unwanted mental pictures

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there must be a name for this phenomenon, i wonder what it is.

I was watching the PBS series Genesis hosted by Bill Moyers. The panel was made up of authors and in the course of the discussion (I don't remember what) one of the authors, E.L. Doctorow, mentioned pretty much the same thing. He spoke of seeing a dark shape rush by but not of being attacked. I felt a suffocating weight when I woke up that one time. I have also experienced the rushing by thing. Its dark and fast and low to the ground. I was in an AA meeting once and someone mentioned it as a common thing chronic alcoholics see.

I wonder if Fuseli's The Nightmare depicts this.

I've wondered the same thing, maybe this is the origin of the incubus and the succubus:

I was going to post a picture, but I didn't want to scare anyone.

Please, do! You've peeked my interest!

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I posted the painting Moog was talking about.

Oh, okay. I thought Moog was referring to something different.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I was also thinking of this, but it doesn't chill quite like Fuseli's

Spirit of the Dead Watching by Gauguin

i'd be happy if the dark mass like that depicted reclining in the photo above, would haunt me

well, i have alcoholic genes running through me, and the only thing keeping me outta the sauce is a general physical aversion to alcohol.

This is exactly what I was thinking as well! In most cases for me, I feel like I trip and plummet down a pit or just a very far distance. I'm not "fully asleep" yet, but getting there.

As for the disturbing images, oh I've experienced them; in fact most of my dreams are in fact nightmares.

I've had nightmares featuring images that would make Freddy Krueger piss in his pants. However, most of those were actually nightmares once I was asleep; not in the transition; that was just falling great distances and things like that.

Now, there was one thing I once experienced that was so incredibly screwy, it forever changed how I slept: I once had a weird experience in trying to sleep where...it was like this feeling of vertigo; it was like everything around me kept "zooming in and zooming out"; very nauseating experience; I kept going to the bathroom that night, stumbling a few times because of it, and tried explaining it to my Dad( I think, anyway); from that point on, I've always slept with a fan on. For some strange reason, the sound of the fan just has this calming, consistent factor to it that keeps me a bit more relaxed than if I just try to sleep on my own, and seems to cancel out most of those "vertigo" type situations.

I find this thread incredibly interesting.

I've had hallucinations and visions as far back as I can remember, sometimes they've been clairvoyent. But, those are waking visions, and not related to sleeping at all.

I have experienced hypnogogic visions behind my eyes as I'm falling asleep or in a slumberess state, as a number of people have said, but they are not generally like the ones shown or described. They are abstract.

As close as I can come to finding images that look like the ones that I get are these:

sometimes i see strobes like these:





[img]http://i926.photobuckhttp://i926.photobucket.com/al ... n_pi/Wrong%[/img]


Or, I'll see abstract swirls like these:



[img]http://i926.photobucket.com/albums/ad101/punkin_pi/Wrong%20Planet/longexposurefiberoptic.jpg[/iimg]




Or, i'll see fiber optic type images like these:












Those types of visions behind my eyes are regular and normal for me and I find them kind of cool, unlesss I'm really suffering from insomnia and overstimulation and I'd rather they just stop and have total darkness.


Conversely, I've also had some disturbing hallucinations in which I see bugs crawling all over the walls when I'm trying to go to sleep. That usually happens when I'm quite stressed or disturbed about something. Those are not behind my eyes, they appear completely real to me to the point I have to turn on the light and get out of bed. Usually I'm so creeped out I can't get back to sleep. Every time I turn out the light, the bugs re-appear.

Other than that the most weird thing I find from talking to other people is that I have an extremely over active visualization of everything I hear. I processs almost everything visually. This can be quite disconcerting and sometimes puts people off when I get weird looks on my face or interpret everything visually.

It has great benefits though in that I have an incredible visual memory.

Bolded for Truth topic

BFT Amazing what that right hemisphere can do!!