Intro: Have clinical depression. On meds since 1995. Recently I started seeing a Psychologist who is both more helpful and alot more interesting than my Psychiatrist. Don't worry. Not suicidal, yet. Recently I started been "hearing things" while awake and concluding that it was something semi-normal like my wife coming home or my wife crying, but nobody is there. So, I was primed when this happened.

I was alone on my boat trying to go to sleep. From the beginning I had this loud engine sound running in my head. At first I thought my AC unit (under the bed) was on its last legs, but it got too loud , and listening to details I concluded that it was some other type of engine. I tried to ignore it and African drums joined in the rhythm with growing complexity and layers of percusion. I finally decided to investigate outside and see what this noise was. Before I reached the door I already knew it was inside my head because I was moving and the sound wasnt changing. Suddenly, I heard a loud whisper, clear as a bell, say "Help me". There was nobody around and no noise outside. I eventually went to sleep accompanied by an engine and an impressive array of African rhythm instruments.

This was enormously upsetting. I beleived that I had just had my first halucination since giving up drugs 30 years ago.

I ask my Psychologist to verify that at 50+ you can't develop Schizophrenia. Odds are strongly against it. He said the daytime experience was just my subconcious connecting noises with some reference point that my brain understood....my wife and I live alone, so its a natural association. This last event though he said was a hypnagogic event, which means that I had a "waking dream". If you google Hypnagogic you get 12 references to Startrek and one to this forum.

Now, I am remembering how I was a frequent sleep walker when I was child and early teen. Scared my mother to death. I'd sit and talk to her but she says I was always a much younger incarnation of myself, including my voice and vocabulary. NOw I remember my girl friend in college, now wife, complaining that when I was exhausted late at night I seemed to lose a solid grip on reality and slip in and out of some dream state.

So, does any of this hit home with any of you.

Maybe this is not the right forum, but I really didn't want to start with the trekies.

Maybe there is a scary story forum someplace.