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Rational explanations for shadow people, please...

D

_Danforth_

Junior Acolyte
Joined
Mar 2, 2005
Messages
86
...because I've started seeing them in my house.

Basically I am a teensy bit strung out at the moment and I've started seeing black or dark-grey silhouettes out the corner of my eyes and/or in mirrors around my house. It's happened four times - three have been humanoid and one has been a spider thing.

I don't think I'm seeing creatures; I think I'm hallucinating or seeing paraeidoliac effects in groups of everyday light and shade. Anyone got a good resource where I can read up on what might cause the effects? I know getting more sleep would be a good one...
 
Yes, sleep is excellent but a council of perfection :)

And strung out isn't a good feeling either, sympathies. Here is a very rational and brief explanation - our mind is filling in the gaps and trying to interpret things. For evolutionary reasons that goes straight into your brain for you to be aware of it, and the "common sense filter thingies" (to use a technical phrase!) catches up after a tiny fraction of a second.

But that very slight delay is what makes it so unnerving as an effect I think.

You might also get your eyes checked - which is a good idea anyway but it would put your mind at ease on that score. Or get it dealt with of course.
 
_Danforth_ said:
...because I've started seeing them in my house.

Basically I am a teensy bit strung out at the moment and I've started seeing black or dark-grey silhouettes out the corner of my eyes and/or in mirrors around my house. It's happened four times - three have been humanoid and one has been a spider thing.

I don't think I'm seeing creatures; I think I'm hallucinating or seeing paraeidoliac effects in groups of everyday light and shade. Anyone got a good resource where I can read up on what might cause the effects? I know getting more sleep would be a good one...
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Please don't be offended when I mention this but your experiences are similar to hallucinations that alcoholics can experience, humanoid and spiders being more common effects for them .. one of my old patients reported to his consultant of also seeing black dogs. I would also suggest you pop down to your GP and tell him/her about your visions.
 
Thanks everyone.

I do have noticeable floaters in my eyes as it happens. Now you mention it, Old_Shoe, I can see how that might contribute to the erroneous pattern-matching Frideswide talks about.

Eye test, Frideswide/rynner2: I am a contact lens wearer so get checked out every couple of years; last one was about nine months ago. I changed to a higher-oxygen-content lens type then as well. So I am broadly happy with my ocular health (lovely word, that) though I'll bear your comments in mind...

Swifty, no offence taken :) I am a regular drinker, although recently I have cut back (from 10-15 units/week to 5-10, this was about four months ago) as part of a general health nudge - not dramatic enough to call it a health kick! So again, I am reasonably certain it's not alcohol-related; my liver was put through more in my younger years, but for the last ten years, my drinking apart from Christmas and before my recent reduction has been at that 10-15 unit level.

The stress will pass. If I'm honest with myself, I would say my ability to cope with stress is slightly below the adult average, and it's been sustained for a while. So I think, probably, on balance, it's linked to that and once I ride it out, the visions will go with it. However, as part of my general health nudge I'll do some more reading up on eye and liver health, thanks for the tips everyone.
 
Kudos on being self possessed and level headed enough to see these experiences as a symptom of your own temporary state of mind. You're rational at least. It'll be interesting to know how your experience of this phenomenon compares to the accounts of others. I hope you feel better soon.
 
what PeteByrdie says :clap:
 
Get some sleep!
I suffer from continual sleep deprivation myself, but fortunately I haven't seen any weird hallucinations (yet).
Your sleep deprivation must have reached a critical point.
 
On waking during the night sometimes I get a swirling golden chrysanthemum type thing with tentacles moving around the room. Now I know it's a natural thingy I quite enjoy watching it before I wake up properly. It's quite lovely ☺
 
Danforth, I know from personal experience that o/d on caffeine can contribute to 'seeing stuff out the corner of ones eyes' in my case 'rats' scuttling around the corners of a room. If you drink any amount of tea of coffee (or those crappy energy drinks) it might be worth easing off.
 
I can't stress enough how lack of sleep can cause you to see shadow things out of the corner of you eyes. Occasionally working long shifts if I've had limited sleep over a few days I'll start seeing shadow cats at home! If out and about I can start seeing humanoid shadow figures as well - just a glimpse!

Are you experiencing any other form of hallucinations? Funny smells, hearing voices? Weird thoughts?

It's a good idea to rule out other things, If you get some sleep and are still seeing them then you want to move on to getting your eyes checked out and a GP visit as it could be a health issue.

The thing is, is not to panic, I think it's around 80% of the population will experience some form of halluncinatory experience in their lifetime. Start on getting your sleep, if you can't sleep then see your GP.
 
nicnocnac said:
On waking during the night sometimes I get a swirling golden chrysanthemum type thing with tentacles moving around the room. Now I know it's a natural thingy I quite enjoy watching it before I wake up properly. It's quite lovely ☺
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Some years ago if I woke in the night I used to see something similar only mine was red. It lasted a couple of weeks then one day it was gone and hasn't been back.
 
+1 for sleep deprivation. You may not be sleeping any less than normal, but either you're failing to sleep deeply enough, or (due to the extra stress) your body may need more than the usual amount at the moment.

The only time I had full-on hallucinations from sleep loss, was while driving home at night after a week's holiday during which I'd slept less than half as much as normal. I was seeing 'shadow people' sitting in my passenger seat, various walls and trees flickering in and out of existence at the roadside, and once a full-sized panther-type creature running across a village green and up a tree. All peripheral images that vanished when I looked directly at them, but very clear nonetheless. I suspect the energy drinks that I'd quaffed during the journey to stop me nodding off probably made things several times worse, too.
 
I echo the above comments about sleep deprivation. My late father used to scoff at the idea of such hallucinations until he experienced one himself. According to him, he had been driving alone for a few hours in the middle of the night when he found himself on a lonely stretch of road. Suddenly, a Hereford bull appeared in the middle of the road as if out of nowhere. I gathered he was quite shocked by it. The vision was fleeting and proved to be a hallucination, but he learned a lesson about the perils of driving while short of sleep.
 
RyoHazuki said:
+1 for sleep deprivation. You may not be sleeping any less than normal, but either you're failing to sleep deeply enough, or (due to the extra stress) your body may need more than the usual amount at the moment.

The only time I had full-on hallucinations from sleep loss, was while driving home at night after a week's holiday during which I'd slept less than half as much as normal. I was seeing 'shadow people' sitting in my passenger seat, various walls and trees flickering in and out of existence at the roadside, and once a full-sized panther-type creature running across a village green and up a tree. All peripheral images that vanished when I looked directly at them, but very clear nonetheless. I suspect the energy drinks that I'd quaffed during the journey to stop me nodding off probably made things several times worse, too.
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I've had a similar experience with the flickering trees thing while driving although not hallucinating, I felt myself losing consciousness but managed to snap out of it in time. The same thing happened at a misspent youth rave I attended when all four corners of the room turned up the strobe lights to high. I had to lean against a wall and wrap my arm around my eyes to stop fainting because when I tried to just use my hand, light was still getting through.
 
My wife worked in a hotel and was told by one of the other staff that a particular room was haunted. She was cleaning the room one day and sensed some movement from the corner of her eye. Looking through the open door to the corridor, she saw what she described as white and grey wavy lines flowing past. Leaving the room to get a proper look, she then saw nothing was there. She was a bit shaken by this and left the room with a splitting headache. I did some investigation into her symptoms and reckon it was a combination of heightened awareness, given the tales of the room being haunted, fatigue, and the aura preceding a migraine, causing the hallucinatory effect. There may also have been something in or near that room producing an ultrasound effect - water pipes, air-con unit or some other electrical system, which may be why other people had experienced strange effects in that room. I suspect such explanations could well account for shadows and other similar effects.
 
Classic ultra-sound thing is 'fleeting' images, caused by the eyeball's distortion. Horrible.
 
Stress levels dropping a bit now, which means better sleep, and yes the shadow people have stopped appearing. I do try to be rational but you were all tremendously reassuring and I'm sure that has contributed to the improvement. Big love to all the internet strangers! :)

Naughty_Felid said:
Are you experiencing any other form of hallucinations? Funny smells, hearing voices? Weird thoughts?
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It's just been the visuals. Weird thoughts probably have remained at their usual incidence :D

I guess part of what spooked me is that while I have been short of sleep before, the visions are new. In my student days I once clocked up a mere nine hours' sleep between a Monday morning and a Friday night. Aided by nothing more potent than the odd can of cola / cup of coffee, I might add. No shadow people, though I did decide to give up and go to sleep when I lost colour! Vision went monochrome. I took that as a Sign.
 
_Danforth_ said:
No shadow people, though I did decide to give up and go to sleep when I lost colour! Vision went monochrome. I took that as a Sign.
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Wow! That happened to my sister once when she was a teenager. I think that was stress-related and also down to low blood sugar, I think.
Good to hear that things are getting back to normality for you.
 
_Danforth_ said:
Stress levels dropping a bit now, which means better sleep, and yes the shadow people have stopped appearing. I do try to be rational but you were all tremendously reassuring and I'm sure that has contributed to the improvement. Big love to all the internet strangers! :)



It's just been the visuals. Weird thoughts probably have remained at their usual incidence :D

I guess part of what spooked me is that while I have been short of sleep before, the visions are new. In my student days I once clocked up a mere nine hours' sleep between a Monday morning and a Friday night. Aided by nothing more potent than the odd can of cola / cup of coffee, I might add. No shadow people, though I did decide to give up and go to sleep when I lost colour! Vision went monochrome. I took that as a Sign.
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I could do 36hours with no sleep with little problems when I was younger, but struggle now if I get broken sleep or less than 5 hours.

Sleep deprivation has certainly had a bigger impact on me the older I get.

Glad things are getting better.
 
Re. sleep deprivation.

I've had considerable experience of using a wide range of hallucinogenic drugs. However, I have never found a substance as profoundly mind-altering as sleep deprivation. It really is quite a trip, affecting massively both the body and the mind.

Glad the Original Poster is doing well :)
 
A Point of View: 'How I learned to embrace my insomnia'
Does insomnia have a positive side? It's a question which keeps the writer Will Self awake at night.

The title of Jonathan Crary's recently-published book says it all - 24/7: Late Capitalism And The Ends of Sleep. By which I mean that as with the best polemics − The Communist Manifesto or A Modest Proposal are other examples − the central idea is encapsulated in its heading. Mind you, my guard was already down, as if in involuntary preparation to receive Crary's thrust, which is this - the processes we associate with contemporary economic life are moving inexorably to deprive us of our sleep. An unconscious person is no kind of consumer at all, being quite unable to enter her credit card security code in a website − and nor is she much good at working either. Moreover, the sleeper is difficult for the state security apparatus to keep under surveillance, as without a real-time electroencephalograph it's impossible to know whether he's dreaming, while even with one the potentially treasonous or terroristic nature of his reveries remains unknowable.

Where I perhaps part company from Crary is in his assertion that capitalism is the only insomniac economic system. I'm quite sure there were the sleepless in Stalingrad, and quite possibly ancient Sumer as well for all we know - but I concede, there is something about our contemporary existence, especially in big, bustling cities, which seems altogether inimical to a good night's rest. I began to notice I was losing sleep about a decade ago − at first just a little top-and-tailing of the main period of repose, so I lay abed an hour or so less. But then I began to find it quite impossible to have a lie-in even on days when I wasn't required to be an economically-productive unit. After that, with increasing frequency there came night-time trips to the bathroom which would often render me insomniac for an hour or two.

etc...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34283303
 
I'm a rational kind of chap, so I was quite upset when I started seeing shadow people on the roadside on the way home from work in the dark in winter. Absolutely matte black, but walking along, two abreast. Just like walking shadows, utterly devoid of any detail; only their movement served to give them any depth. Standing still they would have been like two-dimensional cardboard cutouts painted black. They were SO black that they were like human-shaped holes in the near lanscape, rather than objects in front of everything.

This bothered me for a couple of years before I discovered that this sort of thing is a variant of "ocular migraine" type symptoms that can, very very rarely, arise as a side-effect of medication I was on. Not medication for the brain or mind, but for a bowel condition. It only affects a tiny proportion of those using the drug, but it is a known side-effect.

I was quite relieved; the shadow people will have just been people, and my brain "failed to see" the details that my eyes were seeing perfectly well.

This makes me wonder what other medications might cause this sort of thing, and how many shadow people sightings are actually just people sightings (and therefore very mundane) but "edited" by a brain experiencing poorly-documented drug side-effects, and that also with drugs for non-brain non-mind disorders?

Next time you see a shadow person, just ask yourself how much ibuprofen, lemsip, sudafed etc you might have had lately. Maybe those common over-the-counter preparations also affect a tiny number of users in very odd ways?

Since then I have had other slightly-like-an-ocular-migraine effects that would have frightened me, had I not already known about this
 
severs1966 said:
just ask yourself how much ibuprofen, lemsip, sudafed etc you might have had lately. Maybe those common over-the-counter preparations also affect a tiny number of users in very odd ways?
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excellent first hand experience - thank you severs1966!
 
severs1966 said:
This makes me wonder what other medications might cause this sort of thing, and how many shadow people sightings are actually just people sightings (and therefore very mundane) but "edited" by a brain experiencing poorly-documented drug side-effects, and that also with drugs for non-brain non-mind disorders?
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Or these things are real and the medication alters things so we are able to see them... o_O
 
And being able to see the fairy folk if you washed your eyes in morning dew.
 
severs1966 said:
I'm a rational kind of chap, so I was quite upset when I started seeing shadow people on the roadside on the way home from work in the dark in winter. Absolutely matte black, but walking along, two abreast. Just like walking shadows, utterly devoid of any detail; only their movement served to give them any depth. Standing still they would have been like two-dimensional cardboard cutouts painted black. They were SO black that they were like human-shaped holes in the near lanscape, rather than objects in front of everything.

This bothered me for a couple of years before I discovered that this sort of thing is a variant of "ocular migraine" type symptoms that can, very very rarely, arise as a side-effect of medication I was on. Not medication for the brain or mind, but for a bowel condition. It only affects a tiny proportion of those using the drug, but it is a known side-effect.

I was quite relieved; the shadow people will have just been people, and my brain "failed to see" the details that my eyes were seeing perfectly well.

This makes me wonder what other medications might cause this sort of thing, and how many shadow people sightings are actually just people sightings (and therefore very mundane) but "edited" by a brain experiencing poorly-documented drug side-effects, and that also with drugs for non-brain non-mind disorders?

Next time you see a shadow person, just ask yourself how much ibuprofen, lemsip, sudafed etc you might have had lately. Maybe those common over-the-counter preparations also affect a tiny number of users in very odd ways?

Since then I have had other slightly-like-an-ocular-migraine effects that would have frightened me, had I not already known about this
Click to expand...


Very good post. A lot of people are unaware of the effect of our "second brain" I've seen some first hand reports of very strange mood swings from medications that are most active in the gut.


http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/


worth a read as you think neurotransmitters are only in the realm of the thing between our ears.

Sorry I'm a bit sparse at the mo as RL is kicking in with big boots.
 
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