What would you call this- night terrors? All I know is that for some reason as I lay trying to go to sleep I was assailed by an almost numinous sense of uncanny dread. I literally was weeping with fear until I finally got my tire thumper out of the closet so I could beat the shit out of anything that dared attack. It finally went away after an hour or so and I slept with no problems. WTF was that all about?
Heh. I get night terrors just before I fall asleep almost every night–but I’ve been able to talk myself out of them–“nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine…”
What it is? I dunno. Maybe we’re both just crazy. 
The same thing happens to me frequently - enough that I know that I can manage the sense of fear to a degree - but last night I was hit by one so hard that it took every ounce of self-control not to flee my bedroom screaming.
I was doing really well for the last month or so - sleeping like a baby. Last night was the first episode in a while. Before then, I was finding it a serious battle to fall asleep; every time I’d start to doze off, I’d get hit with a wave of panic of immense strength. Heart pounding, palms sweating, horrible horrible stuff. It would take me hours to fall asleep. They just kept hitting until I was apparently too tired to wake up again.
Who is god’s name buys a tire thumper? 
When I was living in Sarasota, I half-awoke one night with this feeling of weight atop me. It felt like an invisible person was laying atop me, pinning me to the bed. I couldn’t move an inch, I could barely breathe. The sheets were taut around me. I laid there for a while, and it went away.
I do this but more specifically - sometimes I get the nerve up to check around downstairs and make sure that noise wasn’t an intruder, which I guess is pretty common - but I feel like such a stupid goose when I lie there terrified knowing Jason Voorhes is going to come chop me up with a machete. I mean, really! It’s entirely unlike me, but every so often I find myself locked in nighttime terror, both wanting to watch the light that outlines the crack in the door from the nightlight in the bathroom for silhouettes of people outside my room and terrified that I might see something. On a real good night I get too scared to stick my arm out to turn the light on. And the whole time I know how amazingly ridiculous that is.
All I have to add is that I admire the hell out of anyone who can write a phrase like “I was assailed by an almost numinous sense of uncanny dread.”
Who said literacy was dead?
Hypnagogic hallucinations. There’s been a few threads on the subject, too. I get them a lot; they’re freaky.
On the other hand, when I was pregnant with my oldest I suddenly developed the knowledge - the concrete, absolute, unarguable certainty - that brain-eating zombies were congregating outside, ready to burst into the trailer and kill me. This was different from hypnagogic hallucinations; I lay awake night after night in a greasy pool of my own cold terrorsweat, waiting for my bedroom door to slam open and reveal a shambling rotting corpse with impassive eyes lurching in to eat my brain. Every now and then I’d peek out the window, and of course I never saw anything, but my twisted evil little mind would say, “Ah-ha, they knew you were getting ready to look so they’re hiding now!” And then my mom down the hall would stop snoring and I’d go even colder because I knew the zombies had gotten her, and when my door slammed open it would be her shambling corpse coming in to eat me.
This went on for months, even after my son was born. That was 14 years ago; I’m better now, but I still can’t handle watching zombie movies. Freud would have a field day with me, I’m sure.
I don’t think mine are hypnagogic hallucinations. I’m fully capable of moving, and I’m never afraid of any particular thing. I don’t think that there are werewolves with knives at the foot of my bed, or anything along those lines. That’s what makes them frustrating for me - I’m terrified, of nothing.
Wonderful user name for that, you know.
If you’d like Jason Voorhes creeping up on you, let me know and I’ll send him over. He must get very bored lurking around in the dark in my house, stumbling over all my crap. And there’s not much to do on the landing where he hangs out, you know.
That’s quite alright - you can keep him.
Although I think I’d rather have something specific I was lying in fear of, instead of crawling out of my skin for no good reason.
That used to happen to me a lot. I’d be so afraid that someone was at my window. I was on the freakin second floor! And it wasn’t even that I was afraid of someone coming in, just the thought of someone looking in at me was freaky enough. I had to sleep w/my bedroom door open, and the rangehood light on in the kitchen and the door to my mom’s room open.
Oh and I couldn’t sleep w/closet doors open. Still can’t. Or with my neck and head exposed to air. Have to have the blanket pulled up.
How did I solve it?
Got married and got a couple of dogs. Heh. Well that’s not the real reason, but it’s a definite plus.
I’ve become quite a scaredy-cat in the last few years…
My boyfriend works overnight, so 5 or 6 nights out of the week I sleep alone… If I wake up in the middle of the night (as I often do - damn bladder!) and see the closet door open, I freak.
I used to have a problem looking out windows at night, thinking there’d be some scary face looking back at me, but for some reason in our new apartment I’m over that…
Our furnace also makes this awful growling noise when it turns on, so that frequently wakes me up and scares the living hell out of me… Also in the morning (when the boyf is working) I always hear noises and get scared… Our apartment building is really quiet and I get up so early that I’m the only one moving around…
My form of scaring-the-shit-outta-me dreams happened between that period of sleeping and awaking. Seems for a couple of years, a couple of nights a week I would hear blood curdling screaming, and I could not totally wake up or move. I didn’t know what caused it or how to avoid it. I discovered soft foam earplugs and have not had that happen ever since. Weird.
Hey, that same thing happens to me–night terrors is a good term for it. Funny, I’ve heard of children going through night terrors but I never thought to apply the term to what I experience occasionally.
For me, it’s when I’m laying in bed but not near falling asleep. I’ll suddenly be convinced I am not alone, that something invisible is in the room with me. My body reacts physically to it–heart racing, cold sweats, and it feels like every last nerve is buzzing. Very unnerving experience.
The sleep paralysis, I have had that a few times. Similar but not the exact same experience as these ‘night terrors’ for me.
Of course in the morning I feel so foolish.
Sometimes I wake up and have strange hallucinations. Not terror, but hallucinations. I think that, for instance, I’m a Russian air force gereral, and I have to repel the Chinese invation. Or that I’m a soldier in the (American) Civil War. Most of them have to do with being in a military in time of war, and I can usually bring myself out of them, but it is really strange.
LorieSmurf – I used to hear screaming at night, too. Turns out we have a panther that lived in our backyard (mind you, in rural Mississippi, our backyard is 90 acres). When they scream, they sound like a woman being murdered. Even worse, their kittens make sounds like babies crying. shudder
My night terrors are thousands of spiders leaping off the wall beside my bed and on top of me. Once it was a giant blue lobster falling from the ceiling. I wake up in absolute panic, and before I had my eyes lasered I’d try to grab for my glasses to be able to see them.
StG