I wanted to ask about hypnagogia and share my experience - and ask about yours! I'm curious to know if we all experience hypnagogia the same or differently. Often when I'm about to fall asleep, I can't tell if my eyes are open or shut, the room is dark but I can see the outlines of things. Upon further examining I realise my eyes are indeed shut but to me it feels like I can see my complete room in the dark. To say it in another way, when my eyes are shut and I'm about to fall asleep I can see a hallucination of my room (in the dark), almost what my dreaming mind thinks my room looks like, my light in a different location, my bedside table might be shifted, I might even see the bookshelf on the wrong wall or have my room navigation wrong. It's hard to explain, I hope I don't come across too crazy 😅
Another thing I sometimes see with my minds eye (but definitely has a visual aspect to it) is a game/activity/thing that I've played/done for too long. The game/thing/activity is fully functional and interactive. For example, I might see a Tetris wall with falling blocks that fall in the right place, I might have to turn a piece around to make it fit (Tetris master here 😆). Some others I can 100% remember were Rubik’s Cube's and a phone game (Clash Royal) - there are definitely common threads between them all.
Ok now that I've written this all down, am I crazy? Or do other people experience similar things? Would love to hear peoples personal experience with hypnogogia.
I don't usually experience that when I have hypnagogia, but I recently had a dream that started out as a non-lucid, until my dream self decided to take a nap and went to bed. At the point, I could sort of "see" my real bedroom through the dream bedroom, like reality was overlaying the dream, and I became lucid. Since there was no way I could actually see my real bedroom through my sleep mask in the dark, it must have been something a lot like your experience.
When I am falling asleep I usually do not see anything in front of my eyes apart from those kind of mind images in the back of my head sometimes.
When I have those multiple short awakenings in the morning the situation is very different. Then I also see images, and what is very interesting I can sometimes shape them the way I want in order to enter a dream. Especially when I am trying to do WILD I never use alarms but instead just wait for a spontanous awakening in REM. This does not always work but it is pretty reliable. I am not sure if those images are hypnagogia but I wanted to touch on that because I have heard some people say that if you want to enter a dream you should not interact with hypnagogia, because it will collapse an experience. Well, it does not seem to be the case for me. The things I visualise usually appear in front of my eyes in that state. I highly recommend playingwith visualisation in hypnagogia!
When it comes to computer games - I do not play any. When I used to play subway surfers or geometry dash on my phone a couple of years ago, though, I also would see the game when I closed my eyes after intense playing.
I hope this thread will get lots of replies, as I find your question very fascinating! I've often wondered about other people's hypnagogia / hypnopompia experiences as well. Just in case anyone who may be reading this later finds it useful, I'll include a link to Lucid Dream Portal's video on hypnagogia here:
The part about Tetris, etc., made me smile -- you may have heard of the Tetris effect? Daniel Love actually has a video on a clever way to attempt to take advantage of this -- for anyone who may not have watched it yet, here it is: Try this surprising LUCID DREAM hack! (Useful for WBTB & WILD - The "Tetris Effect")
To calm your nerves a but, those experiences sound totally normal! I can relate to most of the things you've said.
My most common experience with hypnagogia is just random colors and lines moving around on a mostly black background (I sleep with my TV on since I still have a fear of the dark, so, the background is kind of a dark gray). This is my most commonly occurring hypnagogia, but I have had a stronger sense of it.
When I was still caught up in the shifting community, I had stronger hypnagogia and hypnopompic experiences. While this thread is for hypnagogia, hypnopompic is just like it, except it occurs when you're waking up. When I tried shifting, I had a very specific place in mind along with all the other good stuff (time of day, who was going to be there, all of that jazz.) I remember my heart racing, tingling, loss of feeling in my body (to the point where it felt like my limbs where in different positions than they were), heat everywhere on my body, and, most importantly, a constant amber light along with smelling wood burning (the smell I had intended on happening so, it wasn't unwelcome.) This was my strongest hypnagogia experience I've had that I can remember.
On the flip side, I've had a stranger hypnopompic experience. Within the same topic, I was trying to get to the same place so I started imagining the room around me. While I didn't see anything different (as my eyes were closed) I did feel as if the room had changed. It felt like it had partly become the room I wanted to be in because it felt almost double the size and felt like my bed wasn't resting against a wall. It also felt like I had a second doorway into my room, but, it faded away shortly (this is common as with the hypnagogic experience above, it had faded as well). Unrelated to my "shifting attempts", I have had strong hypnopompia of a game before, but it was based on all the "match three" games, like Candy Crush. It was more on a farm though and, even though there are farm varieties of it, it didn't match up with any I knew.