Sleep hallucinations
I don't sleepwalk as such, but I'm quite a light sleeper and sometimes get woken up whilst dreaming, but not actually enough to kick me into full consciousness, so I'll be technically awake, but still seeing bits of my dream playing out in front of me. I've had lots of brief conversations with imaginary people (including David Hasselhof once) and a few surreal experiences, such as spending several minutes searching my room for the 'dangerous rainbow coloured tarantulas' who I'd seen hiding behind my wardrobe, or trying to capture a large parrot that I could see flying around my lampshade.

Anyway, this happened most at uni when I was living in halls, probably because it was so noisy, so when I awoke to see the face of one of my fellow students peaking out at me from between my curtains I had a little chuckle to myself at my overactive imagination (I’d just read Wuthering Heights for an assignment) and went back to sleep. Then the tapping started, and became steadily more frantic, and as such I couldn't get back to sleep at all, so I decided to stare at the hallucination until it went away. The hallucination then started to get quite rude and call me a “bloody stupid cow” so I opened the window to prove to my brain that there was nothing there (I found that trying to touch the hallucinations usually made them go away). My friend, balancing precariously on a ledge four storeys up, was understandably angry at being poked, and bit my hand quite hard, at which point I finally realised I wasn’t dreaming (she later explained that she would’ve hit me but was worried about losing her balance). Turns out she pulled a guy at the dodgy student nightclub and went back to his room in the adjoining block, but got bored and, because she was both drunk and stupid, thought it would be quicker to climb out of the window to get back rather than walk along the corridor.
( hanabanana, Tue 28 Aug 2007, 15:16, Reply)