Heutoscopy, night terrors, zombie hands
If you want to read something really creepy, read this journal article about heutoscopy - the illusion of meeting your own doppelganger.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1073027/

This particular case study really haunts me - there's just something so fucked up about beating yourself black and blue to work out whether you or your doppelganger is the illusion. For anyone with a sick enough mind or a keen enough curiousity, there are many other similar case studies, and the further work of Peter Brugger provides a very good introduction to the area.

The closest I've ever come to something like this is sleep paralysis (which is common enough, especially in teenagers). One night I spent a terrifying couple of hours, paralyzed between asleep and awake, staring into the brightly lit bedroom and hallucinating that weird black animal apparitions were moving around me and were going to bite my exposed extremities.

Also, I was convinced I was going to suffocate, because in sleep paralysis things like breath control get handed over to the autonomic functions. I was fine really, but certainly very panicked. When you enter sleep paralysis your whole body has gone to sleep but your mind and your senses are still fully awake. Because your body is in sleep mode, you cannot move because of the autonomic function that normally keeps you from moving about in your sleep and falling out of your bed (failure of this function causes sleepwalking, an opposite problems that I have never suffered from).

Just when I was at the height of my terror, the sheer pumping adrenaline was enough for me to wrest back control of my body from my subconscious, and I managed to flip myself onto my back. Just then, I felt a clammy, lifeless zombie hand land on my face.

I bolted upright, completely awake, to find that I had been lying on my arm for so long that it had gone dead. I had flipped it up onto my own face when I tried to lie on my back, and felt like a complete tit.
(leviticus no longer likes the cut of your gib on, Mon 11 Apr 2011, 11:05, 5 replies)

Dead hand?
You know, there's something else you can do with your hand if it goes "zombie"
(mudskipper, Mon 11 Apr 2011, 11:25, closed)

I doubt that's as much fun as people say it is
unless you get your jollies from clammy, rough, disembodied man hands touching your junk.

In which case I would suggest cottaging is your thing.
(leviticus no longer likes the cut of your gib on, Mon 11 Apr 2011, 11:30, closed)

Not if
you're a girl.
(username failed moderation, Mon 11 Apr 2011, 12:45, closed)

Sleep paralysis is horrible
I spent a good 10 years, from the age of around 17 to about 27, suffering from it every few months or so. Last time I had it I spent a good 20 minutes trying to move my hand to wake up my ex as she lay there dribbling on the pillow and snoring. Sometimes the weird half awake dreams were quite interesting though.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Thu 14 Apr 2011, 2:54, closed)

Reading things
like this get me all clammy under the collar.

My gran always said that everyone has a doppelganger somewhere.
Fuck knows what I'd do if I saw mine.
( Ultimate Cakes & Sweets Why,what are you planning to do - photosynthesize?, Thu 14 Apr 2011, 12:33, closed)