Anomalous, extraordinary, or otherwise interesting conscious experiences

[Evo]

I have always done what I call "directed dreaming", I am always aware that I am dreaming and I "direct" my dreams like a movie director. If I decide I don't like something I am dreaming, I rewind it to a suitable spot to change the direction it was going. I am rarely in my own dreams as myself, I am usually someone else or just observing others.

Some of my dreams are like epic movies with casts of thousands and intricate plots and subplots. I love going to sleep just so I can dream.

I can also "create" my dreams. Before I go to sleep, I start imagining what I want to dream about and will continue it when I fall asleep.

 

[Mk]

How many of your dreams can you direct? Do you know this hypnogogic state where there's colorful shapes, patterns and images?

 

[Evo]

How many of your dreams can you direct?

I'd say I'm aware of directing maybe 90%. Sometimes I'm not aware I am in control until the dream starts to be unpleasant, then I stop it, rewind and change the ending.

Do you know this hypnogogic state where there's colorful shapes, patterns and images?

No, I haven't read anything about it.

Have you ever heard of opthalmic or ocular migraine? I've had two of those. really bizarre, the second one was "classic", like this. The first was black and white and really fascinating. There is no headache, just designs.

http://www.eyeguys.net/ocular.jpg

http://www.eyeguys.net/ocularmigraine.html

 

[Mk]

Have you ever heard of opthalmic or ocular migraine? I've had two of those. really bizarre, the second one was "classic", like this. The first was black and white and really fascinating. There is no headache, just designs.

http://www.eyeguys.net/ocular.jpg

http://www.eyeguys.net/ocularmigraine.html

If I had one of those I'd be REALLY freaked out. Thought I was going to lose my vision, which I my favorite of all senses! I'd have someone drive me to the emergency room immediately!

 

[EnumaElish]

Have you ever heard of opthalmic or ocular migraine? I've had two of those. really bizarre, the second one was "classic", like this. The first was black and white and really fascinating. There is no headache, just designs.

I wonder to what kind of an influence many undiagnosed persons with this condition have attributed their visions throughout human history.

 

[Mk]

Insanity probably had to do with it. "You can't see the dots? What? They're right there! See?! They follow me around where ever I go."

 

[zoobyshoe]

I wonder to what kind of an influence many undiagnosed persons with this condition have attributed their visions throughout human history.

See: The Visions of Hildegard, chapter 20 of Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.

 

[Mk]

I just realized something... most times other people aren't aware they're in a dream!

Gosh, It must be terrible to face a "real-life" situation like some of the dreams I've heard. That's why I never have nightmares, I just change it around. Once I was against a foe I have long forgoten, I and it were at my old elementary school. In a time of inevitiable loss, I conjured up a RPG-7V1 for myself (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPG-7), and a small army of ten Operation: Desert Storm M1 Abramss. Whatever it was, I don't think I even finished the dream before moving on to the next, it was easily defeated, before shots were fired.

 

[Rabid]

This isn't as weird as some of the other experiences here, but it's something that freaks me out.
From time to time I will wake up in the middle of the night and I won't be able to move, it's like I'm paralized. I can open and move my eyes and hear, but that's it. I eventually shut my eyes and am able to fall back asleep. This is definitely not an enjoyable experience.

 

[Mk]

This isn't as weird as some of the other experiences here, but it's something that freaks me out.
From time to time I will wake up in the middle of the night and I won't be able to move, it's like I'm paralized. I can open and move my eyes and hear, but that's it. I eventually shut my eyes and am able to fall back asleep. This is definitely not an enjoyable experience.

This is called awareness during sleep paralysis, I described it to the best of my ability a few posts above:

Quote:
Sleep paralysis: During REM sleep the body is paralyzed by a mechanism in the brain, because otherwise the movements which occur in the dream would actually cause the body to move. However, it is possible for this mechanism to be triggered before, during, or after normal sleep while the brain awakens. This can lead to a state where a person is lying in their bed and they feel like they are frozen. Hallucinations may occur in this state, especially auditory ones. People also generally report feeling a crushing sensation on their chest (possibly because they try to consciously control their breathing). People trying to lucid dream sometimes try to trigger this state, or accidentally trigger this state, while using a waking induction of lucid dreaming (WILD) technique to enter a lucid dream directly when falling asleep.

This is absolutely the scariest thing I have ever experienced, I use my alternative MILD technique to stay away from it. I remember it almost every night I lay my head on the pillow. It happens almost only when I am lying face down in my pillow. You don't get as much air as you need because A) You're not sleeping you're awake! (at least partially) and B) You're trying to breath through a pillow. And I just discovered why I am completely incapable of opening my eyes! Because I'm in REM sleep! Its terrible. You are trying to breath but you can't after many many tries (you get a tiny breath of air in almost every try), you do you're best to muster up all of your body's energy into your right arm, while you are dying, but the thing is you have no energy. You are sleeping. But you don't know you're sleeping, you think you are awake, and suffocating, and its you're fault. I just can't decribe to you the torture.

I seem to suffer of a different kind of sleep paralysis after reading more, others can move their eyelids and look around the room, and hear things. I can't do any of them.

Hmm... it could be a "false awakening" - I think I woke up but actually I'm dreaming this torture. Next time if I can get a hold of myself (which I won't be able to) I'll try to make something or change it to get myself out.

 

[Rabid]

Thanks, I have a habit of skipping forward while reading.

 

[loseyourname]

Okay, hypnagogue asked me to describe what it's like to drink absinthe. Unfortunately, for the most part, I don't really remember. I've only drank it once, and I actually made a concerted effort not to drink too much. I played the role of instigator that night, daring and prodding those who had drunk too much into performing outrageous actions that they would otherwise never do, largely so that I could photograph them and have something interesting to write in my journal (I was in the middle of a road trip and documentation was the word of the day).*

The strongest feeling I can actually remember is that of disconnection. I didn't seem to be participating in any directed way in what I was doing, or what was going on. I experienced things as an observer rather than as an actor. One thing I would like to say about this is that this may not be a typical effect of absinthe. It seems likely that what happened is that the absinthe simply intensified a sense of disconnection that I often feel in awkward social situations to begin with. I've always had a tendency to experience life as if it were a novel, a story that I was either writing or reading. In this case, I was the reader rather than the writer, and some other part of me took control of crafting the narrative, a part whose motivations I have no access to in my memory.

The other notable quality of the experience is the complete lack of fear. Absinthe is alcoholic, and alcohol already lowers one's inhibition level, but this did it to the extreme. I had the sense of being in a reality without rules. It wasn't like I could violate the laws of physics or transcend my physical limitations or anything that profound; it was simply that I had the feeling that the social rules which normally dictate human behavior were gone. All of us were reduced to the level of primal beasts, literally becoming the monsters that lurk just beneath the surface of the knowable psyche. Consider the situation of Caligula. As Emperor, there were no real consequences to his actions. He could do whatever he wished to do and get away with it. Moreover, he seemed to reach the point where morality no longer made any difference to his decisions; it simply seemed to no longer exist in his world. It was something like that.

*I realize this might make me sound like somewhat of a sociopath, but whatever.

 

[hypnagogue]

Thanks LYN for your articulate report. Can you compare the general subjective feel or background/fringey aspects of the absinthe experience to any other sorts of experience?

I find your remark about experiencing life as a novel or story interesting as well. It's not uncommon to read in the psychology literature that we experience life as an extended sort of narrative (and I've heard anecdotal reports along these lines as well), but I personally don't find much resonance with this portrayal. I'm not sure if it's because this metaphor just doesn't click with me conceptually, or if it's something to do with the way I actually experience life. Could you expand on your remark on life as a narrative a bit (if there even is any substantive expansion to do)?

 

[hypnagogue]

Have you ever heard of opthalmic or ocular migraine? I've had two of those. really bizarre, the second one was "classic", like this. The first was black and white and really fascinating. There is no headache, just designs.

I experienced something like this this morning. At the time I had been sitting and reading at the computer for some time, was somewhat tired, and had a kind of heavy-headed feeling (not quite a headache, and not painful, but something along those lines).

Suddenly I experienced a brief flash of light (on the order of a split second), as if someone had momentarily turned on some bright lights behind me. I suspected quite strongly that it was something internal but was still compelled to look behind me to see if there was some external cause (as I expected, there wasn't) because of the intensity of the experience. I experienced a similar thing, with less intensity and slightly briefer duration, two more times in the span of about 10 minutes.

It's difficult to get a handle on what it was like since each experience was so brief. But it seemed like there was a horizontal strip of white light along the upper periphery of my visual field, perhaps somewhat concave and jagged, but my overall impression of the shape is rather ambiguous. On the first occurrence, it seemed like the light lit up much of the visual field, but on the second and third occurrences this lighting effect did not occur, and the experience was limited to just the strip of light itself.

The second and third time it happened I noticed that it seemed like my visual field discontinuously jumped very slightly up and to the left for the split second over which the experience occurred, as if the experience was associated with a brief saccade such that the eye movement registered in conscious experience. (If this was a form of occular migraine, perhaps this visual displacement was caused by an occular spasm.) When this happened my overall visual experience was somewhat fringey and peripheral, as if I very briefly lost the higher degree of detail of visual experience that comes with foveal vision. The momentary loss of foveal vision and the apparent conscious registration of a saccade seem to be consistent with an involuntary occular spasm. (The brain takes some brief time to effect visual attention and foveal vision following saccades, and the jumpy visual displacement caused by saccades is normally not noticed in visual experience unless the saccades are not caused by normal visual guidance mechanisms in the brain.)

The brief visual experiences seemed to be accompanied with a strange, barely felt and ambiguous overall body sensation that lasted a few seconds, although this might have just been caused by a psychological reaction to the anomalous visual experience rather than being a similar perceptual distortion sharing the same root cause as the visual disturbance.

 

[hypnagogue]

A few days ago I was walking down the street and was rather strongly emotionally distressed by some in-family friction over financial matters. As I suppose is somewhat typical for depressed emotional states, I experienced spontaneous, fleeting suicidal thoughts (although, of course, I was not consciously choosing to entertain these thoughts and was not genuinely suicidal). The thought soon occurred to me that I might actually be in the process of dying from a suicide attempt and that my immediate perceptual environment might merely be a strong hallucination arising from an impaired brain.

What is interesting here, in the context of this thread, is not this train of thought in itself. What is interesting is that upon having this last thought, it momentarily seemed convincing, or rather entirely and thoroughly plausible in an immediate, felt-in-the-bones sense that I was indeed just experiencing a massive hallucination, that my perceptual world did not correspond to the real world. Normally one might have a kind of abstract appreciation that yes, we could just be experiencing a mass hallucination (e.g. in brain in a vat thought experiments), but not feel any particularly strong experience of unreality while entertaining such thoughts and ultimately take a dismissive attitude towards them. However, in the moment I have been describing, I did indeed experience a quite strong emotional/perceptual sense of unreality to, or disconnect from, my environment. It seemed more like a vivid fantasy or dream than the "real world." This sensation lasted about 10 or 20 seconds or so before fading away.

It's worth noting here that I have previously experienced similar feelings that have been brought on by clear, voluntary thought rather than emotional distress. For instance, upon being introduced to the philosophical concept of solipsism as a freshman in college, I took the solipsism worldview for a 'test ride,' imagining that solipsism was true and that mine was the only real consciousness, and all the world was just a fabrication of my mind. I became quite engrossed in the thought and for some time, maybe about 5 or 10 minutes, felt a distinct and somewhat powerful (and not-too-pleasant) sense of unreality about my perceptual environment.

Both experiences were probably a brief manifestation of depersonalization or derealization symptoms. DSM III describes depersonalization disorder as "an alteration in the perception and experience of the self so that the usual sense of one's own reality is temporarily lost or changed. This is manifested by a sensation of self-estrangement or unreality, which may include the feeling that one's extremities have changed in size, or the experience of seeming to perceive oneself from a distance. ... the individual may feel 'mechanical' or as though in a dream. Various types of sensory anesthesias and a feeling of not being in complete control of one's actions, including speech, are often present. All of these feelings are ego-dystonic (self-alien)..." And further, "derealization is frequently present. This is manifested in a strange alteration in the perception of one's surroundings so that a sense of the reality of the external world is lost."

http://www.chclibrary.org/micromed/00045600.html describes depersonalization and derealization as follows:

Depersonalization

Depersonalization is a dissociative symptom in which the patient feels that his or her body is unreal, is changing, or is dissolving. Some patients experience depersonalization as being outside their bodies or watching a movie of themselves.

Derealization

Derealization is a dissociative symptom in which the external environment is perceived as unreal. The patient may see walls, buildings, or other objects as changing in shape, size, or color. In some cases, the patient may feel that other persons are machines or robots, though the patient is able to acknowledge the unreality of this feeling.

Depersonalization and derealization are known to be brought on severe stress, such as car accidents or strong pain, anxiety, or depression, consistent with my experience related here. These symptoms can also be brought on by thought reform or brainwashing that strongly challenge deeply held thoughts and beliefs, which is consistent with my solipsism 'test drive' in college. (The medical library cited above also remarks that depersonalization (as a symptom, not a disorder) is "quite common in college-age populations," perhaps lending to the relative ease with which my strange experience occurred.)

 

[Evo]

I experienced something like this this morning. At the time I had been sitting and reading at the computer for some time, was somewhat tired, and had a kind of heavy-headed feeling (not quite a headache, and not painful, but something along those lines). <snip>

Yes, that could be a mild form. I actually would like to see another, since I know they are harmless and temporary. The first one I experienced was so incredible with the designs and the changing of direction and the spinning. I was under extreme stress at the time, which is probably what brought it on. It is so amazing what the brain can do.

 

[loseyourname]

Could you expand on your remark on life as a narrative a bit (if there even is any substantive expansion to do)?

This is definitely one I can expand on somewhat. It has mostly to do with the way I feel about events that occur in my life, as well as my motivations for bringing about certain events and avoiding others. Typically, or at least I get the impression that typically, people are pleased by generally good events and angered or saddened by generally bad events. While I do often feel the same way in regards to an immediate emotional response, I do not always, and oftentimes I do not feel these ways even in the immediate response. Instead, I feel the way a writer does when crafting a story. If a certain events moves the plot forward or reveals a particular aspect of character development, or even seems to make a metaphorical point if looked at from the outside, then it pleases me. If it does not, then I am not satisfied. I have to note that I do not always feel this way, particularly with regards to my immediate responses to events, but when I do, my interactions with people can become rather awkward, as the way I feel about what is going on becomes completely different from the way they feel, and I would even say that my experience of the event as being in context with a fuller narrative is probably completely different from the other person's experience. My experience is artistic rather than visceral.

If you consider the difference between watching Romeo after killing
Tybalt to actually being Romeo at that time, you can get an idea of what I mean. Romeo cries out that he is fortune's fool, in a moment of absolute despair. I would venture the guess that he probably feels nothing but despair. A viewer of the play, however, is moved by a different set of emotions, an appreciation of how fate is playing out to construct what is a beautiful tragedy. In many ways, I would rather lead a beautiful life than a happy life.

Where this manifests most explicitly is in the way I make life-decisions. Most people will simply do what makes them happy, or what they think will bring them success. But a stable home life, meaningful relationships, and material success have never been particularly important to me. When I decide what to do on the large scale of overarching plans (choosing a partner, school, job, whatever), I always take into consideration first and foremost how it will contribute to the story of my life. Does it take the plot in a new and interesting direction? Does it make any kind of artistic statement? Or, more pedestrianly, does it make for a good read?

 

[honestrosewater]

I sometimes look at my life as if it were a story, in order to gain some perspective on things, but it's more in a quiet, reflective way; It's not always on my mind.

I do have something that's a bit strange. When my anxiety problems first started, I realized that I could intentionally imagine that there was some dangerous object in my environment, and though I knew that I was only imagining it, I would still flinch or such when I imagined that it approached me. The key was to move my eyes as if I was watching the object. I was also aware of what object or scenario I was imagining, but this alone didn't produce the same result (it had other effects though).

I first noticed this when my eyes happened to move along the carpet as if I were watching a snake slither across the room. When my gaze shifted towards myself, I jerked back reflexively, as if some part of my brain thought there was really a snake there. I played around with it, making the images more vivid and elaborate and trying to resist flinching, but it was quite strong.

 

[zoobyshoe]

What is interesting here, in the context of this thread, is not this train of thought in itself. What is interesting is that upon having this last thought, it momentarily seemed convincing...

You pretty much proved the basis of Cognitive Therapy: our thoughts cause our emotional state. The way we talk to ourselves, and what we talk to ourselves about, creates our moods.

 

[hypnagogue]

You pretty much proved the basis of Cognitive Therapy: our thoughts cause our emotional state. The way we talk to ourselves, and what we talk to ourselves about, creates our moods.

It's undoubtedly true that thoughts influence moods (and vice versa), but I think this particular experience owed most of its occurrence to the general mood and mindset I was already in, sort of like the gun powder to the thought's flame. That is, the primary causal flow was probably from emotional stress to dissociation, with the particular thought I had merely facilitating that flow. I certainly don't get a powerful sense of unreality every time I entertain thoughts about mass hallucination, even when I do so deeply, but here just the mere spontaneous entry of the thought into consciousness was enough to automatically set off a strong derealization experience.

 

[zoobyshoe]

That is, the primary causal flow was probably from emotional stress to dissociation, with the particular thought I had merely facilitating that flow.

You were already stressed out about the money issues so the thought was particularly potent at that time. The degree to which a thought affects our moods is a somewhat separate issue. Had some exceptionally pleasant thought occurred to you instead you would have have run just as far with that, but in the other direction. The depth of the reaction is different for different people, and different for the same person under different circumstances, depending on the general strength of your emotions at the time, their general volume. The thought itself steers the direction the emotions take, not necessarily the strength of those emotions.

Our pre-existing emotional state does, indeed, prime us to explore certain kinds of thoughts via a confirmation bias. This is what you mean when you say there was a "flow" from stress to dissociation already in progress: you had fallen into the habit of calling up negative thoughts in response to the negative emotions precipitated by the previous negative thought. It actually does run in chains like this, and the solution is to notice what you're thinking, and to correct the distortion of thought. The emotions follow suit.

 

[Simetra7]

In my late teen years and early twenties i was a rather heavy user of marijuana. At that time i enjoyed the whole altered state of awareness feeling that it gave me, and just went with the flow. I found that when i was high my brain seemed to operate on a completely different level and I experienced a deeper understanding of all the spiritual practices i was learning at the time such as meditation and visualisation. At around 24 or 25 a different kind of altered state started to creep in. At first just subtle changes but eventually a whole new and scary state took over. I would find myself unable to control my thoughts and i would imagine that people around me were plotting against me. I realize that paranoia is fairly common in drug users, but this went beyond that. Because i had become quite proficient at visualisation, and was able to manifest many things in my life with this technique, i started to believe that my paranoid state was going to somehow manifest these terrible situations and that i was not going to be able to stop this from happening. It was as if my mind had been completely taken over and when one plot ran it's course without consequence another more elaborate plot would take over. Needless to say i stopped smoking the dope altogether but it took a long time for my mind to come back to the level it had been at before all this started. Now, thankfully that is way in the past and things are relatively normal.
About lucid dreaming; I have been trying to become lucid in my dreams for a long time and have only managed it a couple of times and only for a short duration. A strange thing that does happen sometimes is that i'll be dreaming about someone who i am close to, and all of a sudden i will get the feeling that he/she is the one who is dreaming and that i am in his/her dream. I tell them so but they don't believe me. They tell me that it is my dream not theirs but even then it doesn't really register that i may be lucid, and the dream just takes it's own course while i am still quite sure that i am in someone elses dream.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It seems that on at least a few ocassions, for some period of time during which I was under tremendous pressure and got very little sleep, I walked the three-hundred feet from the house to my office, worked on various parts of an engineering project including high voltage circuits, walked back to the house and went to bed, never to remember a thing. Only later did I realize what must have happened through circumstantial evidence - e.g. work done by either me or elves, and I'm guessing that it wasn't elves.

The first real clue came when Tsu got up one night and I was gone. I had no idea where I had been!

What do you mean "where was I"?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Oh yes, this is a great story from another system's integrator.

Having worked something like a week on hardly any sleep, and I mean something in the neighborhood of eight hours of sleep over a period of five days, which can happen in my line work, Leonard was working away somewhere on the factory floor when a large piece of equipment fell from high above, landed right next to him with a huge crash, and nearly killed him. Leonard thought to himself how funny it was that he didn't even jump. He just kept working as if nothing had even happened. A little while later another engineer walked up to discuss something. When leonard started to tell his co-worker about the near miss and looked over at the fallen machinery, nothing was there. He had hallucinated the entire episode.

 

[Ramster5678]

I was sleeping then i would wake up, and i would see a penny, lying at the tip of my bed, and i tried to grab it, but it went right through my hand! That same night, i had this same experience except with a pencil box. I go to swip it off the bed, but my hand goes right through it. I don't remember how i got out of this incident, i might have just gone back to sleep or it just went away as i (with no success) tried to get it off my bed. This, though, only happened once.

 

[matthyaouw]

A strange experience I had when I was about 9 (i think)
I was at school. I remember leaving the classroom, and on my travels, I took a look out the door, and saw a group of older children that seemed to be getting ready for a group photo in 3 rows. The back ones must have been standing on a platform of some kind. I didn't stray far from the door, but on the way back, there was no one there. They didn't come through the door, and there was no evidence that they'd been there at all- no platform the back row could have been standing on, nor could I think of a reason why they'd be there in the first place. I still don't know for certain whether they'd really been there at all.

 

[cotarded]

I don't even know where to begin in this thread. I have had, or still have, experiences relevant to so many of the topics discussed here. Just a few minutes ago I posted in the "Stuck in REM sleep" thread about an incident where my dream world decided to stowaway when I crossed into reality and I was robbed of a real sleep/wake transition (full hallucinations while I wrote on my desk). I also share loseyourname's artistic life perspective completely (although I'm far less articulate so I'll keep my two cents to myself concerning that idea) and generally think I'm more inclined to a narrative worldview because I don't have any eidetic (visual) or much emotional recall at all. My past is inert and verbal, although wordless (if that sounds like a contradiction, it feels like when somebody tells you about a concept by contrasting two words - before he comes up with a final word or you say "I understand", that verbal but unarticulated substance is my memory).

Anyway, what I thought I'd share was the change in headspace that persisted for some time after a really foolish phase of experimentation with nitrous oxide. Note for those who haven't played with the stuff, it's my opinion that it's surprisingly and insiduously(sp) addictive, not to mention destructive. For those who don't know, it tends to exhibit reverse tolerance in the beginning, intensifying each time you hit it. After some time, for reasons that are unknown to me, and about which I'm extremely curious, the effects diminish to the point of being undesirable. Coinciding with this qualitative change in the high is a change in the comedown. For the enjoyable interval (those times before the acute effects disappear), the comedown is almost better than the actual intoxication, leaving you feeling inspired, generally quicker, and excited. The only thing I can compare it to is the way I feel after I recovered (30 mins or so) from a hard, and successful cross country run (which makes analyzing the source of the effects difficult, as you're combining accomplishment with hypoxia/blood ph change/deranged blood sugar levels/enkephalins etc.).

Anyway, the last few times I did whippets, about a half to a day later I would become completely depersonalized and anhedonic. To the point where the entire world would seem completely fake and pointless. It's a hell of an experience - when you can't feel any emotive response, there's no reason to do anything! Maybe I'm the only one that would find this obvious result counter-intuitive in experience. I'd sit and think, do I want to talk to so-and-so, and feel nothing, do I want to x, nothing, do I want to think, nothing. So after going into a frenzy to evoke feedback, I eventually acquiesced into a state of heavy inertia until my beloved carrot and stick came back and provided reason for living. It was inconcievable how even logic wasn't sufficient to maintain me, because the assumptions were based on emotion, and no matter how many times I demonstrated to my desperate, apathetic self that this or that logically followed, it didn't mean anything.

Last little tidbit that I'll leave out here just to see if anyone is interested:
I experimented with 5-HTP at one point, out of sheer boredom (terrible reason to do anything to your mind, I know, but this was after the preceding and no argument was compelling - I was exhausting habits and impulses since the tried and true wasn't true anymore as far as feedback), thinking it would have no effect, and was met with a very, very unusual change in consciousness. Normally I can never say with confidence that I've been "unconscious" because it may just be that I don't remember (i.e. I could have been thinking all night but not remember it - even if those thoughts were handicapped into incoherence by being memory deprived), but in this case I fell into lapses of non-subjectivity where I felt like a deterministic, inanimate object (in retrospect, at the time I felt nothing) then returned to consciousness with full memory of the events after a second or two.
Tidbit that was.

lates,
cotarded.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

This is pretty mundane after the last post, but I’ve got a thousand things I should be doing and don’t feel like doing, so thought I’d share a hypnagogic hallucination that seemed to take hours once when I was 17yo art student, as a reason to procrastinate. I was using, as I do (easier than thinking!) the hypnagogic state as a kind of tool.

I went to bed, meditated, then rolled to one side facing in and felt some movement about my exposed ear so rolled over facing out across my large room, reassured by a small shaft of light I was now facing as the door on the other side of the room was slightly ajar. (This house has a lot of family history, some may be considered spooky )

As I lay looking at the light I became aware that it was moving, or rather I was moving down the bed. I felt that if this was going to be a proper out of body my awareness should not be still attached to my body, and felt I should relax more and wait. Nothing changed, and I was becoming increasingly concerned that my head was slowly en-route to collide with the wooden bed-end. So I struggled to free the paralysis but couldn’t and my movement down the bed was unrelenting. I awaited the collision.

However, in the instant that my head was due to receive a pummelling from the bed-end, I was flipped upwards, and at a furious pace found myself flying head first, my arms still glued to my sides, around the room- the air racing passed my ears was noisy, my hair blown right back and I could feel the speed on my skin, like when you stick your head the window of a fast moving car. I couldn’t orientate myself in the darkness. I was dreading other, more brutal collisions with the three external brick walls, windows and hard furniture. It felt totally out of control, seemed to be endless, and I was wondering how it would stop.

Then at some point I noticed a pattern in the movement - my feet were remaining much in the centre of the room, whilst my body was sweeping out a large circle that wavered up and down, although above the furniture and below the high ceilings, which was some relief.

It occurred to me this could mean something had control of my feet- had pulled my stiff body down the bed and still had them as it swung my seized body around. I felt that it was important to try to see my feet, and so, possibly, what it was that was doing this to me. It wasn’t that I was certain that there was a malevolent force present, it was more that I had to rule that out, or see it if it existed, otherwise I would always wonder. As I mustered the strength, and courage, to twist my neck to look back at my feet, again, in the very instant that I managed to twist, my newly flexible body was forcibly thrown back on to my bed with a loud thud, I think my sheet fell on top of me then too, and there was silence,... and everything was back to normal. It all felt real.

 

[Dayle Record]

I once went to a Junior High assembly, a musical assembly at my daugther's school. I realized that I was slipping into a bad migraine headache, and there wasn't much I could do about it. Then the "orchestra" (all stringed instruments), was set to play a melody. There were only about a dozen players, and they were terribly out of tune. I have perfect pitch, and the sawing of the instruments in their out of tune state, gave me the effect of worms crawling on my scalp. It was the oddest thing, and that is the only way I can describe it. I was in so much pain I found it laughable, and then when the orchestra started up, it was as if my scalp wanted to leave the room.

 

[selfAdjoint]

I once went to a Junior High assembly, a musical assembly at my daugther's school. I realized that I was slipping into a bad migraine headache, and there wasn't much I could do about it. Then the "orchestra" (all stringed instruments), was set to play a melody. There were only about a dozen players, and they were terribly out of tune. I have perfect pitch, and the sawing of the instruments in their out of tune state, gave me the effect of worms crawling on my scalp. It was the oddest thing, and that is the only way I can describe it. I was in so much pain I found it laughable, and then when the orchestra started up, it was as if my scalp wanted to leave the room.

Did anybody at the pary seem to react to you? In the evidences of Padre Pio's bilocations, presented as part of his case for canonization, he was said to have bilocated from his friary in Italy to one in, I think, Brazil, and people there who knew him personally said they had heard his voice in the corridor, but not seen him.