For those not in the know, hypnagogic hallucination is a term for a fairly ordinary phenomena wherein you experience mild hallucinatory states while falling asleep. I've seen it described as being a result of a transitional phase between waking and dreaming, and is something that pretty much anyone can experience (it's a healthy phenomenon, I believe), and I'm sure a lot of you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, in the context of things like this in myself, the way the brain can produce these sort of effects fascinates me. Very often in the past, especially when I'm particularly tired, I've had some interesting experiences of hypnagogic hallucinations whilst falling asleep. In addition to the fairly standard geometric visual patterns which I think most people experience to a degree, I've tended to get a lot of vocal chatter - sometimes voices I recognize but often not. Attempting to discern coherent sentences and structure is difficult, but when I can the results are often interesting, albeit more often gibberish. It generally doesn't stray beyond that sort of thing, except for one memorable occasion where, in an attempt to stop myself falling asleep, I began to actually drift off with my eyes open, and almost jumped out of my skin when as a result of this I briefly saw a giant hand attempting to grab me out of the wall. I've always thought hypnagogic hallucinations are a great way to gain a bit more insight as to the workings of the mind, and, seeing as I'm apparently sleep deprived enough to be having them fairly regularly again these days, and so I decided to create a thread about them to see if anybody else had any interesting experiences. If you do, post them below! Hope this is in the right forum. Ciao
Oh man, I get the chatter thing a lot. Especially if I spent a lot of time listening to new people that day. It always sounds like how everyone speaks in Animal Crossing to me, but spoken very very dramatically. Shakespearean gibberish! Sometimes there are physical sensations like someone petting my face or the pillow next to me breathing. I find myself experiencing these far less since my family's new dog began sleeping in my bed.
In my case, the words and sentence structure are well-defined and mostly correct, but there's just no meaning.
The other night, coincidentally seeing as I'd posted this thread so recently, I had another interesting experience. I was lying in bed listening to the babble as I do, but the way it sounds is its usually like things spoken inside my head (like thoughts). Only the other night, I heard a word which sounded like it was actually being spoken in the room, next to my head. It made me jump! I guess there's always a chance that my house is haunted but it was probably just one of those more unusual occurrences with this.
i don't usually remember falling asleep, but every once in a while i feel like i'm laying in a rowboat in the middle of the sea, and even hear the water hitting the edges of the boat and crashing around me as i drift off.
I've had them very intensely for over ten years, on account of having two different major sleep disorders, and they definitely don't look anything like real life. My dreams never do; they look as different from real life as a cartoon versus video footage. Used to get them in class a lot of the time while having sleep attacks, and while my handwriting would usually just turn into chicken scratches, I would sometimes be able to type notes - which could actually be pretty funny to read later, since they were syntactically erratic and contained a mixture of references to the actual lecture and references to my hypnagogia.
When I was younger I used to be able to give myself sensations of motion quite a lot - like I was lying on a moving platform, and I could control the movement! I used to pretend I was on a rollercoaster and go through loops. I'm not to what extent that counts as a hallucination though because it was kind of under my control, almost like... the hallucination equivalent of a lucid dream? idk I don't do that a lot anymore, I should probably see if I still can.
To the hypnagogic hallucination that just announced "I'm Kevin Bacon" inside my head; well, hi Kevin, I'm glad you're here.
