(no subject)

[camwyn]

Anyone else here ever have hypnagogic hallucinations? They're sensory weirdness that happens right around the edges of sleep, I think mostly just as you're about to fall asleep. I used to think I hadn't hallucinated even in periods of high fever since the age of five, but I got a sharp reminder the other night that this was not, in fact, the case. Well, maybe not sharp, exactly, but...

Okay. When I still lived with my parents, before I got my Jersey City apartment, I would occasionally have a distressing moment right around the edge of sleep in which I would think that I'd seen a mouse running up the other side of my curtains and hanging on somewhere higher up. I never saw the mouse itself, just the lump moving upwards along the curtain. For a couple of minutes afterwards I would be fully awake, or close to it, and completely certain that there was in fact a mouse in there- even though we'd never had mice in my parents' house and I had no reason to believe that they'd come into the house in the first place. For all that this was one mouse, and not a particularly large one at that, it was still a terrifying prospect. Always. Fortunately there was a relatively easy way to protect myself. I usually snapped out of it as I was either tying a knot in my curtains or tying the cord for my blinds around the midpoint of the curtains. The mouse couldn't get past that.

Haven't had my brain pull that one on me in years, possibly because in Jersey City my bedroom was next to... a blank wall. I had blinds rather than curtains for most of my time there. Got curtains here in Hoboken, though, and the other night I caught myself thinking 'why aren't my cats reacting? Where is my curtain tieback? I must-' and then snapped awake.

Ruddy brain.

Comments

[agoodshinkickin.livejournal.com]

I've had something similar off and on for the better part of the last 15 years or so. Usually it's something like a spider on my pillow or some sort of insect being very close to my face. On occasion I'll see a man in black or a woman in white in my room.

It wasn't until a year or so ago that I remembered a family friend being freaked out by me sleeping with my eyes open as a child.

I just kind of chalk up my "visions" to not having my eyes closed all the way.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_geekie_/]

This happens to me occasionally. I'll suddenly be able to see my bedroom very clearly (I'm very nearsighted), and either I'll see spiders on the ceiling or huge black cracks there. Then I'll shake myself awake. So weird.

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

Ugh. I have those all the time - more when I'm on my sleep meds, more's the pity. I have audible ones, too, occasionally.

[camwyn]

Richard Feynman used to get the audio ones. Mostly he heard a professor he used to have, talking about whatever subject he'd been thinking of earlier in the day. I don't think mine've ever had an audio component, though.

[xianghua.livejournal.com]

Heh. I get extra dogs barking- a couple times I've thought I heard Indy (who had a distinctive 'let me in, dammit' bark), so whether it's ghost!corgi or audio hallucinations...

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

I don't see things, but when I'm alone at night with no sounds other than white noise (refrigerator, computer fan, rain, etc), I hear sounds like a radio being played in another room. It's not loud, and there aren't any specific words. Sometimes it's vague music, but most of the time it sounds like a 1940s newsreel-type announcer. There's usually static.

It mostly happens when I'm tired, but usually when I'm sitting up and concentrating on something else, not when I'm actually in bed. It's not psychosis; it freaked me out when it started up again last year (I only remembered recently that it would happen when I was a kid, too), but everything I've read about it points to something related to Musical Ear Syndrome (http://www.hearinglosshelp.com/articles/mes.htm), although I'm not hard of hearing. Apparently it happens in the presence of sensory deprivation, of which being alone at night with white noise would definitely be an example).

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

That's the sort of thing that happens to me, when I'm sleep-deprived and alone at night with no significant sounds. I hear voices -- although for a while I wasn't sure if I was really hearing them (...insofar as you can "really" hallucinate, anyways...) at all or if I was just imagining it or something, since it's never sounded like actual sound that was coming from my ears; it was obviously inside my head, like the imaginary audio track I get when I'm reading, or a memory of somebody talking, or thinking in a verbal format.

Usually they'd be either unintelligible or talking about something entirely unrelated to me. My memory's a little hazy, since it's been some time since I was sufficiently short on sleep to hear them, but that's the general idea. (I was blaming them on the sleep deprivation anyways, but it's nice to know that there's a difference in content between psychiatric and non-psychiatric auditory hallucinations.)

[primroseburrows.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it tends to happen when I'm really tired. I thought I was hearing things, too. And hey, I am! Only it's more my ear being weird than my brain. Maybe the sleep deprivation slows the sensory input so it's even more deprived.

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

Possibly!

[lienne.livejournal.com]

My hypnagogic hallucinations come right when I'm waking up, and generally revolve around trying to make noise to alert people to the fact that I can't move or speak. I have no idea if I ever actually make any real sounds, because the people always turn out to be imaginary when I manage to open my eyes for real.

Also, thank you! ♥♥♥♥♥ Want those two thousand icons?

[camwyn]

If you're up for it, sure. What do you need from me?

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Pick twenty themes you want icons of, and I'll do one icon post (100 icons) of each. So twenty different PBs, or ten of one and ten of another, or some PBs and some inanimate object/nonhuman themes (hearts, books, cats, whatever), or anywhere in between.

To give you an idea, these (http://community.livejournal.com/icon_pythagoras/tag/sweet+charity:+first+thousand) are what I ended up producing last time I did a thousand icons for somebody.

[camwyn]

Ooh. Okay. It's going to take me a bit to pull together enough brain to do that- I'll try pinging you tonight with a few of them if that's okay.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

Okay! If I'm not online, drop me an email - peahenironybath at gmail.

[daniidebrabant.livejournal.com]

I've had that. I tend to hear random things. Though there was one night when I had the creepiest one ever.

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

Tell meeeeeee.

[shati.livejournal.com]

The funniest one was when I hallucinated that my wall was a forest while in chat on AIM, but I'd taken a sleeping pill, so that might not count. But I had something like your mouse thing a few years back, except it was a giant crane fly instead of a mouse. It took me like fifteen minutes to remember there was no way I could have seen a giant winged insect on my wall -- because it was pitch black in my room -- and calm down. (And then, years later, as I was settling down to bed and just about to turn off the lights, I looked up and saw a crane fly perched on that same wall. DUN DUN DUUUUN!)

[veedub.livejournal.com]

little men at the foot of my bed, looking at me. i would sit up, turn the light on, and watch them FADE OUT SLOWLY, which terrified me to no end becaus i was sure i was going insane.

i had this dream repeatedly when i lived in the building on fifth avenue, both in the downstairs and the upstairs flats, but never since we moved out.

other people said they had strange experiences (seeing things, strange temperature changes, etc.) in the downstairs flat, for what that's worth.

the way i got rid of the Little Men was to write down all my dreams for three months, do a tarot reading around them each morning and a jungian-style analysis on each reading, and write the entire thing up as a paper for course at school. they gradually turned from little men into children, then into one child, who i ended up adopting and sending away in a car with my dance teacher. and i got an A.

[ymfaery]

Do sensations count, or are those a different class of things? Occasionally when I'd be lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, I'd feel like I was falling. I'm not always sleepy when that happens either.

[cameoflage.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that's happened to me. (Fairly sure it's a common falling-asleep sensation, but I don't remember what the formal description is.)

[the_croupier]

I had microsleep 'brown outs' a lot when I went back to grad school, and those sometimes included moments when I'd think something was the case when it definitely wasn't. Not so much visual as my thinking for a moment that something had happened (not necessarily bad, but often inconvenient or not desirable), and then I'd snap back awake again and go, 'Oh, yeah. Never mind. Silly brain.' Once I'd graduated and started to get more sleep again, that pretty much went away.

But I've had the occasional experience of sensory weirdness a couple of times when I'm waking up at an odd hour. The last time would have been worse than it was if I hadn't done a lot of reading by then about 'Old Hag syndrome,' and realized halfway through what was going on.

[aberrantangels]

Stop me if you've heard this one: Once, in high-school, when my brain was crashing in the afternoon, I fell asleep in economics class and was catapulted awake by the need to shout out a sentence I'd either said or heard in the dream I had: "He can have the whole stick out by contemplating my belly with his Jet Contemplator!"

...yeah I don't know what it meant either. Never have, doubt I ever will.