Thread: movie screen eyelids

It's Hypnagogic imagery. And yes, it is a "stage" between wakefulness and dreaming. Well one of many possible hypnagogic hallucinations (there are also auditory, tactile...). It happens to me as well. But there are different types and they change depending on my awareness or how tired I am. I can also recognise if it's a result of something I've been doing for a long time before going to sleep. Like playing a game, then I see the characters moving around... it's all very interesting.

Originally Posted by abruptum

ok so i have a question...

so like, this happens quite often to me. sometimes when im a little tired and laying down, ill see things behind my eyelids, like really random things. for example i see trees growing fast, penguins walking around, various cartoon characters, and it feels vaguely like my eyes are open. ok whatever that happens everynight...

now sometimes, usually in the middle of the day after i get off a class and i go home really quick to eat, i go to take a nap cause i get really tired, and after seeing those images but not falling asleep, the back of my eyelids will just become like amovie screen, and my whole vision is just like i am somewhere and i feel kinda like my eyes are open, but i can still feel my body and i dont think i underwent sleep paralysis.

only once or twice have i been able to walk out of my body into the image i had seen, which are usually in random places. so i dont understand, because i think that is another stage between dreaming, but am i WILDing? i dont understand if its adream or what?

has this happened to anybody before???

Yup, this are just hypnagogic images, and Bonsay is absolutely correct. Sounds like you're using the HIT technique to WILD. You don't have to be in sleep paralysis to WILD or lucid dream. The HIT technique in particular simply focuses on hypnagogia until a dream forms. No SP whatsoever.

Once I have been playing tetris for hours before sleep, and when I closed my eyes, I always saw tetris blocks everywhere, and sometimes I even caught myself playing the game "full-auto mode", without any attention paid to it, in my mind.

Well, I might as well make myself look like a newbie too and ask a question I had never thought about before- I thought you only got hypnagogia while you were undergoing sleep paralysis. How else would you get it?

Well don't call me crazy or anything, but I can pretty much get visual hallucinations in the first 30 seconds - minute after I just close my eyes. No need to be tired or laying down, just close my eyes. I sometimes do it if I'm bored and want to see some "subconscious creativity" (what else could be doing it; certainly not me). These same hallucinations intensify when I go to bed. They get bigger, more colourful, more animated and if I wait long enough they start engulfing the whole visual field until I get into a WILD. But that happened to me only a few times. I usually don't have the patience or courage to do it.

They used to freak me out though.

Well, sure. I get the pictures behind my eyelids. But they're not the same as hypnagogia, I think. I've never been able to produce hypnagogia. However, when I close my eyes, I always see the same pattern of events. A bunch of emerald green squares start forming until they make the top of a 3D pyramid, Mayan style. Then that starts to break apart and fade away. After that is blackness for a few seconds. Then I start going through a "field" of what looks like stars. They're different colors. Mostly white at first, then turning into blue and gold, along with other colors. After that disappears, I'll get a different image. Usually some kind of amorphous blob in any random color. For the most part, it's nondescript simple shapes after that. However, in one rare exception, something very weird happened. There was a blazing white background. Like nothing I had ever seen before. And then a black figure appeared, incredibly black. The contrast was so starch it was hard to keep looking. Then the figure turned around and looked at me, and got so dark it hurt my eyes. It took all of a half second to happen, and it startled me, so I jumped backwards.

Yeah, it's like that for me too. Only difference is that I don't get blobs, but very detailed images. For example a refrigerator turns into a car, then into a book and into a piece of paper which morphs into a tongue etc. They are the same as the hypngagogic ones when I go to bed, so the only thing that changes in the process is the intensity. I think there is a connection, if it isn't the same thing anyway.

That phenomenon is actually called The Tetris Effect

but what if the OP is talking about vivid movie scenes as if it were a dream?

I think I know what the OP is saying. I've had it happen a couple times in naps. Where I lay down and within only a couple minutes I can watch a movie scene that looks so vivid as if it were straight out of one of my dreams and I can watch it in third person and almost control the camera angle. Idk if this is anything like what you're describing OP let me know.

I had this happen once really vividly and I tried to do something in the dream and failed terribly.

Originally Posted by Shift

Yup, this are just hypnagogic images, and Bonsay is absolutely correct. Sounds like you're using the HIT technique to WILD. You don't have to be in sleep paralysis to WILD or lucid dream. The HIT technique in particular simply focuses on hypnagogia until a dream forms. No SP whatsoever.

Interesting technique the HIT method, I've tried it without much success, although I was able to imagine in my minds-eye what I wanted to see, but this never transpired into a proper visual image.

I've got a question though, and this is probably hard to answer as everyone's HI experiences aren't always the same, but, when someone sees something other than the regular swirling blobs in the blackness, like say an almost photographic outdoor scene, does this just make it a high quality HI or an actual dream image?

The reason I ask this is that I've had a few of those images lately where I've woken up at various times of the night and whilst laying there recalling my last dream I had, I'll get the swirling images for a while and then Bang! an instant image of a lady pushing her baby in a pushchair comes into view behind my eyes, but only for a second or two, and then it's back to the swirling stuff again.
Last night was the same, I'm aware I've just woken from a dreamstate and I've just got blackness behind the eyes and then I see a road with a roadsign on the left which is totally readable at the time and is like your best LD high quality stuff, but disappears virtually as fast as it appears.

The thing that doesn't make sense to me is that I'm not trying to DEILD/WILD or VILD at that time but it just appears out of the blue ( or in my case, the black, lol )
I know you said that you don't have to have SP to WILD etc, but don't you mean you don't have to "Feel" SP? For me though, I was quite aware that I was essentially awake and could feel myself lying on my left side.

well, to tweak, sometimes it is as if i am watching a movie, and i pretty much have no controle over it. for example, the first time i had realized what was going on it looked as if i was in a car and it was really vivid. ive never seen my self in 3rd person view in this case, but sometimes it looks as if i am watching a movie in 1st person.

the thing thats strange is that i can still feel my body entirley though, and its when i kinda just "let go" that it inreases in vividity and i feel as though i am falling into a dream. like i said earlier, once i actually almost just walked in, and i kept falling in and out of control in terms of controlling my dream body.

Originally Posted by Elkfazer

Interesting technique the HIT method, I've tried it without much success, although I was able to imagine in my minds-eye what I wanted to see, but this never transpired into a proper visual image.

If you're actively visualizing, that's the VILD method, while the HIT method is passively viewing your hypnagogic imagery, which are produced all on their own.

Originally Posted by Elkfazer

I've got a question though, and this is probably hard to answer as everyone's HI experiences aren't always the same, but, when someone sees something other than the regular swirling blobs in the blackness, like say an almost photographic outdoor scene, does this just make it a high quality HI or an actual dream image?

Really, they're all hallucinations, and a dream is just a hallucination that occurs while you're asleep. Hypnagogic hallucinations occur as you're on the threshold of sleep, and as you enter sleep, they can transform into dreams. Generally, the photographs that you get are the HH, but if you learn to just let them happen, they can start to form a dream around you, making you more immersed in the hallucination itself until it forms a dream world around you. This is a very hazy subject and there's not a lot of research or cold hard facts that I've been able to find, I think of it more like a gradient than just black and white. In terms of HH that appear almost as photographs though, it's still just HH.

Originally Posted by Elkfazer

The reason I ask this is that I've had a few of those images lately where I've woken up at various times of the night and whilst laying there recalling my last dream I had, I'll get the swirling images for a while and then Bang! an instant image of a lady pushing her baby in a pushchair comes into view behind my eyes, but only for a second or two, and then it's back to the swirling stuff again.

Yup, that's that more photographic type stuff. I never get the swirling, abstract junk.

Originally Posted by Elkfazer

The thing that doesn't make sense to me is that I'm not trying to DEILD/WILD or VILD at that time but it just appears out of the blue ( or in my case, the black, lol )
I know you said that you don't have to have SP to WILD etc, but don't you mean you don't have to "Feel" SP? For me though, I was quite aware that I was essentially awake and could feel myself lying on my left side.

Hypnagogic hallucinations are going to occur in the majority of the population, they're just going to have a difficult time remembering it and remaining conscious enough to be aware of it fully. These are just those hallucinations as you're falling asleep.
Sleep paralysis is the paralysis of your body while awake. This is much more rare than HH. But, this bodily paralysis can also be accompanied by hypnagogic hallucinations (or in the case of post-dormital SP when you wake up in it, hypnopompic), so you end up with vibrations, visions, fear and other emotions, weird perception of your body shrinking or floating or whatever. You can end up in SP with no hallucinations whatsoever, and just find that when you try to move you can't. You can also have no SP whatsoever, and some people don't even get HH.

Originally Posted by Shift

Really, they're all hallucinations, and a dream is just a hallucination that occurs while you're asleep. Hypnagogic hallucinations occur as you're on the threshold of sleep, and as you enter sleep, they can transform into dreams. Generally, the photographs that you get are the HH, but if you learn to just let them happen, they can start to form a dream around you, making you more immersed in the hallucination itself until it forms a dream world around you. This is a very hazy subject and there's not a lot of research or cold hard facts that I've been able to find, I think of it more like a gradient than just black and white. In terms of HH that appear almost as photographs though, it's still just HH.

Thanks very much for your input Shift, I appreciate your time in answering some of my points.You're right of course that any image we see whilst trying to sleep is going to be some sort of HH, I was just trying to find out if one type of quality of HH is better than another for dream forming. It would be neat if I could use the photographic type to step into a dream, even though they are very random and very fleeting when I notice them.

I might re-read some of the HIT techs for more info as I haven't read them for a while now.