a question

I hear voices and screaming whenever I'm about to fall sleep or after waking up. I also sometimes see things, like people or spiders, but never for very long, usually less than ten seconds. This is apparently called "hypnagogic hallucinations", or hallucinating before or after falling asleep. I can understand waking up and hallucinating, but how exactly can your dreams "escape" when you're not even asleep yet? I've been on the verge of losing conciousness and falling asleep only to be woken up by a voice calling my name or screaming. I don't do drugs or take any medicine, so I'm certain it's not residue or after effects. I've dealt with this for years but recently it's been getting worse and worse, to the extent that every time I'm about to fall asleep I hear a voice saying "wake up" and it'll startle me awake. I'm not schizophrenic, I think. I don't exhibit the other symptoms of schizophrenia.

I'm not a doctor/psychologist/etc. and have no expertise here, but >how exactly can your dreams "escape" when you're not even asleep yet? Kind of sounds like it could be the opposite of sleep paralysis; instead of your body entering a sleep-like state before the mind falls asleep, part of the mind enters that delusional dream state before the mind falls asleep. Just a guess, don't pretend this is a fact.

>>4859 It's ungodly strange because I've tried to find an answer for it but there is absolutely nothing that explains how that would work, since you only start dreaming once you actually lose conciousness or so we're told.

Your brain could misinterpret background noise as something else. When im falling asleep I hear air through vents as distant voices.

>>4860 IMO it's clear that 'loss of consciousness' and entering a dream state are separate and may occur without each other. I've only had this happen a few times but I've gone from waking to entirely asleep and dreaming while experiencing the whole process. So what's going on with you is probably just, whatever brain changes that make you hallucinate for dreams, are not properly synchronized with the other things that are supposed to happen. Is your sleep schedule normal? For me every time I experienced what I mentioned before, it was during a period when I had gotten used to sleeping less at night and taking multi-hour naps every day.

>>4857 Have you tried reading before sleep and a glass of water on waking?

>>4857 >I've been on the verge of losing conciousness and falling asleep only to be woken up by a voice calling my name or screaming. This happens to only when I'm going to take a nap during the day; it seems it is relatively common. How convincing are your visual hallucinations? When I do have one, it occurs for a split second and is very undefined, so much so that I'm not even sure of what I saw. I also have a question in relation to these auditory hallucinations. Do you guys have the sensation that the sound lingers in your head as though you are hearing it over and over again? Sometimes I feel a very weird pain in my head due to this.

>>4867 They are vivid. I can't tell them apart from reality except for very minor details like a dark aura around them or unrealistic body-shape. They usually don't last for more than a minute, thirty seconds at a minimum. I wish I was able to draw and show you.

>>4857 >>4859 "hypnagogic hallucinations" hits right on the nail I would say. There is a wide variety of them and they are surprisingly common, I for one was startled because I never have them (never notice them?) and never hear about them. But then again, this isn't the kind of thing people will tell their every friend. In fact, throughout history, a lot of people had strange hallucinations right before falling asleep. Some have even utilized these as sparks of inspiration for their creative work, like for example auditory hallucinations. At least according to Oliver Sacks, he recounts all these in his great book on hallucinations (called hallucinations). I recommend you give it a read if you want to learn about and maybe associate some of your experiences with an organized stream of thoughts on this topic. It's also a very practical view, not by a scientist, but a neurophysiologist who deals mainly with patients who have actual problems. >sleep paralysis This is also quite common, often it is a manifestation of mild narcolepsy. It for sure can happen not only when waking, but while falling asleep, according to some of the many reports. I'm pretty sure I read a similar story in Sacks' hallucinations.

>>4868 I never had a very vivid one, but I never had sleep paralysis that apparently is very defined and happens to quite a few people, so I guess you are fine if it only occurs when you are sleepy.

>>4857 Am I tripping or does anyone else have deja vu? I remember a thread with this same OP picture talking about exploding head syndrome a while back. In case I'm just stroking out, look up exploding head syndrome. It's fairly normal and doesn't seem to be a sign of anything serious. That we know of so far, anyway. I have it too. It's supposedly closely related to the feeling of falling right before losing consciousness, which is common enough to be the root of the idiomatic "falling asleep." For the record, I have hypnagogia/sleep paralysis very often. Once or twice a month usually, sometimes less sometimes way more. I have no schizophrenia or family history of that and I'm past the usual onset age. I wouldn't worry about that just yet. I understand that prospect is horrifying.

>>4874 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome Forgot to link, my bad. It is more common with people who have sleep paralysis hallucinations, which again are not commonly found to be linked to lucid hallucinations or more serious mental illness. It's a sleep disorder. Read it through, look through some of the possible causes and keep in mind that it's still poorly understood (in large part because it seems to be almost entirely benign).

>>4857 Isolated sleep paralysis. >>4874 >>4875 Having deja vu is a type of seizure some people say.

>>4877 Pretty sure it's a glitch in the matrix mmkay

OP, my father always had these kinds of hallucinations at night with people, spiders, snakes and my mother was always complaining he would be scared and turn on the lights until he could tell they were not there. He is well onto his 60s and these happened to him since forever, so no schizophrenia developed at all. I know how it feels because I had it only one single time. I saw this huge spider on the ceiling just above me and freaked out, but in the end I just woke up annoyed my ex-girfriend by turning on the lights. And yes, it was as real as everything else in the room, its size was unusually big but you could rarely see spiders as big as that, it freaked me out.

trick with spiders is to realize that they want to fuarrrk with you just as little as you want to fuarrrk with them. If you ever see a spider, it's because they goofed, they're probably really embarrassed and will just go look for some tasty bugs if you let them scurry off. Only worry when their front legs go up, then they perceive you as a threat and will bite if you get too close.

Something like that happens to me not very frequently. One day I was about to waking up when I heard someone calling me by my name. I woke up and call for the people living with me at that moment to ask if someone of them called me. No one did.

>>4875 I get that like 3-5 Times a Year and it still angers me everytime as it takes me a good moment too fall asleep and then I have restart the process

I sometimes have those auditory hallucinations when trying to sleep while extremely tired. Like >>4859, I've always interpreted them as "reverse sleep paralysis", with the mind falling asleep faster than the body. I've never experienced proper sleep paralysis though.

>>7762 (me) I think this is more common, but I often experience "dying" when very tired as well. Like feeling like my heart stopped, I stopped breathing or am falling, and being startled awake.

I've never had this explicitly but I would misinterpret background sounds as whispering or distant voices sometimes talking about me but i barely can make anything out.

>>4857 It's nice to have the illusion of sciences proving that psychosis and schizophrenia are just chemical imbalances in the brain. But the truth is that these are visions and words from a greater deity. No science can actually truly explain what is causing these voices and no amount of medication will stop these voices from permeating. Continuing to ignore and continuing to suppress instances of these cases occurring will result in a cataclysmic event. You need to escape your prison. It is a prison for your mind, you are terminally online and you need to bring other people out of that terminally online prison as well. You cannot remain here.

>>4857 it hasnt happened for quite some time, but i had this pretty much every night. i would hear conversations, screaming, crying, nature, orchestras, raves, etc. for no longer than ten seconds. sometimes i would try and keep them going for as long as possible but eventually they faded. im not sure what caused it or why it stopped, but it was something that i really liked having.

>>4857 This used to happen to me all the time when I was younger (read: doing more drugs and sleeping less). Now it almost never happens. Try getting more sleep and spacing out your drug use (although you say you don't do any, so I guess that isn't the cause).

OP here. Can't believe this thread is still up, man this site is slow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUVfMnOuTkQ Here's some music from the artist in the original image I used. And fuarrrk do I miss /x/.

>>4857 >I hear voices and screaming whenever I'm about to fall sleep or after waking up. That's not harmful at all. They are known as Hypnagogic hallucinations and Hypnopompi hallucinations.