Hey Tom, welcome to DV :) There are a number of things that this could have been, I'll try to address the possibilities, and in the end it's really up to determine what fits best :)
Typically such experiences are just hypnagogic hallucinations, dreamlike little bit and blurbs you get during early sleep as you are dosing off, and which are very common. Simple HH are typically visual and auditory, but not always.
This is where it gets a little muddy. HH is usually not consistently stable in such a manner, and I'm not sure I've ever heard of HH actually involving the sleeper in this manner, instead it usually occurs as brief flashes of images or sounds and concepts that the sleeper has trouble focusing on. It sounds like you may have passed into a dream, or even fallen asleep and had a false awakening. Another possibility is that you were in
sleep paralysis, and these were accompanying hallucinations. One bit of evidence in that direction would be, you said that you felt very uncomfortable and that these hands were consistently interacting with you... did you feel that there was a 'being' who possessed the hands? A 'sensed presence' is fairly typical of sleep paralysis, and can cause the sleeper to become very afraid even though it's all just hallucinations.
In the case that it was all HH, it's entirely possible that the HH simply continued, or that if it was in fact an actual dream, that when you woke yourself up you experienced hypnopompic hallucinations.... hypnagogic hallucinations but
after sleep, or that it was the sleep paralysis if that's what it was. Did you have any trouble moving your body at all? Did you feel any other sensations? One hallucination that is very common with sleep paralysis (though not always present) is the perception (though not actual presence) of vibrations, usually described as "it felt like I was being electrocuted" or "there were volts running through my body".
Anyway like I said, it's hard for someone else to be sure when your body was not being monitored and when a self-report is all you've got to go on. If you've got any questions or if you think any of these sound more likely than the others, let us know and we'll try to see if we can explain a bit more about what may have been going on.
Basically though, these are very simple, natural phenomenon that are completely normal, so you have nothing at all to worry about. Most people just fall asleep (mentally) before such points, an exception being lucid dreamers who attempt to keep their minds awake as their body falls asleep so that they can consciously enter a dream. If it ever happens again, just remember that you can go that route, or if you just want it to end to remember that it is perfectly harmless and not to be afraid, but to just wait it out. If it is a dream, you can learn to do '
reality checks' which are tests to see if you are dreaming or still awake.
