I don’t think anyone is going to have an experience more horrifying than a lurking Ed Begley Jr. 
I just had a generic big shadowy figure at the foot of the bed with the feeling of pressure pushing on my body and not allowing me to move.
I honestly never realized hypnogogic hallucinations were this close to accounts of the supernatural. I knew about the alien abduction connection but people are describing creepy, transparent apparitions and visitations, even historical-looking ones like pilgrims. The title of this thread could just as easily have been, ‘‘Have you seen a ghost?’’
Yeah. Kind of wish I wasn’t home alone right now.
As someone who has them fairly regularly, it really is easy to see that they could be mistaken for something paranormal (as I mentioned in the thread that I think spawned this one). Hell, for all we know, they ARE something paranormal - maybe it IS ghosts in my bedroom!
Given that, without sleeping drugs, I get 3-4 of these a night, I’ve got quite a range! Mostly mine are seeing a spider on the wall … but I also get camera’s watching me, faces at the window, catch nets dropping from the ceiling holding me in bad, people in the house, holes opening in the wall and all sorts of other bugs/vermin!
I can get some Dali-esque type ones where hallucinations warp and melt!
Sometimes I’ll be dressed and nearly out the door before I realise is it all just not real sigh
If I was a bit more superstitious I’d believe my house was incredibly haunted … unfortunately these occur everywhere and even under observation in hospital!
I hate sleep!!
But ostensibly you knew when you had them that you were hallucinating. I wonder why some people recognize them for what they are but some people don’t. Thoughts?
Magical thinking. A need to be having a fascinating life. Ever notice that the people who see ghosts are the same who see angels and aliens etc etc?
Actually, mine was a hypnopompic hallucination (while waking up) rather than a hypnogogic hallucination (while falling asleep). I understand hypnopompia is much more common.
Since I had that aspect of sleep paralysis along with mine, I can easily understand how the myths of night hags, incubi, and alien abductions can be believed.
A couple times I’ve been convinced a raccoon is in my bed about to bite me.
I have no idea where my brain got that. I’m not afraid of raccoons, never been attacked by one, never had one in my bed. We did have one get into the house when I was a kid, but that was more funny than anything scary.
Another time I was lying in awake in bed and looked at the clock on my nightstand. Only the damn display kept jumping around! At least an inch up, down, or sideways. Took what seemed several minutes to actually read the thing.
I’ve never had a name for it before! 
Mainly, it’s hearing someone call my name, which wakes me up, but a few times a week I get ones influenced by my PTSD and I’ll hear gunshots or explosions. When those happen I reach for my M4… it’s never there… 
Good question. When you’re having one, it is as real as reality; then you truly wake up, and you know it was just your brain playing tricks again. Like capybara says, maybe people want them to be more special than they are; I’m good with my brain just playing tricks on me.
A question for other people who have them - I have wonderful dreams, very vivid and creative and entertaining as well as the hypnowhatevers. Do you also have a very vivid dream life?
I do. I once dreamed that I was getting behind the wheel of a '57 Chevy. Putting my foot on the clutch in the dream made my foot jerk in real life and woke me up.
I’ve had plenty of these. I’ve felt cats snuggle up against me when they weren’t actually there, heard the front door open and close when I’m alone, and felt someone watching me many times. When I first started working the night shift I had visual hallucinations all the time, like movement out of the corner of my eye.
Here’s the most vivid dream I’ve had, it still chills me thinking about it. I must have been about maybe 9 to 11 years old, and sharing a bedroom with my brother on the second floor of our house. At the time, the house bordered on an open field that was most likely used for mine talings, as it never grew grass or many weeds (yea healthy place, that field) There were housing developments and hotels on all sides, so that field actually got quite a bit of foot traffic on it, from people getting from here to there. Although I lived in a small city, the light pollution from the snow kept us up sometimes so we slept with the blinds and curtains closed to keep it dark.
One night I’m having trouble sleeping. I toss and turn, but just can’t go to sleep, so I decided to pull the blinds up to just stare out into the night for a bit. I could see the stars so bright and the snow gleaming in the moonlight.
There was a man walking out in the middle of the field.
I didn’t think much of it really. People did so all the time. Hell, I did it at night too, sometimes. The man stopped walking along in the field, and I saw him turn towards me. Although none of the lights were on in the house, he somehow knew I was there, awake and watching him. I distinctly heard a tinny little voice say THERE he is! and he rushed the house. And when I say he rushed it, I mean it was like The Flash fast, he traversed what must have been 200 yards in less than a second. He jumped up onto the bare rooftop in front of my window in a single leap and was at the window almost instantly.
I had just gotten a good look at his face when… no. no that’s not right. He had no face. It was just a blank where his face should have been. I started shrieking bloody murder, screaming at the top of my lungs. My brother came over to my bed to shake me awake, then went to go get my parent. My parents burst into the room hearing my screams. They finally got me to wake up. I sat there, blubbering and crying, shaken by the ordeal. It wasn’t real. It was only a bad dream. It was such a vivid dream though, I still remember it clear as day over 20 years later. After telling them all about it, I went to sleep in mom and dad’s room that night. But before we left to go downstairs, mom closed the blinds to the windows.
Sometimes I wonder if the roof had had snow on it that night, if there would have been footprints…
If you have a one off episode it could be impossible to know - you SEE these things … I see them as clearly as I see anything in a waking state. If you hallucinated then went back to sleep immediately without proving the lack of existance of what you saw, then I would easily believe it really existed.
The way I tell my visions are not real now is because of the timing … mine occur 30 mins after falling asleep - it is one of my cues to stop the hallucination, look at the clock to see what time it is, if it is half an hour after I last looked - then it isn’t real - and that stops the hallucination.
There are still times when I’m just not sure if it was real or not.
I get spiders all the time, and have since I was a toddler. Apparently used to freak my mom out. It’s worse when I’m sick. One time, as a child, I was hysterical because I could see the house breathing.
My favorite so far was a couple years ago when I woke up to see an octopus with knives for tentacles sitting on my husband’s pillow.
I get them frequently enough that they mostly don’t scare me - only annoy me for having to wake up. Occasionally a new one will get me, though. Recently saw a man standing over me and reaching down to strangle me. I screamed so loud and so hard that I lost my voice for two days.
The “Kangaroo of Death.” I knocked my coffee cup off my nightstand when I saw it. Around that time (1983) I also had what is known as exploding head syndrome and thought we were at war–it was very embarrassing when I asked other people if they had heard the bombs go off and they just looked at me like they wondered what I’d been smoking.
I’ve seen spiders and have been attacked by giant rats leaping into my bed but I’ve never hallucinated aliens. I did, in a classic incubus attack, hallucinate the devil even though I’m not religious.
The most terrifying ones, other than the exploding head stuff, involve buzzing noises. These cause me to wake up convinced that terrorists or other evil doers have gotten in and it takes me a while to calm down. I’ve wondered if some people call the police in response to particularly disturbing hypnagogic hallucinations (before I realized what they were there were times when I considered it.)
I haven’t had them for years, but I used to get demon girls in long white nightgowns standing on the corner while imps cavorted over me on the bed, phantom kids climbing on me, axe murderers creeping down the stairs to chop off my head.
And at the time I’d never heard of hh; I thought either I was going nuts or Pazuzu was hanging out in my apartment. Boy, imagine my relief when i found out it was all just figments of my diseased imagination. I can see where some people who’ve never heard of such a thing might prefer to believe in ghosts if the only other alternative they can imagine is that they’re nuts.
I haven’t had any for years but used to get them all the time. They consisted of meaningless snatches of conversation as though a line of people were walking quickly past the bedroom window engaged in conversation. At first it scared me but once I knew what it was I kind of liked it.
“…and I said to him, ‘if you think…’”
“No, you beat the eggs and milk together first…”
“…by 20 points…”
“…maybe she’s left handed and…”
As soon as I started to pay attention it would stop and I’d be wide awake and have to start falling asleep again.
When I was a kid I remember my Speak and Spell talking to me just as I was falling asleep. It turned itself on and told me it needed new batteries. I got up and took the batteries out of the darn thing.
I’ve had visions of a scorpion in my bed too. I don’t live in a part of the world where a scorpion in my bed would even be a remote possibility, but I’ve come to my senses as I’m beating on the mattress trying to squash the scorpion.
In a flu delerium, my fever-cooked brain generated some acid-trip imagery.
I was capable of accessing para-reality: along with the normal length, width, depth, and time, each real dimension has an imaginary counterpart…
You know… i = sqrt -1 ( I realized this because my dreams have an announcer doing a monologue explaining stuff)
…thus this hypercomplex geometry, defined by the set (x,y,z,t) : (i,j,k,l), has truly bizarre properties, such as non-linear causality.
Left and right, back and forth, up and down, even before and after, all get tossed in the Cuisinart. BTW, iirc this is exactly what happens at the Planck Scale.
the world looks kinda like this:
http://files.sharenator.com/6_MC_Escher-s1024x768-142294.jpg
Now, in this para-reality there is life of a kind which is (relatively, from my point of view) rather toxic, as both gravity and electromagnetism is fractured and a mere touch is essentially a microscopic nuclear explosion. They are out to get me, because apparently in the future or alternate history I was out to get them.
However, in this para-reality, I can fly…not through the air, but slide effortlessly along surfaces. Taking a running dive, I can skim down a street or slide up the side of a building, effortlessly overcoming gravity and friction as well as taking hard right angle turns like Light Cycles from TRON.
The way they get me is with Void Bombs…an explosion which tears a hole in space and time. I skim through a void and the spatial discontinuity fractures me.
I feel my arm cease to exist and, to to the dream being far too weird, I hit my internal panic button and wake up.
However, I had been lying on my side and cut off blood to my arm so it was still asleep.
As I still can’t feel my arm, my mind can’t decide whether or not I’m still asleep, so I go absolutely bug-fuck, trying to skim out of my bed and up the walls.:dubious: