A Small Victory

They are completely random and appear at a fast clip. Sometimes there are people, and they are doing things like walking in the woods or baking cookies. Sometimes the visions are scary and bizarre faces and images appear and then disappear quickly. I've seen skulls and decapitated bodies and monsters.

Often, it's like I am traveling. There is a road, usually a dirt path, and it blurs as I move fast down the trail. Most of those visions end up with me walking through piles of leaves, as if I am looking for something. I can hear the crackling of the dry leaves, the snapping of branches, and in those visions there is always a fear, as if I may find something I don't like.

Voices accompany the sites once in a while, people calling out names or just yelling or saying odd phrases that mean nothing to me.

These happenings have a name. It's called a hypnagogic state.

The hypnagogic state is that state between being awake and falling sleep. For some people, this is a time of visual and auditory hallucination.

Good to know I'm not losing my mind. It's always better when something strange happens to you that there is an actual name for it. Makes you feel less alone.

Some people attribute this state to alien mind control. Don't worry, I don't. Although I used to think that I was psychic and that these visions were meant to tell me where to find dead bodies or kidnapped children.

I don't mind this, not even when it's scary. Having these visions is like going on an adventure every night. I wonder where they come from, though. Experts on dreams say that your dreams and visions are your mind's way of cleaning out the clutter in your brain. Maybe that skull I saw last night was embedded in my thoughts somewhere from an image I saw during the day, but didn't register with my consciousness. Maybe it stands for something, and my mind is just trying to purge itself of unecessary thoughts.

And maybe, just maybe, it's the aliens.

I saw the movie Signs last night. It's one of those movies where you watch it and think, eh this isn't so creepy, it could have been better. But then the movie is over and your house is dark and you are looking over your shoulder and seeing strange shadows.

I'm not so egostical to think that earth dwellers are the only living creatures in the entire solar system. There has to be other life out there. The universe is so vast, so deep and wide, that we may never know what does exist beyond where we are capable of traveling.

What if there are aliens and they can control your mind, or seep into your thoughts? What if the visions I see are supposed to be messages? What if I was singled out and I'm supposed to take the images I see and connect them like a puzzle and solve the world's problems with them?

Ok, maybe not. Still, I'd like to think there are more to the things I see when I close my eyes than random pictures my brain cells are shooting at me. Beings from outer space controlling my mind would be kind of cool, because then I could blame all the goofy things I do on them. Sorry, officer, the aliens told me to do 70 in a 40. I couldn't control myself.

These are just two separate things that have been running through my mind since last night. Sleep hallucinations and aliens. Combinging the two is just a result of too much coffee and not enough sleep.

But, still....don't you wonder?

What do you think? Are we alone or do we have company out there somewhere?