Dream/waking hallucinations, age 7

[Breakfastologist]

In a conversation about dreams that seem to persist into waking up the other evening, it transpired that my parents, my girlfriend and several other people we knew could all remember dreams where some element persisted into a kind of half-waking state where we could still see elements of the dream in the room, or at the least we knew they were there. What was particularly interesting to me was that it seemed to have happened very memorably at around the age of 7-8 in all our cases.

Has anyone else experienced similar? Is there any reason that anyone can think of it may happen at that age?

Funnily enough, the night after we had that conversation I had something similar happen for the first time in absolutely years.

 

[Anonymous]

well i think the growing brain radicly changes at about 3 to 4... and funnily enough my dad asked wether Harry (3 3/4) had nightmares as i had the most awful screeming wakeing nightmares at his age. my poor parents had to walk me in the cold night air for up to an hour to calm me down..eyes awake screeming... i seem to rememebr them being about, things being too big or swollen..like looking down at my hands and them being huge.... now harry has had a few nightmares, and he wakes up screming, eyes wide open. the last one was about Puppets, puppets that were alive and so many that they ocupied all the bed and when he steped on them they still moved.... perhapse the brain changes at 7 too?

 

[Bannik]

Has anyone else experienced similar?

Yes. They used to be quite dramatic (and traumatic ) when I was between about 4 and 6. I've actually learned to morph the images that "spill over" (I just love saying that ) into reality in order to make them less frightening.

Once a few years ago I even willed something into existence. I had no idea what to expect. It turned out to be a little creature that looked like a cross between a dragonfly and tinkerbell (not exactly a robed monk I know but it was my first try). It flew around the room without making any sound and more slowly than an actual dragonfly would.

I still get them (I'm in my mid-twenties) and they aren't necessarily connected to the dream I was having. Or, at least, if they are I don't remember the dream once I wake up, so the images just seem to come out of nowhere.

 

[Anonymous]

I vividly recall a dream I had when I was around 5 years old about a vampire/Ripper-like character inhabiting a foggy Victorian London which ended with me waking bolt-upright...and seeing the cloaked, top-hatted, pale-faced, gloating figure suspended and writhing in mid-air directly before me. Though memory fades after 25 years, I still strongly maintain that my eyes were wide-open yet the image from my dream was before my eyes, something that has not occured in any other nightmare that I have ever had. In a blink the figure disappeared and I got up and dashed to my parents room, letting out a scream like a steam whistle en route.

Amusingly, the source of this nightmare was a series of sketches by the English comedians The Two Ronnies entitled "The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town".

 

[Anonymous]

I couldn't get to sleep because of the Raspberry Blower! Can't really remember much about it, but must've been well scary

Its only recently I've started having dreams where I see things from the dream after I wake up (I'm 26, it started about a year ago). I usually dream someone is in the room trying to carry me off for some nefarious purpose by wrapping me in the bedsheets and dragging me away. When I wake up there is usually a palpable sense of someone in the room, sometimes I see someone and I can always feel myself being dragged, even though (presumably) I'm not moving. It only lasts a few seconds but its very scary while it lasts.

The other night I had a different one in which a savage dog the size of my bed was in the room. I saw the dog after I woke up - again just for a few seconds and again very scary.

Has anyone else started having dreams like this as an adult, having not experienced them in childhood?

 

[Anonymous]

i know someone who has nightmares when fully awake!!!!! not often but since he was a child... stark stairing terror, white knuckles the lot...very strangely about imposible amounts or quateties of things.. like a ten ton ball of walpaper on the stairs or ten thousand stacking chairs in the corner of the room.