I get a bit easily scared...

Not so long ago, I was about to fall asleep, when I got the vision of me, sitting down in the living room, browsing the DreamViews forums. When suddenly a gray cat hopped onto the table, and it scared me so much, that I almost got a heart attack. Although it was a normal looking cat. Nothing scary. When I woke up, my heart was beating like 5-6 times a second, and I could hardly breathe.
I experience a lot of similar visions from time to time, when I'm near falling asleep. Sometimes I see scary faces, etc., but sometimes quite normal things, like a vision of a flower scares me too... Strange... :shock:
Edit: No wonder the sleep paralysis noises scare me so much... I'm a bit oversensitive I think o_O

There should be a term for events that create a jump but are completely non-threatening. Frights? They come from seeing something incongruent in a short period of time. The body instinctually kicks in the fight or flight response before the mind has a chance to understand and sort out the amount of threat or whether a threat is even plausible.

Whenever I'm immensely focused on something, be it in a dream or awake, the slightest noise or disturbance scares the crap out of me. So I know what you mean.

This sounds a lot like a hypnic jerk, which commonly occurs during the onset of sleep.