a very unusual hypnopompic event

[Wade]

Last night I had a VERY unusual hypnopompic event. As I’ve mentioned before over the years I’ve had many, many of these experiences, many of them quit terrifying but about five to six years ago I “conquered” my affliction. By that I mean that the episodes dropped dramatically…but didn’t disappear…and more importantly the level of fear and anxiety has almost completely disappeared. Most the time the episodes now border on being if not pleasant, at the very least interesting. Also to a certain point I am lucid and can rationalize out my thoughts even in my sleep. I record my dreams religiously and I am able to not only remember many dreams to a somewhat limited detail, I tell myself while in the act of dreaming that I might want to remember this when I wake up. This usually happens when I have a “theme” dream which is to say I have found over the years that a number of reoccurring themes keep popping up in my dreams that aren’t necessarily essential to the dream itself but show up again and again and agai throughout my dreams.. These themes are what I tend to focus on more so than the main story of the dream itself.

I’ve always instinctively knew when an attack was coming and because I now know what to expect…or not to expect…I usually just wait it out (here I go again) For the most part, when I am coming out of an event, I hear whistles and tones sometimes going up in scale and sometimes down and once the sound manifested itself as PIANO keys coming down in pitch. Once I heard a voice say “he’s waking up” and when I awoke I found that my toes were curled up and trying to grab ahold of the bed frame at the foot of the bed not unlike a bird perching on a branch. But last night’s episodes was one for the books

As usual I did feel an attack coming on and decided not to fight it, in fact I told myself let’s see where this goes. As per usual, I had the sensation of not so much being held down but embraced or cocooned or contained. A most uncomfortable feeling to be sure. I told myself that if things got out of hand my two roommates’ would come help me . For the record I have no roommates’ and one of the people costarring in my dream ceased being a roommate some ten years ago. Also I think the dream took place in my childhood bedroom. My mind was telling me to play along, pretend you are still asleep and not lucid (which I apparently was but my mind told me I was coming out of sleep and i was aware or somewhat lucid)

As I felt myself being contained, I heard a voice for only the second time (that I could remember) It said “Hello Brother, I love you. I am so glad that you decided to hear me (or maybe it was you CAN hear me ) there are many things… It then said a couple of things I couldn’t make out. I felt myself being more and more contained, that is to say I was in a grip that was being tightened but I felt no fear, only curiosity, but at the same time, my mind was saying “Pretend you are asleep, pretend that you cannot hear it. DO NOT INTERACT WITH IT Then I heard “It say “Oh help” and I had the sensation of it being lifted or pulled off me and then, within seconds it was back and once again I felt myself being contained “Hello, Brother” “it” said. Then it said a couple of more things that I couldn’t understand and then left for good . During all this time I could distinctly hear the wall clock clicking through the seconds but I don’t remember if I recognized it as such. As when my “brother” left I could hear the distinct rustling of papers as if there was a stack of them that got distrurbed by a breeze…there was no stack of papers nearby that could explain this sound though. The voice itself was somewhat fey and childlike with a fair amount of reverb or feedback. By then I was coming out for real as I told myself “wait a minute, I don’t have any roommates’” and even at that point even after I was lucid for real I pretended to still be asleep and unaware…even though I was VERY aware of my surroundings just to see if it would happen again.

 

[Muadib]

Wow, a strange experience to be sure, thank you for posting it. After the thing in your dream, whatever it was, told you that it had many things to tell you, was what it said completely intelligible or did you just forget what it said? If you forgot, do you think it will come back to you at some point? Also, what did the voice you heard in your prior experience say to you? Was it similar or completely different?

 

[Wade]

in the previous dream the voice was female and matter of fact, I think I remember dreaming I was flat on a table and the table was being put into an upright position.. I think I was on an operating table. And as I was being put upright I heard the women say "he's waking up" and when I awoke for real thats when I noticed my toes.

as for last night no the voice just dropped off in volume or something , sort of mumbled it was like trying to hear someone tallking indistinctly with their back to you

 

[BlackRockLobster]

I appreciate your posting this, and I have experienced something akin to this before. There have been otherwise lucid dreaming states that have been interrupted by what seems like a broadcast, and has a kind of mental static, like bubbles, in the audio. In those times I've been told similar things. For me it only happens when I am dreaming I never experience it awake.

 

[Chuckleberryfinn]

Bizarre and unsettling. I used to have hypnopompic experiences all of the time. I'd awake and see a variety of things in my room, standing around my bed. When I was a child, it was a clown. One year as a child it was Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. It used to terrify me. I'd always pull the covers over my head to try and hide from it, but one day the clown pulled the covers off of my head. No, I had not seen the movie "IT" nor had I read the Stephen King book.

The last time it happened was a few years ago, and it was actual Gray Aliens standing around my bed. Another time a few years ago it was a blue angel. Bizarre things. I've never experienced the auditory hallucinations, just the visual.

 

[Randall]

I've never had an experience like that, but I've had other strange experiences. One that I've not mentioned before is that when I was about 6 or 7 years old, my parents and I were out on a drive in the country. My dad was a geologist and he liked to check out interesting geological formations and look for fossils. We were on a gravel road that ran alongside some farmland, and along the other side of the road was an embankment and a river far down below. We stopped for a moment and got out of the car to check out the embankment to see if any fossils might be found, and it turned out that the embankment turned into a cliff. My dad said to be careful not to get too close, but as I was backing away, I found that the surface of the embankment was covered in a loose clay/gravel that started to crumble and cause me to slide toward the edge of the cliff.

I went down onto my stomach and stopped sliding, but I could feel how loose the surface beneath me was, and felt like I could easily slide over the edge at any moment. My dad saw what happened and said to hold still and not to move. Then he dug his rock hammer into the ground above, pulled his belt off, inched himself down toward me, and while hanging onto his rock hammer with one arm, he was able to extend the belt down to where I could reach it, whereupon he used it to pull me to safety. I was very relieved.

So what's so weird about this event? Despite the fact that I remember it quite clearly, both of my parents say that it never happened. It wasn't a dream. To me it's exactly like I lived it, yet when I mentioned this incident a few days later, nether of my parents remembered the trip or the event, as if it was just wiped from their minds, or as if I had found myself in some parallel universe where it had never happened to them. Can complex memories like this just suddenly manifest themselves into the minds of children and integrate so perfectly with real life that it seems like it actually happened? Some people say they can, but I had good parents so there was no parental or substance abuse or other issues that would have led me to create a mask memory to cover up some trauma. So I still don't know how to explain it.

 

[TalkingMeatSuit]

I've had very similar experiences when trying to fall asleep, when waking up, and when I'm zoning out really hard. Most of the time it's associated with sleep paralysis. For the longest time I reacted to the paralysis with panic, which makes it worse.

Lately I've been trying to be more relaxed and explore the state when it happens. I get the audio experience too. For me it often sounds like the rapids of a nearby river in a big open space, occasionally a little static-y. When the sound gets real loud and pronounced I get a little startled and haven't had the balls to surrender enough to see what lies past that.

Other random stupid sounding shit:

Had a group of 4 interlopers in a lucid dream once. Was kinda weird, because in lucid dreams you are in control and aware, and I sure didn't invite them there to bother me.

Speaking of hearing talking when in these states, there's been a few different occasions where I've had that happen as well. Generally it's when I've been home by myself, doing staring-at-the-ceiling after work kind of relaxing, zoning out completely then it sounds like someone is talking to me from the next room. It freaked me out each time and made me grab the shotgun to look in all the rooms and closets lol. Needless to say I wasn't able to stay in state to see WTF is going on, even if it's just crazyness in my head.

TL;DR - Thanks for sharing your experience, it's pretty cool and perhaps it's not as uncommon as we might think. Keep us updated with your exploring

 

[TalkingMeatSuit]

I'm awake a lot during the night; I don't sleep well. I'll listen to Paracast, some Audible books, other podcasts, etc sometimes when I can't sleep.

One night last winter I was doing this near-nightly routine, in this case lying on my back listening to a Jim Marrs interview on Binnall of America. Partway through the interview I was having to focus and listen more carefully on what the two of them were saying because someone in the background at one of their locations kept talking while in proximity of the microphone and just would not shut up. After a few minutes of this I started to think that this made no sense, which startled me and made me sit straight up. I rewind the podcast to re-listen to the last 5-10 minutes and there was no one talking in the background of the recording.

 

[LeBombette]

I'm awake a lot during the night; I don't sleep well. I'll listen to Paracast, some Audible books, other podcasts, etc sometimes when I can't sleep.

One night last winter I was doing this near-nightly routine, in this case lying on my back listening to a Jim Marrs interview on Binnall of America. Partway through the interview I was having to focus and listen more carefully on what the two of them were saying because someone in the background at one of their locations kept talking while in proximity of the microphone and just would not shut up. After a few minutes of this I started to think that this made no sense, which startled me and made me sit straight up. I rewind the podcast to re-listen to the last 5-10 minutes and there was no one talking in the background of the recording.

That's somehow extremely creepy...gave me goosebumps. :/

 

[TalkingMeatSuit]

That's somehow extremely creepy...gave me goosebumps. :/

It creeped me out for sure, but only briefly so. I felt no negativity at all from that particular weird little experience. As I mentioned above, I did have a malevolent experience of sorts, this was not the same.

It makes me think though that stuff like this is pretty common though. We all hit those hypnagogic states or similar states of focus when transitioning to and from sleep, or practiced intentionally or done completely unintentionally in some cases. How many reports of the "old hag" are out there? Maybe some of us just pay more attention when it's going on or are able to notice it on occasion. Maybe all those monks who spend their entire lives putting their minds into these altered states aren't the religious zealots that some think they are - perhaps they just like comfortable clothes and psychedelic experiences?

I asked a medium once about that particular experience. He was one of the few that was able to say some shit that I couldn't figure out how to write off. He claimed it was a "spirit guide" - which who knows about that sorta thing... it's nothing even remotely provable. Even if he was able to quote a dying friend's last words, word for word, doesn't mean he's always right. For all I know I could have been picking up an AM radio station from a broken antenna, hearing my subconscious if such a thing exists, or some other random set of circumstances that enabled me to hear a source of noise that I normally couldn't. Then again, maybe it was an individual from another wavelength of existence? Para-stuff is frustratingly elusive in the answers department.

 

[Tyger]

I ramble around a lot of thought-systems, some are more practical than others - but this reminds me of the idea that when we sleep our physical body and our life-body (also called the Etheric Body in certain streams) stay sleeping on the bed - and our Astral and higher bodies lift out of the body, this enabling the body to repair itself (the astral and mental activities during the day are wearing).

I have friends who subscribe to this esoteric view who suspect from what they have read that sleep experiences of some of the kind related here on this thread are associated with the etheric realm - with the consciousness lifting out but not leaving the etheric body so that experiences unfold - in consciousness because the astral has not fully 'left' - to do with the etheric realm (which are close to being physical in quality). They go further to suggest/theorize that the abduction experience so commonly described is at the etheric level - and that the 'aliens' are anthropomorphized etheric qualities. (It is the etheric body that is 'repairing' the body from the day-waking consciousness activities - and the images often have this 'medical' aspect).

To be clear, I have no idea if the above is 'true' but I do find the use of the view to be a useful heuristic device to negotiate through the labyrinth of experiences human beings are finding themselves dealing with these days. As I am being told with ever greater clarity: Believe nothing. Do the inner work. Find out for yourself. You can be the only judge. When I asked: How? I was told to begin at the beginning - with the Six Subsidiary Exercises - so for the purposes of this post (I was actually handed a book when I asked) I have googled these exercises and this seems to be the best summation of these ancient occult exercises - they do not originate with Steiner btw (it's just who came up through the google), though Steiner gives particularly lucid descriptions of what this ancient work is about (he is one of several - the Rosicrucians are another source for this). He is also one of the most practical that I have come across - very German - that.

LINK: ContemplateThis: The Six Exercises for Basic Esoteric Development of Rudolf Steiner

 

[Tyger]

P.S. The most important factor is to control fear. To have absolute mastery/command of one's thoughts and emotions - else wise, all manner of mischief can occur. Nothing can hurt you - as long as you take the appropriate safeguards. A healthy dose of caution but nothing can harm unless willed. As you do this 'inner work' the nature of the answers to the questions start to reveal themselves, like about memory, etc.