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Posted: 09-09-2003 13:19 Post subject: CLASSIC ARCHIVE MERGED: A Spikey Thing

Simon Fuller, Sydney, Australia

A couple of nights ago (15- Cool

I was in bed when I noticed my baby son (who often sleeps between us) sitting up and doing something odd. I looked at him, and as I did so I noticed a very strange thing floating away from him.

The thing looked like a collection of spikes, the same kind of shape as knitting needles, but thinner. There were six spikes about 6-8 cm long, all joined at one end at a central point, so that they were radiating out at right angles to each other.Then there were smaller, thinner spikes also radiating out between the larger ones. Imagine a three-dimensional asterisk, that's about the best description I can come up with. The spikes were coloured in thick bands of black and a dark creamy white.

This thing floated in a fairly straight line, though it was bobbing slightly as if it was being lifted on a fishing wire or floating like a soap bubble caught by a breeze. I sat up, announcing quite loudly, "What the hell is that?" I watched it as I reached for the light switch; it was travelling at a steady pace toward the corner of the ceiling and the roof above the bedroom door. As the light came on, it vanished. I spent a while looking for it, but there was no sign. It took a while to get back to sleep, I was a bit unnerved but not really scared.

I realised later that I'd been sleeping, though I didn't know it at the time. I can't remember exactly what the strange thing was that my son was doing. He was actually asleep, so I definitely dreamed that part, unless you consider astral travel or something. It would be easy to dismiss this as a dream that overlapped into my waking, but why on earth would I dream of a small, spiny, floating thing? It was completely unlike anything I know, as you can tell by my attempts at explaining it. As far as I can remember, I don’t normally dream of flying, abstract shapes. That it persisted until the moment I turned on the light was also a bit strange.

There is a ceiling fan above the bed, which is cross-shaped, but it is completely the wrong shape, size, and colour, and was in the wrong spot even before it floated away. I’m about 90% sure it wasn’t that, and there’s nothing else I could have seen and misinterpreted.

One last note, we’ve recently moved house and my wife says she keeps seeing small, dark shapes scurrying like mice, out of the corner of her eye (I mentioned this in another thread).

Posted: 11-09-2003 15:58 Post subject: Weird night visions

This reminded me of a few incidents I have experienced whilst being half asleep. The part-sleeping mind can play very convincing tricks on you, and quite often I will 'see' something in the room with me.
Take for example, one night when I woke up lying on my back, staring straight up at the ceiling. I 'hallucinated' that there were hundreds of crane flies (or daddy-long-legs) swarming over the ceiling of the room. Understandibly perturbed, i leapt out of bed and switched on the light, only to find that there was nothing there.
Another time, I 'dreamt' that there were hundreds of spiders crawling over my bed, and when i finally became fully conscious, I was sat straight up in bed and had been frantically swiping at the bedsheets for about 10 minutes.

Although these examples are slightly different to the above, I think it demonstrates how convincingly your mind can project very real-looking hallucinations when half asleep. A spiny object such as the one you talk about, seems like it could quite easily be the product of such a hallucination, particularly as the symmetrical nature of the object lends itself well to being a trick of the eye ( think about looking at a bright light with squinted eyes, and how it turns into a spiky shape).

Posted: 12-09-2003 05:17 Post subject:

Another time, I 'dreamt' that there were hundreds of spiders crawling over my bed, and when i finally became fully conscious, I was sat straight up in bed and had been frantically swiping at the bedsheets for about 10 minutes.

I've had that exact same experience, only a few weeks ago. The bed was swarming with spiders who were marching in diagonal lines accross the bed, I LEAPED out of of bed and started pounding it trying to get rid of them, pleading with my girlfriend to get out of bed because there were spiders EVERYWHERE.

I took some convincing apparently that there were indeed no spiders. Smile

It can be quite distrubing I imagine to someone who's sharing your bed as well, I have a habit of this sort of behaviour and one night a few years ago, I alledgedly leaped out of bed, ran to the window, screamed "THE ALIENS ARE HERE!!", got back into bed and fell into a deep sleep.
Leaving my girlfriend wide awake, with her heart pounding a mile a minute and peaking through the curtains.

Im yet to live that one down. Very Happy

Posted: 12-09-2003 20:59 Post subject: Spiders

I used to work in a call centre on some evil shift pattern, the worst one we called the spider shift as by the end of it you'd have had so little sleep and been awake so long you would see scurrying things out of the corners of your eyes, only when you tried to look at them would they dissappear. People I've known who work night shifts also experience similar things.

I still get it now and again if I have prolonged periods of not getting enough sleep, but never used to before working the spider shift. Another effect that has lasted from those evil shift patterns is my brain turning hiss on videos, poor tv reception etc into music being palyed backwards.

I think it's great how the brain takes its own slant on things, kept me amused for may hours while on the spider shift.

Posted: 01-01-2004 00:30 Post subject:

All right, I saw one. At the same time I was seeing this. Only I would see the girl spirit at night and the spiky thing in the morning.

http://forteantimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10715

I was able to move away and not see it again. It seemed to have personality. I thought it looked like a cross between a spider and one of those electric static globes you put your hand on to activate. It would rotate, which made me think of a spider spinning its web. It seemed kind of jolly and excited to be there. I didn't want to share this right away along with repeat visits from the female spirit because it all seemed so crazy. If it was just a hallucination, why didn't I still see it after I moved?

When I first read his story, I was excited because no one else has described anything like it. But then he said it was just a dream. roll eyes (sarcastic)

Edit: Yes, I was seeing it on waking which means "hypnogogic hallucination" and it would disappear when I jumped up or expressed any shock or even turned my back on it in annoyance.

Posted: 04-11-2005 06:09 Post subject: A Spikey Thing

I have seen something extremely similar. This was when I was about 20 years old. I am now 34.

I had been sleeping, and I woke up and there was this ball shaped object made out of spikey things and it was moving about my bedroom. I was so scared. I finally jumped out of bed and turned on the light but there was nothing there anymore. I tried putting off going to bed for as long as I could for about a week after. I saw it again about 1 - 2 weeks later. Same thing again, but I was not so scared.

I spoke of this to my boyfriend's friend shortly after and he was very surprised saying that his mother has seen something a few times which sounds like it could be the same. The interesting thing is that we had visited her place prior to me seeing anything. I have always wondered if it had followed me home.

Since I saw this spikey object, I have been seeing what you would call hypnopompic images (although I did not know it was called this at the time). I have thought that it too was a hypnopompic hallucination.

Now that I read that someone else has seen something very similar, it makes me wonder. That is potentially 3 people seeing the same thing. I wonder if anyone else has.

I too am from Australia. Is this a coincidence? What has been floating around the bedrooms of Australian citizens? What is its purpose or is it just 3 people having the same hallucination?

Interesting.

Posted: 04-11-2005 12:16 Post subject:

I used to have the spider experience quite often - leaping up out of bed shrieking, swearing blind that I'd seen one (yeah right, with my eyes closed, in the dark), and totally ruining the sleep patterns of my poor boyfriend. My mother used to have them too (luminous green spiders, those were) - and I just assumed that we were both seeing spiders because we both have a bit of a phobia about them (well, I have quite a big phobia). But reading these accounts of 'spiky' things - maybe our brains are wired in such a way as we see things with sticky out bits: you might interpret it as spiky, but I would see a longlegged spider (and someone else has seen daddylonglegs). Veery interesting.

Posted: 04-11-2005 14:30 Post subject: Re: Weird night visions

Posted: 04-11-2005 16:28 Post subject:

Also another data point for this thread? Light switches in dreams?

Posted: 04-11-2005 20:46 Post subject:

I don't know if I understood the description of the first spiky thing correctly, but 'six spikes at right angles to each other' sounded amazingly like the x, y and z axes of my colleague's 3-Dimensional technical drawing program at work. I think they help him rotate the object he has drawn in 3D. I wonder if we have some sort of axes to help us see the world and if you in a strange non-awake state, you accidentally see some of the drawing aids ... um, click one of the buttons on the screen and it should disappear again ...

Posted: 05-11-2005 13:29 Post subject:

I often see spiders descending from the ceiling toward my bed while half-asleep, whereupon I roll out of bed, turn on the lamp and look frantically about... to find nothing. I have insomnia so going from nearly-asleep to wide awake is pretty annoying. The worst part is that one time (the most recent one, even) it turned out that there WAS a spider descending directly twoard my head from the ceiling, so I can't just dismiss and ignore it. Bleh. Sounds like this is a pretty common phenomenon, though I doubt it's related to the original post.

Posted: 05-11-2005 13:51 Post subject:

Prhaps they were Nematodes?

Posted: 05-11-2005 15:28 Post subject: a spikey thing

A parasite? That's a horrible thought.

I often see dark shapes moving about the room as I open my eyes, but of course it is not there when I turn on the light. The funny thing is the objects that I see, are things I have never seen before, like twisted bits of metal floating in front of my face, a huge bunch of sticks with twine around it, an object shaped like a piece of bread with metal chips or something coated over it, blobs, people, shadows, cats. It just does not seem dream like. I am definately awake when I see them. It is like a very detailed afterimage in 3D and then it disintergrates.

Posted: 07-11-2005 11:33 Post subject:

Like most people, I often find myself seeing shapes in clothing hanging in my room etc. but my favourite story is that of a school friend who one day took a shock from a lab transformer pack during a physics lesson.

He came wandering down the tuck shop we ran and spent the rest of the afternoon in the storeroom sitting on a stack of fizzy drinks twitching his head. I asked if he was ok and he said he was seeing white rabbits in the corners of his vision. Laughing

After a quiet sit down for a couple of hours he was fine - but clearly these things can be induced fairly easily.

Posted: 07-11-2005 22:37 Post subject:

You must have seen the famous Odradek as described by Franz Kafka:

[...] One is tempted to believe that the creature once had some sort of intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant. Yet this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no sign of it; nowhere is there an unfinished or unbroken surface to suggest anything of the kind; the whole thing looks senseless enough, but in its own way perfectly finished.

In any case, closer scrutiny is impossible, since Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and can never be laid hold of. He lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall. Often for months on end he is not to be seen; then he has presumably moved into other houses; but he always comes faithfully back to our house again.

Many a time when you go out of the door and he happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, you put no difficult questions to him, you treat him-he is so diminutive that you cannot help it-rather like a child. "Well, what's your name?" you ask him. "Odradek," he says. [...]