Woken up by a ghost

[shriram]

There is an easy way to decide if you've been woken up by a ghost or not:

1: If you think you've been woken up by a ghost.
2: You haven't.

 

[Quinn]

Maybe this?

http://sleepdisorders.about.com/od/glossary/g/Hypnagogic_Jerk.htm

Quite possibly, though I hadn't just fallen asleep. I was actually dreaming when it happened, but the jab wasn't part of the dream. It interrupted it, just as a physical jab would.

I've had some very intense episodes of sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations, though I think it's been at least 10 years since the last one. The first one actually caused me to believe in out-of-body experiences for a time, in what I now realize was a classic case of confirmation bias; I had heard of OOBEs, so I looked into them, and sure enough, they sounded just like what happened to me, so I didn't look for other explanations. When I learned about sleep paralysis some years later, it was actually a relief. Noting my own errors in the process was what led me to skepticism.

 

[Quinn]

A little joke from your girlfriend, maybe?

She certainly has the temperament and sense of humor to prank me, but I'm 90% sure she lacks the physical coordination to get out of the room and close the door as quickly and silently as she would have needed to. (Not a slam against her; I would think it was beyond the skills of most normal people. If she were a competitive gymnast or professional cat burglar, maybe, but anyone else, not so much.) And the remaining 10% is covered by the fact that the dog was asleep on the couch with her. If she had come running out of the room and quickly gotten under a blanket on the couch, the dog would have been jumping around excitedly. Plus, if she were going to prank me, I'm reasonably sure she'd come up with something better. (Then again, maybe that's exactly what she wants me to think…)

 

[Quinn]

There is an easy way to decide if you've been woken up by a ghost or not:

1: If you think you've been woken up by a ghost.
2: You haven't.

Your clarity and conciseness are admirable. Have you considered expanding this into a full-length guide for fence-sitters looking into paranormal phenomena?

 

[Stray Cat]

Your clarity and conciseness are admirable. Have you considered expanding this into a full-length guide for fence-sitters looking into paranormal phenomena?

Thanks

And "yes"... but in all honesty, I didn't have time to write it myself, I used a ghost writer.

 

[Michel H]

She certainly has the temperament and sense of humor to prank me, but I'm 90% sure she lacks the physical coordination to get out of the room and close the door as quickly and silently as she would have needed to. (Not a slam against her; I would think it was beyond the skills of most normal people. If she were a competitive gymnast or professional cat burglar, maybe, but anyone else, not so much.) And the remaining 10% is covered by the fact that the dog was asleep on the couch with her. If she had come running out of the room and quickly gotten under a blanket on the couch, the dog would have been jumping around excitedly. Plus, if she were going to prank me, I'm reasonably sure she'd come up with something better. (Then again, maybe that's exactly what she wants me to think…)

Well, getting out of a room (almost) silently is not very hard. And it is possible that your dog was actually not sleeping, even if his/her eyes were closed. The dog is apparently closer to your girlfriend than to you, since he/she was sleeping with your friend, rather than with you. Your girlfriend had perhaps trained the dog, and rehearsed this several times, as the dog was perhaps a central element of her "prank". Perhaps she put the dog on the couch, and ordered to him:"Now, Jack, close your eyes!, don't move!, sleep!", and the dog understood and tried to obey.

 

[svenax]

Maybe this?

http://sleepdisorders.about.com/od/glossary/g/Hypnagogic_Jerk.htm

Look, it even has a fancy name! This happens to me quite frequently, at least several times each month. Always wakes me up quite violently.

 

[svenax]

Quite possibly, though I hadn't just fallen asleep. I was actually dreaming when it happened, but the jab wasn't part of the dream. It interrupted it, just as a physical jab would.

How do you know it wasn't part of a dream? It is usually quite hard to tell.

 

[Sockor]

Do you have, or can you induce pain in the general area while awake? I am able to sleep in some funny position that leaves my left shoulder/armpit aching, and sudden movement can be painful.

 

[asydhouse]

I've woken up to the sound of myself making a loud grunt a few times; the weird thing is that it's loud and odd enough that I've tried to do another one, but find I can't make a sound remotely like it. I think I really did make a noise, because the room reverberation sounds right, but I don't know whether my waking brain has distorted the perception or whether I can make sounds in my sleep that I can't make awake...

I've had the odd sleep-poke and shoulder-shake too; I half wake, wondering why I'm being disturbed, then realize there's no-one there, so go back to sleep.

The worst one was as a teenager, sleeping with the side of the bed against the wall; I dreamt I was kicking a soccer ball (a shot or a penalty, I don't recall exactly) and kicked the wall really hard. That woke me up. Fortunately, I didn't break any toes.

When I was 18 my single bed was along one wall. I woke up one morning to find my cheek was a bit swollen, and I had a loose tooth, and generally felt sore in my face. I didn't remember anything happening in the night, but I figure I slammed my face into the wall during the night. The tooth firmed up in its socket over the next couple of days.

Weird.

 

[Dissolution]

Ghosts? Don't be ridiculous.
It was the invisible man. He's always doing that.

 

[mike3]

When I was 18 my single bed was along one wall. I woke up one morning to find my cheek was a bit swollen, and I had a loose tooth, and generally felt sore in my face. I didn't remember anything happening in the night, but I figure I slammed my face into the wall during the night. The tooth firmed up in its socket over the next couple of days.

Weird.

Which goes to show that when people report strange "marks" after a supposed "alien abduction" experience ... doesn't mean it was real.

 

[stanfr]

Quite possibly, though I hadn't just fallen asleep. I was actually dreaming when it happened, but the jab wasn't part of the dream. It interrupted it, just as a physical jab would.

As Svenax hinted at, those two statements are contradictory. If it "happened" while "I was actually dreaming"--then by defiintion it was "part of your dream". It would be extremely difficult for you to know with any certainty, especially now, whether you were fully awake or not when the jabs occurred. And of course not all dreams are alike--in a lucid dream for example the line between a dream state and your awake state would be blurred.

Even if you are positive you were awake, what makes the sensation so unusual? As the many resposes here indicate, the mind is prone to creating all sorts of phantom sensory experiences. So what? A mere jab in the ribs sounds pretty innocuous to me. Now if some funny looking translucent figure was sitting on your bed side at the same time of the experience, at least you'd be getting somehwere into the unusual realm...albeit it would probably be just be a more elaborate hallucination.

 

[mikado]

I put my much beloved cat down some ten days ago. In the first intense stage of grief, I really truly saw him everywhere. half asleep I was sure he jumped on me..... funny what you're mind can do to you!

 

[Quinn]

As Svenax hinted at, those two statements are contradictory. If it "happened" while "I was actually dreaming"--then by defiintion it was "part of your dream". It would be extremely difficult for you to know with any certainty, especially now, whether you were fully awake or not when the jabs occurred.

You're right, I was unclear on that. My point was that it wasn't a congruent part of the dream; I didn't dream that something hit me in the side.

 

[ExMinister]

I have had a lot of these weird experiences. When I was New Age, I had no problem attributing them to ghosts. Now I have no problem attributing them to weird brain phenomena.

Speaking of not being a congruent part of a dream, I had something similar when I felt as if I was awakened from a dream by a trumpet blast in my left ear. I jolted upright, my first thought being someone had just kicked the front door down. My next thought was that something had exploded in my brain. Took me a minute to fully focus on the fact that what I heard was distinctly a TRUMPET. I still went downstairs to check the door. Googling the next day I learned there is actually such a thing as Exploding Head Syndrome, exactly what happened to me.

I have been rudely awakened to the sensation of someone tugging at my feet, husband sound asleep. Not that it mattered as it happened while I was single and alone too. Or I would feel the dog jump up on the bed in the middle of the night and no one was there.

Most bizarre one was falling asleep one night, really felt like I had just laid my head on the pillow moments ago, when I felt a hand on my head. I lifted my head to see who it was, fully expecting to see my husband or one of my kids, and instead there was this dark shadowy thing, it's hand in my hair, I could see the claws at the end of the fingers, and the thing leaned down and bit me in the back of my neck with what felt like fangs - felt like fire! Scared the crap out of me. When I finally woke up, I KNEW it was sleep paralysis... it HAD to be, but still I had to sleep on the sofa that night, and I still refer to that side of the bed as the haunted side. It was the pain of the bite that freaked me out the most. My husband sleeps there now!

So, when you said you can understand how people can attribute these things to ghosts, I just want to say that I totally get it, too.

 

[Mudcat]

I think Data said it best:

Because... a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be a bit of undigested beef, a... blot of mustard, a... crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. Why, there's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are. Humbug, I tell you. Humbug.

 

[George 152]

I was rudely awakened early this morning by being poked in the ribs -- two hard jabs in quick succession. I rolled over and looked up to see why my girlfriend was waking me up in such a hostile manner.

She wasn't there. Neither was anyone else.

My first thought was that she had poked me and then quickly left the room for some reason. But it would have had to be really quick. Though I had been fully asleep, I was startled by the poking, and I spun around fast to see what was going on. Plus the bedroom door was closed. She would have had to close it while quickly running out of the room, which meant I would have heard it close, which I hadn't.

Just to make sure, I opened the door and looked in the living room. She was napping on the couch, under a blanket, with her dog sleeping next to her.

My next thought was that something had fallen on me. But it would have had to be something fairly substantial to land on me with that much force, and therefore would have been easy to find (and there would have been two of whatever it was). There was nothing to find, either in the bed or on the floor nearby. Plus, there's nowhere something could have fallen from except the ceiling (there are no shelves or anything nearby). There hadn't been anything hanging from there, and the ceiling itself was intact.

I was rapidly running out of possible causes, and the ones that remained were getting more and more unlikely. Nonetheless, did I check under the bed and in the closet to see if there was anyone hiding there? You bet I did. (There wasn't.)

At that point it was basically down to mind tricks or ghosts. So I chalked it up to an unusual but certainly not inconceivable misfire of some part of my brain, and laid down to go back to sleep.

And as much of a skeptic as I am, and for as long as I've been one, and for all the ways I understand and appreciate (and even utilize) the ways our minds can make us perceive things that never happened… I was too freaked out to go back to sleep, because dammit, I felt something poke me! I know what I felt! There's no way it could have been all in my head!

So today, as I sit here groggy and sleep-deprived, I feel just the tiniest bit more empathy than usual for people who believe in paranormal things because of inexplicable personal experiences. If I could be that freaked out, with the collection of information in my head, it's not at all difficult to understand how someone with less information could interpret such an experience as irrefutable proof of ghosts (or whatever entity they chalk it up to). It really did feel like something I couldn't possibly have imagined. And for someone who isn't familiar with the degree to which it's possible to imagine things that don't seem like you could possibly have imagined them, it would be easy to dismiss that option as ridiculous -- possibly even more ridiculous than ghosts.

Muscle spasm

 

[Cainkane1]

I was rudely awakened early this morning by being poked in the ribs -- two hard jabs in quick succession. I rolled over and looked up to see why my girlfriend was waking me up in such a hostile manner.

She wasn't there. Neither was anyone else.

My first thought was that she had poked me and then quickly left the room for some reason. But it would have had to be really quick. Though I had been fully asleep, I was startled by the poking, and I spun around fast to see what was going on. Plus the bedroom door was closed. She would have had to close it while quickly running out of the room, which meant I would have heard it close, which I hadn't.

Just to make sure, I opened the door and looked in the living room. She was napping on the couch, under a blanket, with her dog sleeping next to her.

My next thought was that something had fallen on me. But it would have had to be something fairly substantial to land on me with that much force, and therefore would have been easy to find (and there would have been two of whatever it was). There was nothing to find, either in the bed or on the floor nearby. Plus, there's nowhere something could have fallen from except the ceiling (there are no shelves or anything nearby). There hadn't been anything hanging from there, and the ceiling itself was intact.

I was rapidly running out of possible causes, and the ones that remained were getting more and more unlikely. Nonetheless, did I check under the bed and in the closet to see if there was anyone hiding there? You bet I did. (There wasn't.)

At that point it was basically down to mind tricks or ghosts. So I chalked it up to an unusual but certainly not inconceivable misfire of some part of my brain, and laid down to go back to sleep.

And as much of a skeptic as I am, and for as long as I've been one, and for all the ways I understand and appreciate (and even utilize) the ways our minds can make us perceive things that never happened… I was too freaked out to go back to sleep, because dammit, I felt something poke me! I know what I felt! There's no way it could have been all in my head!

So today, as I sit here groggy and sleep-deprived, I feel just the tiniest bit more empathy than usual for people who believe in paranormal things because of inexplicable personal experiences. If I could be that freaked out, with the collection of information in my head, it's not at all difficult to understand how someone with less information could interpret such an experience as irrefutable proof of ghosts (or whatever entity they chalk it up to). It really did feel like something I couldn't possibly have imagined. And for someone who isn't familiar with the degree to which it's possible to imagine things that don't seem like you could possibly have imagined them, it would be easy to dismiss that option as ridiculous -- possibly even more ridiculous than ghosts.

Assuming your trying to tell the truth it was just lucid dreaming. I once dreampt that I had been bitten on the ankle by a horse. I awoke with a start and for a few seconds my ankle actully felt like it had been bitten.

 

[Venom]

Funny, this morning I heard my alarm clock in my dream....just as I was transitioning to being fully awake.