Sleepwalking, Hallucinations and Night Terrors

April 19, 2025

Talking about this is a little embarrassing, because it’s easy to think “He’s crazy.”, but a lot of people deal with these things, so who cares, right? I actually find this stuff really interesting about myself, so I figured I’d share my experiences.

Sleepwalking

The earliest I remember sleepwalking, or at least being told I slept walked was when I was around 7 or 8, I apparently walked around kinda like a zombie asking “Where is it?”, until my parents sent me back to bed. I found it very strange at the time, I had never heard of sleepwalking and the idea of my body doing stuff without my control was a crazy concept. It never really happened often after that, until my mid 20s when I was in a shitty relationship. Me and my ex were on holiday in some hotel, I sleptwalked out of my bed and into the corridor, waking up as the door locked itself behind me. Yep, I was pretty much naked apart from boxers LOL so I had to knock on the door to get back in.

Hypnagogic Hallucinations

Dark Figures

In my teenage years, when the world began getting more stressful and I was going through puberty, something odd started happening. I began seeing dark figures in my room, standing watching me or hiding in the corner. The thing is, the sight of these things never scared me, in fact my subconscious response was to always fight them off for some reason LOL… I’ve leapt out of bed many times while asleep and tried to chase them only for them to go behind a wardrobe or just vanish through a wall. One time I even tried to punch one as hard as I could, and I ended up breaking the skin of my knuckle on my wardrobe before falling right back asleep. Seeing dark figures has just been a normal thing for me ever since, it doesn’t happen a lot but it’s also not infrequent either.

Repeating Rooms

Another REALLY weird thing I see regularly, much more regularly than the dark figures is… almost a wireframe sort of 4D perspective of my surroundings with me at the centre sleeping, kind of like an out of body experience. I’ll literally see the same room I’m in with transparent walls, duplicated infinitely in every direction. It’s the weirdest thing ever and I have absolutely no idea what is going on when I experience that. I don’t really talk about this a lot because it’s so difficult to explain. Best I can find online is pictures like this, but they still look nothing like I see.

Night Terrors

The worst thing I experience semi regularly is night terrors, good god they’re really not fun. I’ll be 100% calm, zen, chill before going to sleep and something inside me will activate a deep terror which makes me jolt out of bed in a panic with my heart pounding like thunder, often saying things like “What the fuck?”, “Nonono…” or “Watch out!” or something random like “It’s going to fall on us!” basically from what I can tell my brain is playing a simulation of where me or someone I care about is about to get hurt/trapped in some way. This is 100% linked to stress, like if I’ve had a bad day at work, or if I’m worried about something subconsciously, it’ll manifest in this way sometimes.

The weirdest thing about the night terrors though is how my subconscious totally takes over. For example, I’ll jolt up and look around in a panic, my wife will reassure me it’s okay but I answer her back perfectly clearly about this made up situation my brain has put me in. She’s told me on several occasions that she’s asked me math questions to check if I’m really awake and I answer them immediately, which I can tell you for a fact I cannot do awake LOL… I’m not the brightest when it comes to math.

Thankfully I’ve never harmed anyone while sleep walking/having a night terror, it’s definitely something where I put more focus on myself than anything else, or I’m trying to protect my partner from things that don’t exist.

Inspiration

As you can see above, there’s a lot of crazy shit. I’ve actually took a lot of inspiration from my night terrors, sleep walking and hallucinations for the little novel I’m writing, which I hope to release soon. It really fascinates me how our subconscious really takes over sometimes and can steer the wheel even when the “real you” isn’t even awake.