half awake / half asleep

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Does anybody ever experience a few seconds of false memories or assumptions while drifting off to sleep?

Not false memories, but impossible thought/language gemometries, which when you SNAP back to wakefulness are caught in the memory, but impossible to describe properly!
 

mms

sometimes
Not false memories, but impossible thought/language gemometries, which when you SNAP back to wakefulness are caught in the memory, but impossible to describe properly!

i've had days where whole mornings ive been awake yet, not really known if i am really, i know that sounds like i'm just dosey, but that weird not really being able to work out when i'm asleep or awake it odd.

recently took some us sleeping tablets containing acetaminophen, and diphenhydramine. im sure they diminish parts of your brain as part of the process of making you sleep, i took some and tried to type a sentence and forgot full chunks of the sentence i intended to write, they were just blanks, never take that stuff. it will fuck with you!:rolleyes:
 

krankissey

mr. great
i think i've just recently begun to kick my sleep paralysis which has been plaguing me since i was 16.

horrible stuff.

the scariest shit i've ever experienced, without a doubt. there's a direct link between my fascination with ufos and my onset of SP, as i was sure i was in contact with aliens due to the overall experience/waking nightmare.
 
P

Parson

Guest
only happened once that i remember and while it was in fact real freaky i had known about it for enough years in advance that i quickly realized what was going on and didn't have a panic attack or anything and managed to just go back to sleep
 

zhao

there are no accidents
there's a direct link between my fascination with ufos and my onset of SP, as i was sure i was in contact with aliens due to the overall experience/waking nightmare.

yeah. there are a lot of documented cases of connection between this phenomenon and abduction/visitation.

seems to happen to me when I wake up out of the deepest sleep - haven't happened recently because I think I don't sleep that deeply anymore.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
This phenomenon is one of those interesting culture-transcending things that people have talked and written and mythologised about for ever. It's thought to be the origin of the 'incubus' and 'succubus' legends (although the latter were no doubt also inspired by nocturnal ejaculation) and all sorts of stories about witches and demons - someone already mentioned 'hag-riding', the feeling (very commonly felt during sleep paralysis) of someone or something sitting on your chest and preventing you from breathing. In European folklore, this often takes the form of a witch-like old woman.

Again, someone's already said it, but the parallels between 'witch-riding' or 'incubus visitation' and 'alien abduction' are startling. Just different interpretations of the same thing.
 

swears

preppy-kei
I was scared shitless last night. Woke up at about 1.30 and could have sworn I saw the silhouette of a bearded man sitting on the chair next to my bed. Just yelled in total shock and ran to the lightswitch, nobody there of course. Fucking creepy.
 

John Doe

Well-known member
I was scared shitless last night. Woke up at about 1.30 and could have sworn I saw the silhouette of a bearded man sitting on the chair next to my bed. Just yelled in total shock and ran to the lightswitch, nobody there of course. Fucking creepy.

This phenomenon is recognised in central America. A mate of mine experienced it (while in Guatemela, I think) much to the terror of the family he was staying with. Such a visitiation, in their folklore, presages disaster or tragedy of some description. There was a small earthquake, I think, following my mate's visitation which damaged their house? (It's a long time since he told me about it, the details are foggy). The family he was with directly linked the two events. This old man has a name (which I can't remember).

Fascinating psychological phenomena. Well, either that or you're in for some Serious Bad Shit swears...)
 
I was scared shitless last night. Woke up at about 1.30 and could have sworn I saw the silhouette of a bearded man sitting on the chair next to my bed. Just yelled in total shock and ran to the lightswitch, nobody there of course. Fucking creepy.

Assuming of course this is not the - very common - hallucinogenic side-effect of some psychotropic drug simply triggered by - equally common - underlying psychic blockages, consider just how "fucking creepy" such uncanny irruptions and psychic invasions must be for such people like your friend that you wrote about in another thread, when you stated that he was invaded/demonised by "conspiracy theories about the illuminati and area 51. Reckons people in black BMWs are following him around, constantly paranoid about people staring at him when they obviously aren't". For many, seemingly, the nightmare continues, persistently, long after they've woken up.

The problem, as always, is equally the hysterical over-reaction to those (and by those)experiencing such phantasms ...
 

bruno

est malade
This phenomenon is recognised in central America. A mate of mine experienced it (while in Guatemela, I think) much to the terror of the family he was staying with. Such a visitiation, in their folklore, presages disaster or tragedy of some description. There was a small earthquake, I think, following my mate's visitation which damaged their house? (It's a long time since he told me about it, the details are foggy). The family he was with directly linked the two events. This old man has a name (which I can't remember).
a similar thing happened to a friend who spent a few days on easter island last year. he slept very well until the second night, when in a dream he was accosted by a strange emaciated being. at some point he was at his hostel (wide awake) and saw through the corner of his eye the very thing he had seen in his dreams, a dark grinning figure with large eyes staring back at him as it passed by. he was very unsettled by all this and described the experience to a local, who took him for a fool for not knowing the island is populated by spirits and demons and so on, and that what he had seen was, i forget the name, but one of these spirits. creepy!
 
This all reminds me of Primo Levi's short poem, Reveille, about a haunted concentration camp survivor, which succinctly evokes the Mobius Strip-like continuum of the parallel between dream and waking (half awake/half asleep) realities:

In the brutal nights we used to dream
Dense violent dreams,
Dreamed with soul and body:
To return; to eat; to tell the story.
Until the dawn command
Sounded brief, low
'Wstawac'
And the heart cracked in the breast.

Now we have found our homes again,
Our bellies are full,
We're through telling the story.
It's time. Soon we'll hear again
The strange command:
'Wstawac'


The first stanza of Levi's poem above has the survivor recalling being asleep in the concentration camp, dreaming hopeful, intense dreams about escaping back home to relate his story, only to be brutally woken up from his dream by the Polish kapo’s ‘Get up!’ ("Wstawac!"). Much later (in the second stanza), while actually at home having survived the war, his story having been related to his family, he now imagines been woken once again by that same terrifying command, ‘Wstawac!’ What is interesting here is that though there is an obvious reversal of the relationship between the dream world and actual reality from the first verse to the second, their formal narrative structure is identical: in both instances, a relaxed and homely domestic world is intruded upon by a traumatic outside in the form of the horrifying command, "Get up!" The apparent move, therefore, is from reality, in the form of the wake-up injunction, intruding on the dream, to the dream, the imagined (or rather, the spectral, hauntological) wake-up call, interrupting reality.

[A really good filmic example of this is near the beginning of Lynch's Mulholland Dr, where an anxious guy in a "Twinkie's" fast-food restaurant tells his colleague about a recurring nightmarish dream he's been having, about being in the very same restaurant as he now is and being aware of a wall behind the restaurant concealing an old dark-faced, emaciated man. The guy proceeds to retrace his nightmare in waking, socialy reality, but dies of fright seeing the old man spring out from behind the wall. In Lynch's films, reality does not have priority over dreams]

Lynch's materialised phantom in Mulholland Dr
mulholland_drive_bum.jpg


Freud’s theory of dreams maintained that the ultimate function of dreaming, even daydreaming, was to permit the dreamer to remain asleep. What he may also have implied by this is that the horrors or traumas that we sometimes encounter in dreams can be much more unbearable even than external social reality itself, so that the dreamer "wakes" up to escape (back) into that ordinary social reality. In other words, what appears in the guise of dreaming, or even daydreaming, is sometimes the ultimate traumatic truth on whose repression social reality itself is constructed: our everyday reality permits us to evade an encounter with true trauma.

Yes, we are the stuff that dreams are made of ["Truth has the structure of a fiction"--Lacan].
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
What a stupid record to attempt. You might as well try setting a record for 'most beer drunk in one session'.
 
Top