Trying to figure out the things that happen in my sleep
This had started as a poem idea, but I couldn’t articulate it into verse, so I’m just making it an essay. I’m learning more and reading more about things like weird visions and mediation. When I meditate, I often have strange visions. It’s what inspires a lot of my art.
I often feel like I’m floating, and then at times its like I’m in space or surrounded by weird creatures. There was one vision in particular where everyone had long necks and big heads. It was rather unsettling. I don’t know where these things come from.
A doctor had commented on my Facebook page about it calling them hypnagogic hallucinations. The Cleveland Clinic explains it as:
Hypnagogic hallucinations are usually brief and fleeting but are occasionally prolonged. They can take different forms, including:
Visual (seeing something that’s not there): About 86% of hypnagogic hallucinations are visual and usually consist of changing geometric patterns, shapes and light flashes. It may seem like you’re looking into a kaleidoscope. They may also involve images of animals, people or faces.
There are also auditory and somatic, but I focused on the visual because that is what I experience. Now, the question for me is, is this something strictly scientific or medical or is there a supernatural component to it? Mine are like this, but sometimes far more detailed. Sometimes very real.
What is the most strange and no one has explained to me yet is when I have dreams of dead family members, usually my mom who died almost 10 years ago. But she’s alive and doing things as if she’d never left. And in the dream I have memories of things with her that never happened in real life, but yet the memory feels just as real as anything.
Sometimes I have dreams of my mom who was always supportive, but in my dream she’s either mean or at least passive agressive. I had one dream I was somehow at the Super Bowl but they said my ticket was no good. So I called my mom to come pick me up. She showed up, but told me I wasn’t ready to come home and then left. I then tried to take a taxi all the way home, but then I woke up at some point.
I don’t know what any of this means, but it touches on my dreams being portals article I did the other day. Sure, there may be science behind this, but I just don’t know what it could be, not to mention how it feels. It feel so real and so intense. There have bene times I woke up and was physically shaken.
I’m not a doctor or a scientist, so I’m just presenting questions and some of my own theories. I really do feel what I’m experiencing in these instances are other versions of my mom or family members from other time lines. Somehow in my sleep I’m astral projecting into these different places which is why everything is so surreal.
I know there is stuff with brain chemistry and all that, and that might factor in, but there may be a cart and horse situation here. Yes, there may be a scientific thing going on here, but that doesn’t mean what is happening isn’t also supernatural. I don’t feel they are mutually exclusive.
There is often a view that science and the supernatual are two different things. I think the brain’s chemical and physiological reactions can be triggered by what is happening within us supernaturally. Like your brain’s reaction to astral projection. I’ve never been able to willfully do it, but I think it does happen when I’m asleep and it all is so real and tangible at the time.
Sometimes I wonder if it would be like A Nightmare on Elm Street and if I grabbed something before I woke up would it come into this waking world with me. I would try it, but I usually don’t know enough that I’m dreaming to think about it at the time. I’m usually confused and trying to figure out where I am.
Someone tell me I’m not the only one who experiences this. I notice an uptick in them lately and I don’t know if its coming from me, or is something trying to tell me something?
What are your thoughts? I’d like to hear other people’s experiences and maybe do a follow up article about it. Is what we experience in dreams real or a criss cross of alternate timelines and universes, or is it just crazy shit in our heads? What say you?
Leave a Reply