Last night I awoke at some unearthly hour to see a large python sinuously coil itself over my leg. I sat upright in bed, barely able to speak other than to croak in a terrified squeak "Snake!". Jan woke up at this point too, and said something like "Oh god, not again" and went downstairs to sleep on the sofa.
Of course, there wasn't really a snake there. I had been having a very lucid (and probably freudian) dream after watching Predator on dvd (and the last 20 minutes again on tv), woken up and in my sleep befuddled, short sighted daze interpreted the pattern of brown and cream circles on the blanket at the end of the bed as some sort of scaly creature seeking to crush me where I lay. I've had these sort of dreams before. I am very short sighted and when I wake up there is a brief moment where my brain struggles to make sense of the visual jumble that my eyes are feeding it.
I can vividly remember waking up one Christmas Eve as a child to see Santa Claus standing by my door. I was terrified, partly by the prospect of a stranger in my room but mostly by the thought that if he realized I was awake I wouldn't get any presents. I lay quietly for what seemed an eternity, hardly daring to breath, until the dawn light started to filter into the room and suddenly the patterns of light and shade shifted and I realized that the cloaked figure was actually my dressing gown hanging on the door handle.
In my old house there was the time that I awoke to see a doorway to a parallel dimension opening in the wall at the foot of my bed. I could just see an outline of the door as brilliant, blinding light spilled through the crack. I fumbled for my glasses as the door snapped shut and I put the bedside light on. My heart was racing and I felt as if I had witnessed some sort of genuine paranormal revelation. It took me a while to figure out that the mirror on the wall must have caught the reflection of the 500 watt halogen security light on the house opposite that had filtered through a gap in the curtains.
Oh, and we won't mention the incident of the tentacles on the ceiling or the mechanical butterflies on the duvet.
Maybe this is a common phenomenon that might explain why some people are convinced that they have seen ghosts and the like. The expression "I couldn't believe my eyes" has some truth behind it. Our brains do an awful lot of processing of the raw visual signals that get sent along the optic nerve before we actually see an image and interpret it. Optical illusions prove how easy it is to trick us into seeing something that is not actually there - coupled with a dream fugue or (as with ghost spotters and ufo hunters) a propensity to want to see something gives rise to the most convincing illusions.
Either that, or I'm going mental.
Monday, October 25, 2004
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I saw a programme on it years ago - it's called the 'Old Hag' syndrome or something - where people wake up convinced someone is sitting on their chest. It's actually caused because our bodies become paralysed when we are in a certain dream state (so we don't hurt ourselves) and yet occasionally our brains wake up too quick - but we are still paralysed, which is why it feels like there's something on us and we can't move. Anyway, it was terribly interesting. Happened to me once and scared the life out of me. But having bad eyesight doesn't help. I used to be convinced there was an eye on my wall watching me as a kid. Took me years to work out it was a poster I had on the wall and in the dark I could only see the white parts fo the poster.
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