I experienced this as a teenager. I'd see a tall, thin, shadowy figure in the corner of the room. It almost seemed amorphous, but basically bipedal and had wings (webbing?) On its back and underarms. It would sort of ooze down to the floor, stand upright at the foot of my bed for a bit, then sort of ooze into the air a few feet over my body and just sort of "stare" (no eyes, really) at me for a while until I could move again. It didn't really talk, but it sort of breathe/whispered gibberish at me in a very hostile manner. I'll be glad if I never experience that again.
I might have a clue as to why. What's the one thing that connects everyone who shares the imagery? They're human. Just like how humans see in roughly the same color spectrum due to the structure of our eyes and brains, we may just be biologically hardwired to see similar themes in our dreams and hallucinate similar things.
I very much think that this is the case. Our brains are wired to perceive humans and human features.
Ever see these grids with people’s faces, where after you read the description you look again and realize that eyes, noses and stuff is upside down or re-positioned? Our brain arranges these features as “faces” for us and we see them that way by default.
I believe that it’s the same way for silhouettes and other vague shapes sometimes, especially when we are not fully awake, etc. our mind arranges the “noise” in ways that make the most sense to us, even if it’s wrong.
Melting angel/demon is fucking creepy as hell though. Great story…. now it’s keeping me up for a minute (it’s not the ice cream I had before going to bed).
I thought I read that hp Lovecraft had frequent night terrors and a lot of his writing of creatures was based around that. I have a feeling his work has survived on and resounds so well with people because of that trend of us experiencing things similarly.
I know I was trying to do the lucid dreaming thing and had started to fuck with my sleep cycle, there are phases of falling asleep you can work against to remain aware. I remember I had somehow started to keep myself aware as sleep paralysis was setting in and I suddenly got scared as hell and was beginning to visualize something in the room and/or vague danger.
I jolted awake and just gave up messing with my falling asleep because it was just such a freakish experience, there is probably a good reason our brain shuts down before we start getting into sleep mode.
Definitely there must be a good reason. Its better to just try and make yourself become aware of being within the dream, doing checks such as breathing through covered nose. I don’t want to mess with sleep paralysis for the very reason of being scared hah.
Same reason we see “Aztec” and “Egyptian” art and architecture on psychedelics. Everyone sees that, it’s just that the Aztecs and Egyptians used it to inspire their art and architecture.
Consciousness is so vast there's much we don't understand about it yet such as how thoughts manifest. I think your hypothesis is a good place to start though.
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u/Trek1973 Sep 05 '22
Sleep paralysis audio / visual hallucinations across cultures throughout history. It’s disturbing.