Hypnopompic Hallucinations

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Sometimes I wake up and I'll see things around me. Usually it'll be big spiders on my wall or snakes crawling on the floor. One time I even thought Nicholas Cage was standing by my bed. I just found out those are called hypnopompic hallucinations. Your brain doesn't wake up all the way so it projects dreams into real life. Does anybody else have these?

Yes I get these sometimes. Well mine was more like an auditory hallucination apon waking. A woman was talking in my dream and I woke up and still heard her talking for a while.

I've had that happen to me a couple of times in my life.

I have these too but they are auditory, and they happen when I'm falling asleep or waking up.

When falling asleep I often imagine the sound of random conversations or bits of dialogue. The sounds are clearly in my mind, not my "ears" and it is often the voices of characters I've heard on TV (e.g., once I "heard" Monica and Chandler from "Friends" arguing and joking as if the TV was on in my head). It's like I'm hearing the dialogue of a dream without any pictures starting yet.

When fully asleep I often have dreams that are entirely auditory with no pictures. Sometimes I write essays on a typewriter in my dreams, hearing myself proofread the paragraphs in my mind. I've written songs as well but they normally disintegrate within seconds of waking up. The other day I wrote one down. It was a bit of a song that my mind wrote. It was sung in tune as: "I have a picture of you, to soften the process of what I went through". LOL. Lame but curious. Again, no pictures.

Waking up I often hear telephones or doorbells or someone calling my name. I've grown so used to it that I can dismiss it instantly.

I had a sleep study and was told this is hypnogogia and hypnopompia like you said. It is not considered schizophrenia despite hearing voices, because it's only associated with sleep. The sleep study also said I don't get to the deepest stage of sleep. I forget what it's called but it's one stage deeper than REM. I also have apnea. Not sure if it's all connected.

also known as hpnaygogic hallucinations, or sleep paralysis.
had those, too, on a small number of occasions, like when I upset my sleep cycle really bad when working on my graduation project for college.

here's a short documentary-horror-film (yes, that's a thing now) about it:
https://vimeo.com/68638523

it's not dangerous. the only people who ever got any severe damage from it were members of some tribe who had a legend surrounding it that the creatures they'd see were actually dangerous, so they would try to not go to sleep - and suffer mental damage from self-inflicted sleep deprivation.

work on your sleep hygiene. you'll be fine.

No, but hypnopompic! What a word!

I did watch a YouTube video about that recently (here), sounds terrifying. (The video is funny though.)

I've noticed they usually happen when I'm stressed or have had a bad day. Like yesterday was pretty bad so I went to bed and thought "I bet I have one of those tonight." And I did! I thought there was a guy with a snake wrapped around his neck standing in the corner of my room (not Nicholas Cage this time thank God).

A lot of the time I won't even "see" what I'm hallucinating. Like I'll wake up and think "There's a giant spider in my living room" so I'll shut my bedroom door so it can't get in and then go back to sleep.