Sleep Disturbances
I'm vastly amused and a little weirded out by the discovery of a new website. Long story short, I was looking up sleep disturbances for mom (she'll wake up sometimes with the sensation that she's looking in the wrong direction in bed, but then she's not-- proprioceptive type disturbances) and stumbled on a website that has perfect descriptions of...
dum dum duuuuuummmmmmmm....
My trenchcoat dreams. Yep, all these years I've been fighting alien abductions.
Who knew? Apparently, I'm both a "close the door" type person (I struggle to move a finger in order to awaken) and a "defend yourself" type person (sometimes if the finger thing doesn't work, I pray really hard and eventually wake up and/or calm the heck down).
So why are my alien abducters wearing trenchcoats? I'm not quite sure. I think I'll voice that question aloud next time I have an episode. Since I'm changing contracts, attending a wedding, frantically Christmas shopping and otherwise stressing out, a trenchcoat dream is overdue! "Pardon me, but exactly how bad do you think the weather IS here, Mr. Alien. Geesh, trenchcoats are so OUT!"
Seriously though, the descriptions of the paralysis are dead-on for my trechcoat dreams. Especially disturbing is the fact that moving a finger is EXACTLY how I deal with them. And the paranoia afterwards... usually merits a good look in every closet and under the bed prior to settling back down. And a door lock check.
Stay tuned. I'll tell you if the visitors open their trenchcoats to reveal the "grays". :-)
posted by Rambling Speech at 11:16 PM
4 Comments:
I remember you talking about those dreams a little. There are worse things that stress could bring on, but destroying the chance for a restful sleep is pretty bad. I'm thankful I don't have a problem with it. All I have are the balloon hallucinations as I start to drift off to sleep. Sometimes as I get close to sleep I'll look up and see a mass the size and shape of a balloon with a string floating in the room. My bedroom has a ceiling fan in it, as have most of them over the years. Slowly the "balloon" moves toward the ceiling and fan. I lay there knowing the "balloon" cannot exist, but I steel feel a tremendous urge to get up and stop it from being sucked into the fan. I usually fight the urge, but in the end it's usually easier and faster to stand up and let the image dissipate. I realize that the image is probably just my brain misinterpreting the fovea of my eye in the darkness, but it still happens. Then I have to calm down for a while afterwards to go to sleep. And Why oh why can't I bring myself to close my eyes. We are all strange indeed.
Sorry Lucky Bob-- I plugged "balloon halllucination and sleep" into google and I think you are brain damaged or have dementia.
Either that, or your brain is compensating for lack of visual stimuli. It happens.
Or you could have hypnagogic hallucinations which fall in the same area as my hypnpompic hallucinations.
All I have to say is, watch out for the aliens. And their nasty balloons.
I think it's classified as a type of Entoptic phenomenon. Wikipedia has a small description, and this PDF has some good example pictures of some of them. I've experienced the floaters quite a bit myself. For me they are easiest to see in a fairly bright environment when looking at an even, light color, like a cloudless sky or smooth wall. For some reason I don't see the fovea "dark floating mass in dim light" one though.
My worst dreams involve driving. I can't see where I'm going well because it's foggy or dark and the lights don't work. Or I'm lost, and the roads don't go where they are supposed to and there's no way I can backtrack. Highways become almost moebius-like, criss-crossing in impossible patterns that would make a civil engineer faint. The dreams are usually stressful, but I haven't had a full on nightmare since I was in grade school. Tiffany, however, has the occasional night terror. I think that's the term for them. A sort of nightmare when she is semi-awake and she physically can't move. That's why she refuses to watch horror movies... she says her dreams are bad enough.
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