Did I hallucinate?

Something kind of weird happened to me last night. I was taking a nap around 6 PM after running on very little sleep for more than a day. I literally lay down and crashed. (It usually takes me a while to get to sleep)

I had set the alarm on my phone to wake me up two hours later because I didn't want to go to sleep that early (and wake up in the middle of the night), just nap.

So it rang and I turned it off and I looked across the room where my dresser is (my head felt really heavy and I still felt groggy) and I saw these shapes like indented into my wall (circles, ovals, really abstract sort of things with no color, but that are certainly not there normally). It surprised me, but when I'm groggy like that I just sort of accept things or forget about them. I blinked and I saw them again.

I remember having a rational reason for it, or it seemed rational at the time, but I can't remember exactly what it was. Something like my eyes were playing tricks, or I was seeing reflections of things (you know how when you look at something in bright light and close your eyes or turn to a blank wall and the imprint will show up?)

I don't think I was dreaming because I got out of bed right after that and sort of forgot about it. I wasn't on any drugs at the time, just really fucking tired.

It's so weird, because I kind of just accepted it as normal at the time, but I can't think of a rational reason now why I would have seen that. It could just be that my memory is bad because I was (and still am) running on hardly any sleep.

I've never hallucinated before, at least not that I'm aware.

Any ideas or comments?

 

i think you were just extremely tired and after waking up and still being tired and out of it, you just seen those things on the wall.

 

Sounds like lucid dreaming.

You're awake enough to be aware, but still in the dreamworld where physical law doesn't matter. Neither does time or space.

The semi-awake perceptions you have will be under the influence of this and will not be processed "normally" by the brain. Whatever you remember will seem odd now that you're fully awake.


x

 

Naw, I lucid dream all the time. This definitely wasn't it. I was awake, for sure. I mean, unless you can lucid dream while being half-awake? Is that what you're saying?

 

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


x

 

Dude, I know what a lucid dream is. I get them all the time. I've been doing it for years. I was awake. My phone rang, I turned it off, looked at the wall, and climbed out of bed.

 

People hallucinate sometimes when they are sleep deprived

 

^ That's what I thought. ^

Anyway, thanks for all the answers to my dumb, retarded post.

 

Yeah definetly sleep deprivation. I had a similar thing happen to me once too. I was working a midnight shift at a Sobies stocking shelves and I had been awake for at least 24 hours. When I noticed a jar of "spider butter" (that's what the label actually said to me, and I totally accepted it, I was like those health nuts are crazy! And the jar was completely full of spiders. Then I blinked and relized it said "nut butter" and it had chunky pieced of peanuts in it, not spiders. I also kept seeing thing out of the corners of my eyes as well as people talking to me. So yeah you just had huge sleep deprevation, you weren't having a lucid dream.

 

Wow, that's crazy!

 

I read the journal of some guy who stayed up for like 4 days and he saw some crazy, crazy shit.

 

ever done shrooms or acid... you might have been having a flashback... and while you sleep the drug dmt flows throughout your brain and dmt makes you trip hard... its the strongest psychedelic known to man... you just never remember your trips while your asleep and when you take dmt while your awake you remember your trip kinda like a dream... its all clear right when your out of it but after a few minutes you hardly remember anything at all about it...

 

How do we know that "hallucinations" don't entail some element of reality not ordinarily perceived? Interesting at any rate.

Smitty your post reminds me of when I was working 2 jobs and watching my young son during the day and really not sleeping much at all. Someone in a writing group that I was in had lent me a book called *A Father's Story*, Jeffery Dahmer's dad, Lionel's, account of his son's childhood. It included photos and you could see this progression, even in the pictures alone, of Jeffery Dahmer's descent. The effect of it for me was actually heart-breaking in terms of seeing a person slip away into what he became.

I remember stocking a shelf at about 3 a.m. in a convenience store and seeing from the corner of my eye as a man dressed in black walked past me in the otherwise empty store. So I realized that I had a customer. When I straightened up the place was empty.

Later that morning after getting home from work I glanced at that book on top of my stereo and had this matter-of-fact realization that I had company staying with me. Then I did a double take and wondered what the hell I meant with that?! Another odd aside to this. I was separated from my son's mom at the time. I had made note of the name of a town in Jeffery's childhood in the book: Bath, Ohio, and how it made me think of "blood bath," which I mentioned to my son's mom.

She brought a letter to me a few days later that had arrived at her address somehow by mistake although it was addressed to me. It had my deceased father's name on the sender address. When she told me to look at where it was from I threw the envelope across the room as it was from Bath, Ohio. It turned out to be a scam about researching your family tree, but it was kind of freaky nonetheless.