For many years I thought it was the hand of God rousting me up from certain death. Yes, it was a severe flu (Hong Kong, late 1960s), and according to my older brother my parents were very worried. (though I cannot get any detail, my mother died when I was young and my dad is completely clueless)

I have since learned, that there is a point in sleep where the brain creates spurious signals (hallucinations). It is the usually accompanied by sleep paralysis (Brian Dunning at Skeptoid has a few entries in his podcast about it, Steve Novella has mentioned that they happened to him when he was under stress in medical school). There is a point in REM sleep where things happen that seem so real, but are not. Most common for me is that I hear my name called, or the doorbell ring just before I wake up (and yes, a couple of times I have rapidly gotten up, thrown on bathrobe to see who was at the front door, only to see no one there).

Once in a great while I will hear a voice in my head when I am awake. Though it is often when I am very tired and stressed. So I don’t worry about it, and try to go to bed. Since I am older, my reasons for being tired now often have to do with hot flashes. sigh

Note: About four times in my life the sleep paralysis fails, and I have shouted and walked while asleep. The most dramatic was when early in my marriage when I had been reading Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series of books. It was about an hour after I had gone to bed and hubby was in the basement mucking about when I started to dream about the “thread.” My mind had the dangerous deadly “thread” falling from my actual bedroom ceiling down to me and I started to scream. Not only in my dream, but in reality. My husband woke me up because he thought I was being assaulted and had run up from the basement with a baseball bat.

I wonder if they should study to see how many of the children sleep walk (which is common in my family, we have lots of weird stories).