Night Terrors

[LikkleBaer]

Okay, pretty much everyone has at some point had a nightmare so vivid that they've woken up in a cold sweat with their heart hammering and a genuine sense of fear.

For some people this is a regular experience, and not a particularly pleasant one either. It's something that interests me because it's something that I have to live with... there's a reason why I've spent most of my life sleeping with the light on.

Again, wikipedia is of great help in explaining what I mean:

Hypnagogic sensations are vivid dream-like experiences that occur as one is falling asleep or waking up. Accompanying sleep paralysis can cause the sensations to be more frightening. The features of these sensations generally vary by individual, but some are more common to the experience than others:

Most common

Vividness
Fear
Falling sensation

Common

Sensing a "presence" (often malevolent)
Pressure/weight on body (especially the chest).
A sensation of not being able to breathe
Impending sense of doom/death

Fairly common

Auditory sensations (often footsteps or indistinct voices, or pulsing noises). Auditory sensations which are described as noise instead of sensations of legible sounds, are often described to be similar to auditory sensations caused by Nitrous Oxide by persons who have experienced both.
Visual sensations such as lights, people or shadows walking around the room

Less common

Floating sensations (sometimes associated with out-of-body experiences)
Seamless transition into fully immersive lucid dreaming, also associated with out-of-body experiences
Tactile sensations (such as a hand touching or grabbing)

Rare

Vibration
Involuntary movements (sometimes the feeling of sliding off of the bed or even up walls).
The feeling of being pulled in different directions

During the hypnagogic state, an individual may appear to be fully awake, but still has brain waves indicating that the individual is still technically sleeping. Also, the individual may be completely aware of their state, which enables lucid dreamers to enter the dream state consciously directly from the waking state (see wake-initiated lucid dream technique). Many artists, musicians, architects, engineers, and others demanding creativity to be successful have benefited from hypnagogia, where the mind can be free and open to creative and new ideas.

An experience of the hypnagogic state is not an uncommon occurrence with 30 to 40 percent of people experiencing it at least once in their lives.[citation needed] However, it could be a sign of a sleep disorder, such as narcolepsy and insomnia, or associated with temporal lobe epilepsy.

The hypnagogic state can be accompanied by or associated with anomalous phenomena such as alien abduction, extra-sensory perception, telepathy, apparitions, or prophetic or crisis visions. This conduciveness to anomalous phenomena can be correlated with the initial increase of alpha and the later increase of theta brainwaves.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Thankfully this doesn't happen all that much now, but I've experienced ALL of the things listed, including those described as 'rare'. I'm curious to know if anyone else has had similar experiences.

[Realm]

I've experienced many of these. Falling, both from great heights and small, sudden starts that jerk me awake (often the feeling of having just tripped over a step) happen to me every few weeks - usually as I'm falling asleep. I've also had the involuntary movents one, usually I feel like I'm falling off the bed when I'm not. I've also woken up in the night so dizzy I had no idea whether I was face up or down.

I've had some really f'ed up dreams too, including getting chased by men with knives, eaten by giant rats, and throwing Molotov cocktails at a dead guy with a shotgun. Rarely do I have a real bad nightmare, but when I do I don't forget it.

Of course I have sex dreams too, but that's a little off topic...