Night Oddities Created 11 years ago2013-03-05 23:56:01 UTC by Striker

Since I have moved to the college dorm, for some months now, my sleeping pattern has been noticeably affected.
I've started experiencing weird dreams, to the point where I was terrified of going to bed. I've calmed down lately. One last dream I recall was with a screaming cat, although this is not necessarily scary. Sometimes I have uplifting dreams that enhance my mood, but the fact is that I started to dream a lot more than before.

I have colleagues that speak during sleep. It's bizarre because sometimes it's just... mumbles, you can't understand anything. They told me even I spoke once, although it seems I asked a math question(lol).

One weird thing happened to me once though. I knew all of my roommates would go to college the next day morning earlier than me, so when I got up I looked around and saw nobody in the room. I went to the bathroom, and when I entered the room I started packing. I suddenly hear a worried voice: "What's the time? :O". I instantly turn my head towards my colleague which had a terrified face with red eyes. I almost fucking screamed, I can not explain to you the feeling of horror I experienced. I knew I looked at his bed and saw nothing. Was he so well covered with the blanket? Was I not attentive? I questioned my sanity for the rest of the day... although the situation had a logical explanation.

I think it has to do with emotional stress and sleep deprivation. I get little time to sleep, and the internet is wasting my night time. I can't wait for weekends to recover...

Share your stories. Discuss scientific facts. The topic is not focused, we can discuss general neurology too.

Apparently (I wouldn't know myself for obvious reasons) I talk/mumble quite often in my sleep. Also apparently I rarely sit up during the night.

I think it's hard to tell though whether it's actually unconscious or whether I actually am awake, but am just not mentally aware enough to remember or justify.

Are you trying to give us a heart attack as well?
I don't want to go sleep now xD

You should Google how to improve your sleep. Things like exercise, relaxation, low amount of stress, healthy diet all work towards helping you sleep better. The only problem I have when it comes to sleep is that my bloody flat mates don't shut up some nights, playing loud music or raging at video games. I got earplugs for that now

I'll share a short tale of mine, I don't think I've ever been more scurred.

Basically I woke up in the middle of the night, and my cover is missing. I guessed it must have fallen down the side of the bed, so in the dark I stick my hand down the side of my bed, searching around becoming ever more frantic as its just not there. So I check the other side, nothing, so I have to turn on the lights, by now I'm really confused and scared someone is playing with me.

No freaking covers in my room at all. Door is closed as well. This is where I was really the most scared I have ever been, opening the door to see what the fuck is up. House is empty, I walk out into the corridor and am still terrified.

Walk up to the stairs and wtf, there is my doona cover, sitting on the freakin' bottom of the stairs.

Talk about anti-climactic!

Cat? Dog? Monkey? Thief trying to pass off as ghost?

That reminds me of a ghost(?) story I once read, about a young boy who wakes up in the middle of the night. He picks up his teddy bear and goes into his parents bedroom, but they're not there. He gets scared and goes downstairs to look for them, but once he reaches the bottom of the stairs a thick, malevolent darkness starts to rise out of the dark, so he drops his teddy bear as it chases him upstairs and into his room where he hides under the covers and passes out. The next day his parents tell him they never left their room, nor did they hear him calling for them, but they never found his teddy bear after that. Was quite well written iirc.

As for actual experiences of mine, there was once time when I was a child that I thought aliens were going to eat or abduct me. I woke up in the middle of the night to what I believed to be a noise, although I wasn't sure as by the time I was actually awake whatever it was had stopped. A few seconds later a very loud, garbled electronic sound came out of the darkness. I can remember it quite clearly, but it's difficult to describe, the closest sound I can think of is extremely garbled radio communication. It sounded a bit like that, except not recognisable as having been speech, and with a strong electronic edge to it.
This sound continually appeared and disappeared over the course of what felt like an hour, appearing for a few seconds at a time with a 10 to 40 second gap in between. I was shivering violently, trying to just pretend I was asleep, although it would have been obvious that I wasn't. I'm sure if I had anything in me I would have soiled myself, this was seriously the most fear I have ever felt in my life.
I eventually managed to fall asleep (or pass out from fear and exhaustion), and the next day I woke up to find no explaination as to what it was, and no evidence that anything had even been in my room.

Some months later I discovered an explaination. I had a remote control robot toy, which had an inbuilt speaker. I found out that if both the remote and the robot were on, and if you pressed the antennae off each other, then it would make the same noise.
This explained what the noise was, but unfortunately it raised two other questions.

How, in a room with no open windows or doors, where the air was completely still, did the two antennae suddenly start to touch each other on and off?

And why did the sound on that night sound like something was pressing the two together? There was a distinct difference between the sounds produced when they just brushed off each other lightly, and when they were pressed together and suddenly released, and the noise that night definitely sounded like the latter.

[The story is written in such a way as to be more spooky, although the events did actually happen as described]

One last dream I recall was with a screaming cat, although this is not necessarily scary.

Like an aggressive cat whining, by any chance?

Stress does make you prone to nightmares, by the way.

Cat? Dog? Monkey? Thief trying to pass off as ghost?

Sleepwalking I guess. What made it really weird was that the door was shut.

If you went all the way there, you had to open it. It's not that much of a stretch to assume that if you could open it, you could also close it again.

TJB: That is terrifying. I sometimes wake up suddenly to a bunch of noise that I could only describe as what you say you've heard. Sort of like a very distorted triangle-wave white noise. It only holds for a fraction of a second. I am almost completely sure it isn't actual sound waves but an illusion product of my half asleep brain that happens entirely inside my head. That doesn't make it any less startling though.

Do you still have that toy?

I remember that journal, JeffMOD.

I often dream about odd places that may or may not actually exist. Some are quite earthly, others kinda weird and profound. Sometimes about these giant stones temples with a purple-blue shellac stone that resembles something between Mayan and Buddhist temple architecture. Others are as weird as a place I see quite a lot. It a flat world in constant blue twilight with the land covered in endless puddles of about 1 to 4 feet across. Most of the puddles have random objects of cherished and sentimental value inside them. From what I gathered after the second time seeing this place, the puddles age the objects backward. There are definitely a few things I wish I could place here in this world. The dream itself is weird, like something between being a full dream and a lucid dream. Being not random and the same each visit is also very uncharacteristic of a dream.

That one is really interesting, Rim.

I remember one time I dreamt I was a character from a JRPG, I remembered the whole thing when I woke up, and I wrote down a pretty good story for a game that I doubt has been done before. Not really relating to scary dreams though. Well I was fighting bosses and stuff in that dream, as anyone would in a JRPG

Probably the worst dreams I've had; I'm dreaming and I can see myself from a corner of my room, and all of a sudden the view starts flying towards me and I get this feeling as if I'd been ripped into the air and then I wake up frightened as shit. I've had a few dreams when I'm falling endlessly too, and those few where I'm being chased and keep falling over, it's so annoying.

Yeah SP is some seriously scary shit. It basically convinced me to stop pursuing lucid dreaming.

Wake up Neo...

I hate it when you're falling asleep and in your dream/mind (whatever it is at that point) you fall/trip/drop something and you spasm in real life. It's just a very disconcerting experience.

ya scotch that is horrible! though i haven't had it happen for many years, but it's a very disconcerting feeling

I don't have it a anymore Stu, although I can't find any info on it. It was about 2-4 feet tall, black and white, and if I remember correctly it could only turn left (so a right turn would be a 270 degree left turn)

As for scary experiences waking up, today I got an awful shock.
I've been backing up my stuff to get ready to reinstall Windows, so last night I left my computer on to compress a ~50GB folder.
I fell asleep when it was at about 30%, but I woke up today to find it was still only at 50%! Oh the horror!

Had a dream my alarm didn't go off.
Then my alarm didn't go off.

I really hope the dream it turned into, about some kind of mix between Fallout and a cop show, doesn't happen. Because I was being sent into the presidential metro to face certain death.

You've watched XXX.

Haven't, actually. Is XXX like that?

I don't remember it well. But someone is killed at the Presidential Metro.

Yeah JeffMOD I've had similar dreams where my alarm didn't go off and it was something really important I had to get up for, and I was really stressed out and having an awful day. And then my alarm went off in real life and I woke up. Really freaky, like something out of a bad scifi movie. It's happened mainly when I've been worried I won't wake up on time, or my alarm will not wake me, or will malfunction.

I just woke up with the most surreal feeling. I dreamed I was listening to a radio and it was loosing signal. As the signal completely faded, I woke up. I immediately looked at my phone: 05:49. I've set the alarm at 05:50.
What the heck?

That's awesome.

Except the 5:50 part. WHY DO YOU WAKE UP SO EARLY D:

I wake up at 6am three days a week because Uni starts at 8am, takes me 45-60 mins to walk to uni, and I like some time to get ready.

I'm remembering more dreams since I have a needy cat that wakes me up often enough.

I have to wonder and ask, do you guys believe in other worlds?

Irony is not lost that I'm asking an HL community.

I've been watching lots of tube videos of quantum mechanics lately, so my answer is a big YES =)

Other identical worlds to ours exist in our universe statistically, not to mention god-knows-what kind of non-carbon-based life. And then there are alternate universes that probably exist right under our feet, i.e., xen =)

For all our smarts and technological innovations, we still a lot to learn about the extent of what our own existence really is, and it seems we are just at the very tip of the iceberg in our understanding

Basically CT's last paragraph. It's certainly possible, likely even. We'll never know for sure, but alternate timelines/realities/dimensions are definitely an interesting concept.

Clicky for some related videos. There is way more material out there you just have to dig a little, and deal with youtube blasting playlists out of existence for copyright infringment

nice edit block by the way jeff =)

Whenever I hear people talking about the possibilities of the vastness of space it reminds me of the Boltzmann Brain idea and it makes me sad because it is a depressing thought.

And on the subject of dreams, I used to have a problem with dreams related to getting up in the morning. I would very often be woken up for school, then drift off to sleep and dream that I had gotten out of bed and gotten dressed. I would be woken up again, as I hadn't come downstairs yet, but because when I'm half asleep I'm an idiot I wouldn't get out of bed, believing that I was already dressed and ready for school. Then I would fall asleep amd it would happen again. Those dreams were the worst.