Disoriented and half sedated like I just woke from anesthesia: I am Jason Statham. From an otherwise insensible existence, my body makes me aware that danger is close, My next four movements will be the difference between life and death.
The a rush of adrenaline and fear that resonates through my body usually results in a blind search for a weapon to obliterate the thing that's about to eat my face whole. I frantically attempt to smash, squish and demolish the stringy figure that scurries across my bed sheets, or sometimes along the the wall. Sometimes, it's a small spider, other times it's a tarantula the size of a volleyball. (I'm serious.) To my surprise, it's the small spiders that are more terrifying. The small ones can hide.
After I smashed my phone against the wall for the sixth time, my hope of seeing the broken fuselage of abdomen and appendages became futile. If that spider would have been real, I would have beat the living shit out of it. Confused, and still left with 'the fear,' I did what any human in a panic should do — I asked Google. It turns out I wasn't alone.
For a long time, I thought — at best I was having a bad dreams – at worst my room was a breeding ground for 8-legged friends. Friends which only came out to play when my mind was in a deep place of unconsciousness. I can't really remember when this started happening — it has been years — but I do remember last week when I realized this wasn't an experience exclusive to my own reality. I realized that all those times I had awoke to holograms of massive spiders, probably were not normal.
What I thought was some extension of an arachnid infused dream state, turned out to more complex: I wasn't experiencing a rollover in a dream state: I was hallucinating something completely foreign to my consciousness.
Hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations are visual, tactile, auditory, or other sensory events, usually brief but occasionally prolonged, that occur at the transition from wakefulness to sleep (hypnagogic) or from sleep to wakefulness (hypnopompic).
I"m not particularly afraid of spiders, I am afraid of things unknowingly crawling on-and-around me in my sleep. To some comfort, I found that I wasn't alone in my conflict with make-believe arthropods. In any case of hallucination, you would assume that an individual's experiences would be varied, yet I found other tales of late night creepy crawlies that were numerous and uncannily similar. I would say that this post, generally describes my situation:
I will go to sleep and wake up to see a spider on my pillow, bed, wall ect... This can happen in the middle of the day (during a nap) or at night in bed. At first this was a very scary feeling b/c it only happened about once every six months but this past year it has increased to about once every 2 weeks- a month. In the past I would scream "spider"-waking my husband in a panic and ripping all the covers off of the bed but now I just point to the spider and try to show him that it is there and it runs away and slowly fades away.
In the past, terrorizing apparitions of things that go bump in the night were accredited to visitations of the "night incubus:" spirits and devils. Science has been able to relate the experiences — ranging from senses of smell, taste, hearing and sight — to neurophysiological changes that occur within human sleep.
The two terms, hypnopompic and hypnagogic, refer to the onset of the experience within the the sleep cycle, the latter term representing the vast majority of reported cases accredited to sleep related hallucinations which surface in the immediate stages of sleep.
With up to 38% of participants in past studies having felt 'the fear' of hypnopompic hallucinations, they are not only commonplace, but also very much a mystery. Contributing factors of this condition have placed emphasis on sleep paralysis, hypnic-jerks, narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and stress.
I think it's time I get a sleep test.
