dream stuff
This past weekend my Mother was telling me of a strange incident that happened to her just as she was falling asleep. She was bummed because she hasn't been sleeping well and she was hoping since dad was away on a hunting trip that maybe she'd sleep better. She said that just as she was falling asleep she heard someone call her name. It woke her up completely, she thought my brother was there and got up to see what he wanted. She never got back to sleep. I told her that that was a very specific type of dream and that I'd had that very same thing happen to me many times throughout my life. At the time I couldn't remember the name but now I know the term I was looking for was "hypnagogic hallucination." This type of dream also includes the "falling dreams" that cause you to jerk back awake just as you fall asleep but more commonly it's what happens when you start to wake up and you haven't completely left the dream state, causing you to overlay visions and/ or sound from your dream onto the real scenes in front of you. When I was a child I had one episode of night terrors and sleep paralysis. The weird thing is though, even at the time I realized it to be just a dream and never believed that anything weirder than that had happened. I woke up early one morning gripped in a terror so complete that I felt like if I moved something would kill me. That something, I believed at the time, was a vampire hovering in the tiny space between the top of my bedroom door and the ceiling. I could see, in the near darkness, an amorphous dark shape pulsating there. I have no idea how long I was frozen in terror but it was light in the room before I could move again. I may have gone back to sleep. Although that was my one and only bout of night terrors I still have hypnagogic hallucinations to this day. In fact, earlier this year, I was awakened by the sound of a piece of wood falling on the floor in my basement. I sat bolt upright in bed, afraid that someone had broken into my garage. I live alone in my own house all by myself so I don't take this lightly. I crept downstairs to see what there was to see. No on had broken in, but neither could I find one piece of wood out of place on the concrete floor. Another time a couple of years ago I woke up to the sound of someone knocking on the side of my house right outside my bedroom just like someone knocking on the door. Once again I was startled into coherence but the sound made so little sense it didn't even bother me. Moments later a car went down the street and ran over the metal plates covering the huge hole in the street (remember that?) with a sound very similar to the knocking. Disturbingly these realistic dream sounds seem to have become more common since I bought my own house. I've always been incredibly interested in stuff like this, the inner workings of the brains and what happens when we sleep and dream.