Back when I was somewhere between the ages of 7-12 years old, I had a few recurring dreams. In all of these, I was dreaming with my eyes open. Here's a few of them:
1 (The Desk) - I sit up in bed in my room. There's just enough illumination coming from the bathroom nightlight to allow me to discern stuff around me.
I get an impression that something is wrong in the room, and out of the corner of my eye I catch movement.
When I turn my head I see that the end of my desk that's farthest away from me is slowly moving away from the wall it's up against. As it continues to gradually swing around towards me I can see it splitting jaggedly in half, and the far half is moving faster than the nearer. I sense now that I'm in danger, it's coming for me. I'm about to be attacked by my own desk.
I dive under the covers, waiting for something awful to happen, but I just fall back into normal sleep.
2 (The Sock) - I sit up in bed, dreaming, and the entire bed begins slowly moving away from the wall it sits up against. I know what's coming as, again, this is another recurrent one. I lock up in a familiar dread.
The bed stops a few inches away from the wall, and with excruciating slowness a plain, white crew sock begins rising from wherever it had been lurking below the bed. I'm frozen in inexplicable terror of it. The sock looks as it would if it had been carefully flattened against the wall, with a 45 degree angle between the leg part and the foot section.
It rises up to eye-level and pauses there, and I know that it knows that I'm looking at it, staring at it helplessly. After a minute it starts dropping down again as the bed simultaneously slides back against the wall, and the threat is over.
3 (The Hallway) - I sit up in bed again, looking down the hallway beyond the open bedroom door. The bathroom is about 8' down, on the right, emitting a faint glow from it's nightlight. The hallway continues on another 10' or so and ends at a blank wall, with openings to the left and the right, den and kitchen respectively.
Everything I see (as in all these night terrors) looks as if I'm observing it underwater, a gentle rippling effect. That's when I become aware of the voices coming from the dark rooms beyond the end of the hallway. They're softly laughing, chuckling, a thoroughly malignant sound, men and women, and the threatening, conspiratorial quality of it sliding thickly from their throats locks me up in an extremis of full-on terror as I struggle to wake up - yeah, I'm fully aware at this point that I'm asleep, aware that whatever the hideous things are in the dark just beyond the hallway are focused on ME, they want ME.
And in that fear, by force of will I begin to wake myself up, and observe something remarkable - the swimmy appearance of everything begins to clear from a point at the center of my field of vision, that clarity steadily spreading outward in a perfect circle toward it's periphery, and hearing/sensing a faint "pop", I'm suddenly fully awake, everything looks normal, the voices gone, still staring down the hallway, never having missed a beat from being asleep to awakening, eyes having remained open throughout the whole process.
1 (The Desk) - I sit up in bed in my room. There's just enough illumination coming from the bathroom nightlight to allow me to discern stuff around me.
I get an impression that something is wrong in the room, and out of the corner of my eye I catch movement.
When I turn my head I see that the end of my desk that's farthest away from me is slowly moving away from the wall it's up against. As it continues to gradually swing around towards me I can see it splitting jaggedly in half, and the far half is moving faster than the nearer. I sense now that I'm in danger, it's coming for me. I'm about to be attacked by my own desk.
I dive under the covers, waiting for something awful to happen, but I just fall back into normal sleep.
2 (The Sock) - I sit up in bed, dreaming, and the entire bed begins slowly moving away from the wall it sits up against. I know what's coming as, again, this is another recurrent one. I lock up in a familiar dread.
The bed stops a few inches away from the wall, and with excruciating slowness a plain, white crew sock begins rising from wherever it had been lurking below the bed. I'm frozen in inexplicable terror of it. The sock looks as it would if it had been carefully flattened against the wall, with a 45 degree angle between the leg part and the foot section.
It rises up to eye-level and pauses there, and I know that it knows that I'm looking at it, staring at it helplessly. After a minute it starts dropping down again as the bed simultaneously slides back against the wall, and the threat is over.
3 (The Hallway) - I sit up in bed again, looking down the hallway beyond the open bedroom door. The bathroom is about 8' down, on the right, emitting a faint glow from it's nightlight. The hallway continues on another 10' or so and ends at a blank wall, with openings to the left and the right, den and kitchen respectively.
Everything I see (as in all these night terrors) looks as if I'm observing it underwater, a gentle rippling effect. That's when I become aware of the voices coming from the dark rooms beyond the end of the hallway. They're softly laughing, chuckling, a thoroughly malignant sound, men and women, and the threatening, conspiratorial quality of it sliding thickly from their throats locks me up in an extremis of full-on terror as I struggle to wake up - yeah, I'm fully aware at this point that I'm asleep, aware that whatever the hideous things are in the dark just beyond the hallway are focused on ME, they want ME.
And in that fear, by force of will I begin to wake myself up, and observe something remarkable - the swimmy appearance of everything begins to clear from a point at the center of my field of vision, that clarity steadily spreading outward in a perfect circle toward it's periphery, and hearing/sensing a faint "pop", I'm suddenly fully awake, everything looks normal, the voices gone, still staring down the hallway, never having missed a beat from being asleep to awakening, eyes having remained open throughout the whole process.