managed to make it outside; that’s the first place I go in fact. 
I used to have the “demon” dreams so often that they eventually stopped scaring me. I got so used to them, automatically knowing that the demons weren’t real, that it was just another one of those dreams, and now I don’t get them nearly as much anymore.
I still get the “out of body but not really” ones alot; in fact I can sometimes force it to happen, which I suppose falls into the realm of lucid dreaming. I can’t control it much though.
Whoa, those demons sounds pretty scary! I’ve often felt someone sit down on the bed while I’m in this state. I’ve also heard my name called, and knocks on the door. For some reason, though, when I get “scared” in this hypno-state, it makes me fall asleep faster, instead of waking up. You would think the opposite would be true. I’ve been trying to make this state last longer, because I just read (on the SDMB?) that this leads to astral projection. That’s not happened for me. Yet.
Mine have gone away but I used to have them all the time. It happened so often that I was frequently afraid to go to sleep. I’d be lying there and would at some point feel the change and zoom, off I’d go. They were terrifying. I’d feel like I was being sucked down from the bed to the floor by some kind of powerful air current and whooshed along at a great speed. I could “feel” my pajamas blowing and my hair being whipped back - kind of like how you’d feel if you were strapped to the top of a train going 200 mph. I was not able to move or even hardly breathe. Often I felt as though there were an extremely bright light shining into my eyes - so bright that I couldn’t open them and I’d try to cover them with my hands but I couldn’t move any part of my body. Whenever I came out of these, my heart would be racing and I would be close to having a panic attack. One time I was sleeping on the couch and the dream took the form of the couch raising into the air and swinging back and forth. I was fighting for dear life to hold on to the “swinging” couch and finally I couldn’t hold on anymore, between the swinging and the hurricane-force wind, and I promptly rolled right off the couch and onto the floor, which woke me up.
If I had any proclivity whatsoever to believe in alien abductions, I would have thought that was what was happening to me. I firmly believe that all the people who insist they have been abducted were having the same kind of dreams that I did.
I’ve had the kind that trublmakr is talking about. I’m a professional FileMaker database programmer. While you really can do some amazing things with FileMaker, I remember lying half-awake early one morning and “realizing” that all I needed to do in order to store actual physical objects in FileMaker container fields was to convert them to digital arrays using a text parsing function and incrementing the position until you reach the end of the object. (Hello, patent office, I’ve got a Star Trek transporter that runs on an iMac). And then I was thinking I could use the Substitute to replace key chains on the molecules once I knew the corresponding digital pattern-strings. (Lead into gold, anyone?).
I remained sufficiently convinced that even after getting up and taking a shower, and by that time realizing I had no peripheral USB device that would read a physical object as digital data, I was still trying to work out how I could implement some kind of “scanning wand” that would do that so I could get busy writing the parsing scripts, and only gradually realized this impossible wand was the missing step that made the whole premise one of those “Collect Underwear; ____{step 2 goes here}; Enjoy being rich” thingies…
Of course, I’ve also sat here at work, wide awake and theoretically coherent, and made plans to email myself a bottle of Tabasco sauce rather than risk forgetting to take it with me when I went home.
:o
I used to have aural hypnagogic illusions (which is what they were called in my nursing days) as I was falling asleep and I really liked them. It was like a stream of people passing by me and I could hear meaningless snatches of conversation:
Why she would wear that, at her age…
So I said, “If you think you can do it better…”
No, if he says anything I’ll go to the cops…
Can we go tomorrow Dad…
But if I tried to pay attention to them they just disappeared. They certainly weren’t hallucinations because I knew they were not real and for this reason, once I worked out what was going on, they weren’t scary - even though it could be dozens of different voices.
About 10 years ago it stopped unfortunately.
These things were really laying into me a few nights ago.
I woke up in the middle of the night, which is unusual for me. Since I sleep with my curtains open, my room was bathed in eerie light. A man was inside my room, blocking part of the window and casting a definite silhouette. In the casual manner of someone who deals with this sort of thing the whole I time, I just stared at it and waited for the apparition to vanish. Only, instead of vanishing, the figure began to walk towards me. My heart suddenly decides to take a vacation to my throat, and I bolt upright to confront the demon at which point it disappears. Still a little on edge, I scan round for other invaders and find that a small wooden Rhino has transformed into a curled up cat. As I watch, the cat pounces at me – leaping right off the top of my bookcase. This time I have to look away and turn on the light to evict Mr. Mistofelees.
My hypnogogic hallucinations appear to have evolved around my staring at them trick. I am worried…
Quite often when I’m worried about not getting up on time, I’ll wake up hours in advance and be convinced its time to lead my nest. Additionally, if I go to sleep late I try and continue what I was doing before I slept when I wake up. After playing the Sims the night before, this took a rather interesting manifestation.
I had been controlling a house with five people in it, and so as I awoke from my slumbers I somehow took on five separate personalities and made sure that each one was waking up and moving on to complete appropriate tasks. It wasn’t until quarter of an hour later that I suddenly realised what the hell I had been doing. I can’t even remember the specifics of how it worked, but I distinctly remember ‘being’ each of the characters.
When I was younger I had the same hallucination every night, only when I was going to bed. I didn’t have Sandman – I had a whole army of sandmen that would come marching and chanting into my room. I always closed my eyes at this point, and so I never got to see them. They would always vanish shortly after.
One time, I was drifting off to sleep with birds chirping outside my window. I hallucinated that I could understand what they were saying. Of course I couldn’t remember what they were saying when I awoke.
This sometimes happens to me at work when I haven’t had enough sleep the night before and I start to nod off at my desk. For the ones I could recall I have kept them in a file. Over the past seveal months, here are some of the ones I have listed (many of them make no sense at all):
“And it sat in his hand.”
“I want my friends back. I want 'em ALL back!”
“Is it legal leg up, or is it leg down?”
“Building would not reach your places in Africa.”
“It’s happy employee poetry happy month!”
(high-pitched raspy female voice): “Interview you taking, honey?!”
“Michelle makes it easy to show all.”
(pleasant young female voice) “…have to do my afternoon cleanup.”
“…a detriment to my creativity.”
“But thanks to Mr. Recession, we haven’t had as many people going to casinos.”
“If you gotta take chances, then you gotta take chances!”
“We’re at normal occupancy volume, I hope.”
Lady saying, “Thanks for your help, It’s nice to meet you” as she’s leaving.
“You guys have never had to find them before?”
“I have an account, too. Did you know the exhibits are not that much different here?” (female voice)
“We have to get it from bumper-to-bumper land!”
“…quite a mess here!” (said slowly)
“A light verse they may not know.”
“You and your daughter’s planning.”
“There’s no more parking spots.”
“So that’s the filling-in shelf.”
“I use a digital router instead.”
“It might be this guy. He has no brake lights.”
“…scared the poop out of you!”
“I just thought of a picture I could carry out.”
(little boy voice) “No, I just really want to pinch the window!”
“Tuna teeth? Good… fuck!”
“You’re close enough in nature.”
“How much carpet did you put down?”
“It was bigger than that- fuck!”
Similar to that, I was on a bike trip and took a nap off the side of the road and woke up tapping my foot to the chirping birds.
I agree. Until I learned what these things were, I thought I was possessed; I was just waiting for the head-spinning to start. Ever notice how many “true” ghost stories start out with the person lying in bed?
I’ve also heard those snatches of conversations while I was falling asleep. For a good while, I liked to think that I had tapped into the collective subconcious of the world and I really was hearing other people’s conversations!
These things are just strange. I’m actually still considering that whole “math your way to the perfect book” thing… except I suck at math.
I’m feeling really good about mine mostly being about words, not ghosts or demons like some here!
When I was a kid, alot of times I would get this feeling as I started to fall asleep, where it would feel like I had risen up close to the ceiling. When I told my friend about it as an adult, she said she thought maybe I really had levitated, cuz she had also had this feeling, and she had been levitating!