Nice to meet you dreamers... has anyone experienced hallucinations while in sleep.. please help

I've had a number of strange sleep/dream experiences throughout my life so have joined here to learn more. I'm not great at using forum sites so please be patient with me :-) I am not sure what some of the acronyms mean.

I started sleep walking as a child -never conscious through it and was only woken a few times. Fever tended to set this off. While I was sleep walking this is when I started having what felt like lucid dreams. I was always walking through a square type of tunnel that was quite dark and had what seemed like garden lights and daisy flowers on the floor edges of the tunnel. There was light at the end of the tunnel but I wouldn't call it a bright white light, there was also something dark on the other side, it seemed round and I was always too scared to come out of the tunnel so walked up and down it instead. I experienced a lot of vertigo at night in my childhood years also. All of this stopped around 12 years old.

Around 16 years old I started experiencing this on and off- I would go to sleep and within an hour I would what felt like a hallucination, definitely not a dream, I hallucinated in my bedroom that there were massive spiders above me and on my bed although I seemed to be in a sleep like state and until there was light in the room I couldn't see anything else. I had this on and off mostly in times of stress or illness. I just put it down to fear of spiders and stress at the time.

In the last year these hallucinations increased and changed from being spiders to anything possible, commonly ducks and geese (i live on a small hobby farm) but also the room and walls could change, once it actually turned to the frame of the house and there was a builder on top the roof putting his hand down to lift me out. I often yelled and moved around when this happened unaware of anything that was actually in normal reality. The only way I would wake from this was if my partner turned the light on, in some cases I turned on my lamp and a few times guided myself around the room to turn on the light switch, during these instances I had some awareness which is how I managed to turn on the lights to get out of it.

I have experienced lucid dreaming in the past 2 years on and off and know the difference between the hallucinations and lucid dreaming (at least i think). My first lucid dream happened in the first night of moving to a new town in 2010. I dreamt that I was sleeping and a man came into the room and put a tiger colored cat on the bed as a gift. In the dream I woke to the cats warmth and love and I caught a glimpse of this man watching over me. I jumped up and tried to ask him what he was there for and he said that I wasn't meant to see him and he could not speak to me, he left as quickly as he came. He didn't tell me anything but left an incredibly warming feeling. I left the room looking for him then to actually wake up.

I have had numerous lucid dreams after this, a lot involving apocalypse type of scenarios, or changing between worlds/realities, time travel, meeting different types of friendly aliens and most recently telekinesis that I am becoming more powerful on each dream.

I seen a sleep specialist 3 months ago and had a sleep study done as I went through a stressful situation and went weeks on end having the hallucination scenario and very little sleep. The study come back as normal, he mentioned that I was able to go to sleep very very quickly but just categorized what I had as parasleep which means unexplainable sleep. He prescribed a small dose of Clonazepam which is commonly used to prevent seizures in epileptic people but for me was to reduce the electrical activity in my brain. I have not had one hallucination since but have still regularly been able to lucid dream. I am uncomfortable taking this medication and will be reviewed in a few months and may be able to reduce and hopefully come off it.

I would love to hear other peoples views or similar experiences and look forward to posting my lucid dreams in the forums soon.

Love JoJo

Hi Jojo, welcome to DV!

I am nowhere near a sleep expert, and I honestly don't know much about the technical side of sleep and dreams but you mentioned that they told you you could go to sleep very quickly. Does this mean you can quickly go into REM phase? From what I know, REM is the deepest phase of sleep where most dreams and lucid dreams take place. If you have the ability to get into that quickly, then it would make sense (to me) that you would also get the hallucinations quickly. Actually, they might not be hallucinations as much as they are dreams already, from what it looks like. Perhaps the reason why they are very vivid is that you are already in a fairly deep state of sleep quickly so the dreams come quicker, and since you were just previously awake, you retain that waking awareness once you start dreaming.

There is a method of getting into a lucid dream called WILD or Wake-Induced Lucid Dream. The main difference between WILD and DILD (Dream-Induced Lucid Dream) is that in DILD, you fall asleep normally and get lucid from within the dream. Whereas in WILD, you are awake, and as your body starts falling asleep, you retain mental wakefulness so you start dreaming and know you are dreaming without drifting into unconsciousness in between. Your ability seems like it would be a very very big advantage with WILDing, you might want to check it out: WILD Oh and to help familiarize with the acronyms: http://www.dreamviews.com/introducti...beginners.html

This is just from my perspective, so I could be wrong. Next time, when you start to go to sleep, try paying attention to the hallucinations as they start and try to control them. You can influence them with your own imagination, and perhaps they'll change to what you force them to be. Do not be afraid of putting yourself in danger, as they are all in your mind and you are very safe even if you feel like you're not (which is very common). One other thing you might like to try is to practice visualization, this can really help with adjusting to or controlling the imagery you get as you fall asleep. http://www.dreamviews.com/dream-yoga...-training.html You can use those hallucinations to your advantage!

Sorry for the hefty reply! I hope it helps and good luck~