I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, and ask the opinion of all you sleep paralysis/night terrors expects. It’s because I’m prone to a weird sleep disorder and although it has some of the symptoms of night terrors, in some ways it is different, and I wondered if anyone else had experienced or knew if it had a name. It may be that I’m just dreaming weirdly.
Basically I get this a lot when I’m especially tired. It only ever happens in the first part of the night, just when I’m dropping off to sleep. I always dream that there’s someone in the room – and usually (but not always) somebody sinister – but I don’t feel paralysed or helpless. Actually, what normally happens is that I react immediately and tell the person to go away or shout at my boyfriend. And I actually do this – talking out loud in my sleep. By this time I’ve half woken up but, and, partly because I’m very short-sighted and partly because (I think) I’m still a bit asleep, although my eyes are wide open, * I can still see that person in the shadows*. At this point I switch on the light, the person disappears and I go to sleep without any problems.
Anyone know what this is? As I said I don’t think it’s sleep paralysis because it’s not always sinister, and because the dream is over very quickly. Is it common to dream about an interloper in your room when you’re half asleep and still aware of your surroundings?
Happens to me all the time. If not a person, it’s a ghost swirling around the room.
My WAG (IANADorPsychologist) is that it’s merely hallucinations. The brain does weird things when it’s in that netherworld between sleep and wakefulness.
I believe these might be “hypnogogic hallucinations” (sorry about the cite: not much web info that I can find about them), which can include voices, images, and feelings of paranoia. They’re usually quite normal, though sometimes an indicator of another underlying problem.
Part of the problem is that I always wake my boyfriend up – sometimes because I’m freaked and I want to turn the light on, but at other times I’m like ‘hmm, there’s a ghost over there. He’s definitely coming over here. Look, you can see his head and everything.’ He’s learnt to ignore me now.
My daughter described something similar, except she always saw an old man and old woman dressed in old fashioned clothes and they were not threatening. It always happened soon after she had fallen asleep. This went on until she moved to another home in another state and she hasn’t seen them since.
If I’m not mistaken, hypnagogic hallucinations have been tied to sleep apnea, and may be due to decreased levels of oxygen in the brain. I’ve found a wonderful resource at Talk About Sleep.
I FEEL DEAD PEOPLE? “Sensed presence” and TLE are good keywords for searching for info on that sort of hallucination.
So, do your relatives notice any weird stuff when they stay over? Does the weirdness still occur when you sleep in other locations? Ghosts supposedly haunt a particular place and don’t follow you around, while temporal-lobe “sensed precence” hallucinations are going happen to you alone, and occur regardless of your location.
I had something similar happening, a weird feeling in our upstairs bedroom, as if someone invisible was in the room. A “creepy old attic” feeling. This was something new for me; I’ve lived lots of places but never noticed a creepy atmosphere in a room before. We used the bedroom as a storage attic for years, then later as a bedroom again (VERY weird trying to go to sleep up there!)
But it turns out that this upstairs room had been the main bedroom for the previous owners. And the elderly husband had accidentally killed his wife with their car in the driveway, then himself died afterwards after wasting away with guilt + depression over several years. Knowing this, I was of course subconsciously primed to expect that our house could be haunted, so “suggestion” and reality aren’t easily separated.
I mentioned this “haunting” to my sister-in-law who was into New Age weird stuff. She performed a ghost-removal ceremony under guidance by a psychic over the phone. Big fun.
But afterwards? The “weird feeling” while sleeping in that room was utterly gone. It felt like just another room again, totally inert and normal like any other in the house. I had gotten used to the weird feeling, so it’s absence was fairly noticable.
If ghosts don’t exist and all the above was caused by suggestion, then maybe an exorcism ceremony is the perfect cure. It could provide just the strong suggestion you need to convince your subconscious that the “haunting” has ended.
I am a sleepwalker and I tend to have most episodes during the first hour of sleep, especially when I am lagging in quality sleep. I sense that I have gone into deep sleep too quickly and I start to wake up, but my brain stays partly in REM sleep. As a result, I act out my dreams. I often think there is something ominous hanging over my bed, and I get up and run. I can’t really see it directly - it seems like I can only see it with my peripheral vision, which I believe is the same way you ‘see’ in dreams and why it is so hard to focus when you dream you that you are reading. :o
I’m subject to periodic bouts of insomnia, during which I will fail to get any meaningful sleep sometimes for several days. I’ve found that, at the end of a cycle of this, when perhaps I haven’t slept for three or four days (mind you, I said “meaningful,” as typically what will happen is that I retire early, sleep for a couple of hours pretty good, then wake awide and then maybe eventually doze fitfully for the rest of the night… Six or seven hours of wakefullness before getting up and going to work can kind of suck . … I suppose it’s better than absolutely no sleep, but after several nights of this one can become quite batty).
Anyway, after a couple of days of this I will sort of start to hallucinate. I’ll hear voices, doorbells, that kind of thing, which seem to be calculated by my mind to make sure I don’t sleep. And once I had “someone” shake me awake while grabbing my shoulders and looking me directly in the face. That got my heart beating, I’ll tell you that, and I remember making some kind of noise about it. I was a bit paralyzed in the bed for a few seconds, then managed to move and turn the light on. It stayed on, too.
Thanks again for the links. I don’t really have the weird sounds in my dreams but it does look as if they are hypnagogic hallucinations since I do get them when I haven’t had enough sleep.
Bbeaty>I’m not sure, an exorcism may freak me out more than the dreams do! I’m a big fan of ghost stories, which is probably why I dream of spirits. But I also dream of friends, workmates, etc, visiting too. I get it in other places too.
I’ve had years of sleep disorder all of which I am finding are diet related. Any amount of alchohol can cause you to re-emerge from sleep an hour after falling asleep. Also all grains- esp. wheat, plus the usual suspects: chocolate, coffee, etc. The only answer is to restrict your diet as drastically as possible (I find Dr D’Adamo’s diet is good). It may work.
I suffer from sleep paralysis that involves the feeling of being held down and being unable to speak.
My bouts are not nearly as frequent since I trained myself to sleep on my sides and not my back. I read I read somewhere (cannot remember where) that most of these episodes occur when one is flat on their back.
While your problem is different, it appears to be a related disorder. Perhap changing your sleeping position would help you, it certainly couldn’t hurt to try.
Ghosts supposedly haunt a particular place and don’t follow you around, while temporal-lobe “sensed precence” hallucinations are going happen to you alone, and occur regardless of your location.