Now that I'm living alone, I hear strange sounds in the house like cracking and a dog barking. I jump out of bed and turn on the outside lights and I have never seen anything outside so I go back to bed.

I do believe it's our faulty brains that are responsible for so many things we think we see, hear, etc.

Think about deja vu, for instance, and there are conditions that cause people not to recognize people, places and things that were formerly familiar - even their own limbs sometimes.

I understand that our dreams are occuring in the moments just before we wake up - and that we wake multiple times over the course of sleeping, more than we might think, we just don't remember it happening.

I can't count how many times I've been awakened by the sound of someone saying my name - or saying 'mom', or a loud slam - and finding nothing.

I think too, that sometimes very small sounds can seem amplified by our minds when we're asleep.

With the shade it could go either way. Our brains are perfectly capable of transitioning the sound. DH is frequently sure I called his name and occasionally I will hear him say my name as I wake. I used to wake frequently to the sound of a heavy book dropping on the floor. Night noises. I check the cats. If they didn't hear it it didn't happen.

Oh, to have the dead and irresponsible sleep I enjoyed before becoming a mother! I can barely remember it now, fifty years later.

Even though they say you dream during REM sleep, I have recently confirmed my suspicion that I start getting dream images before I'm fully asleep. My dreams are so weird that I know they're not merely thoughts. It happens when I'm trying to get back to sleep at night, not when I first fall asleep. When it happens, I know I'm going to be able to get back to sleep after being awake for an hour or two.

Brain activity and the "perceptions" real and imagined it causes, both when awake and when sleeping, is one of the last frontiers in medical science. There are frequent "false positives" concerning things people thought they perceived that in fact weren't perceived at all, as a trite example.

I reject the possibility of anecdotal explanations of "it must have been this" or "this was a sign or a foretelling of that". As in the other thread I just commented in, people will believe and justify (at least to themselves) what they want to believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that that which they hold dear is unsupported or contrary to accepted facts. However limited they may be.

Interesting. Eileen, I can relate to what you say. If I've had a bad night sleeping...I'm talking about under 4 hours, I will try to do a 20 min yoga nidra the next day. I find it very restful and it really helps re-energize me. But in the process, I'm not asleep, but my brain will take me into a very weird dream-like state where I get the craziest thoughts and images as if I were dreaming, but I'm not. I wouldn't think I could be in REM sleep when I've only been at it for 10 min. Maybe next time I see DH's sleep dr, I'll ask him.

I have similar experiences as Eileen describes. I close my eyes and start seeing dreamlike imagery, and I know I'll get to sleep easily. It's a good feeling.

FWIW, I recall learning about micro-sleep, or something to that effect, where our brains sleep for just a few moments. I think that might be what's happening in those moments of free flowing visual imagery just before sleep.

Reminds me a bit of how, in my younger days, I'd start drifting off while driving on the highway late at night and immediately come to.

I am reading a really fascinating book called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It might be interesting for you to check out.

But your house has always had "happenings". Could it have been one of those?

Who knows?

Boo! ;-) .....personally I've had weird dreams too but never had a shade roll up on it's own much less roll up just as I wake up from a weird dream...and we have 3 shades in the bedroom windows. Has that shade rolled up on it's own before?

I had a weird experience before I went to bed last night. I was sitting in my chair watching tv and on the desk next to me I keep a Chapstick handy always close by and within eyesight on the desk. But last night I could not find it on the desk, I looked and looked, even looked on the floor and all around.

I finally gave up and went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Upon my return I sat down and glanced at the desk and there it was right there in front of my eyes just 12 inches away. It was as if someone put it there while I was in the kitchen but VgQn had already gone upstairs to bed. The chapstick was standing up on it's end and if it were there I would have knocked it over when previously searching for it. I chalked it up to a glitch in the matrix, any other possibility was not as comforting and I was not sleepy so it wasn't that.

ps, something else weird, not sure why my ID just popped up as vegkg??

Got it fixed now.......

Whoa - now that IS weird, vgkg!

Ghosts

in the machine

I was watching a show about hauntings yesterday, and one person on the show had a tool that measured energies in the room were unexplained but were natural earth energies that would show up in certain parts of the room and not others. I think that there are a lot of natural energies that we do not know a lot about, such as where they come from and why. We might have even more of these energies if the earth were not protected by the Van Allen Belt.

I used to have a Van Allen belt, which I bought at a store on Market Street in San Francisco called East Coast Girls. They sold mostly women's clothes, but I consider belts to be unisex. The belt was fairly wide and was made with clear plastic strips that enclosed some white felt with glitter, various kinds of sequins, miniature playing cards, etc.

You might try photographing your roller blinds in the day and at night and see if you can catch any stray energy surrounding them. Digital cameras are especially good at capturing this, and you might not realize this unless you know what to look for.

FWIW I believe those machines measuring energy are gauss meters measuring magnetic fields...?

I really don't think it's a ghostly thing. I just think the mechanism didn't lock solidly and eventually flipped up. I've not had that happen with the shade in my room before, but have with the bathroom shade.

I was more thinking about sleep/wakefulness and the sequence with which we perceive things vs. reality when we are in that twilight phase.

Ah-Ha, figured it out....that Vegkg log-in dated several years back to the time gardenweb was bought out and many of us had a hard time getting back in. At that time I created a new account to be able to post but within a week the old log-in was working again. Weird how that old one popped back up.....btw, my Chapstick has behaved itself for 48 hours ;-) but that episode was truly weird.