Hypnagogic Hallucinations Examples | Sleep Paralysis Hallucinations

As hypnagogic hallucinations are something very difficult to explain to other people I wanted to gather some examples of what other people are seeing in order to help friends and family understand better these sleep disorders.

Hypnagogic Hallucinations Examples Related to Sight

Expanding Shapes or Moving Shapes

• Feeling that your body is expanding and getting larger and larger up to the point where you no longer know where are the boundaries of your body – as if you are everywhere and nowhere.
• Approaching or Disappearing geometrical objects or even just a point, such as points of light in the darkness.

Lines or Geometric Patterns

• Seeing geometric shapes moving, flowing, and swirling in various colours and designs.
• Seeing geometric shape fluid motions much like the same way as fractals

Seeing Faces of People

• Having visions of various people or their faces come in front of you and pass by continuously. In most cases these would be total strangers as far as you know. Also they are not always clear images, but rather somewhat blurred.

Hypnagogic Hallucinations Examples Related to Sounds

• Hearing other people speak. For example a family member or a friend speaking to you or to another person about all kinds of things – they do not have to be important.
• Hearing of your name being called out by a person or an entity. For example in one case a person saw what he described to be a demon right next to him who said his name 3 times.

Other Kinds of Hypnagogic Hallucinations Examples

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  For example having a feeling that someone else is in the same room where you are sleeping. You do not necessarily see him or her or even you don’t know if it is human or not – you just feel some entity is there also. And most people seem to feel it to be evil, although I suppose there is no reason for it to be evil, maybe it is just that people are afraid and subconsciously assume it is evil when it could be either not there at all or it could be neutral or good.

• The above can get one step further in one reported example where a dark figure was seen in the room who then grabbed the ankle of the person who was having the hypnagogic experience. Naturally this frightened the person a lot who started screaming (although not clear if the screaming was inside the hallucination or could be heard in real life)
• There are also some reports of people feeling of being strangled and having a strong pressure on the chest. Feeling being crushed as well as suffocation.
• Waking up and doing the regular routine and then realizing that this is inside the dream or the hallucination and then repeating this possibly few times – basically fighting to wake up for real until the point when you finally manage to wake up in the real life.