odd type of nightmare: Has anybody experienced this?!

Some time ago a friend of mine describe an odd type of unpleasent dream. At first he told me it could not be described in words, but after some friendly intergation we have been able to come up with a describtion that loosly describe the phenomena.

The dreamer finds himself in a vast empty darkness. He is not in his body instead he is nothing but his mind. Then an external force comes flying towards his, he does not see, hear, feel, smell or taste this force yet he is absolutly sure it is there. This force comes flying at him with the interval of heavy drums, and from several points surouding him 360 degrees. Every time the force hits the entity that he is a pang of fear trembles trough him.

we have found someone else who had experienced the exact same dream. and besides that we have found one piece of litrature that seems to describe this type of dream: Freedrik van Eeden, a study of dreams. (1913). in this paper van Eeden tries to classify the diffrent types of dreams. one of the types is the pathological dream, wich he describes as “In pathological dreams, however, they may be extremely strange and harassing. The sleeper may have a feeling as if he were a square or a circle, or other sensations of an utterly indescribable character.” but this is the only things he mentions.

has anybody else had this types of dream? does anybody recognise it? does anybody know where to find a better decription of the pathological dream by van Eeden?

thanks alot! :wink:

It reminds me of the dreams I get from the first sleep cycle after a period of insomnia. I imagine that these dreams are actually not from REM sleep. They can look/feel like greyness, blackness or complete void, and I have sometimes had the feeling of time and space bending and twisting around me.

I have also had dreams where intense fear has radiated from a static image, for example a full moon seen through a window in a completely dark room.

This article has some information about non REM sleep, nightmares and sleep disorders such as night terrors and sleepwalking.

That’s a yogi state. He may of been having a higher awareness experienced mixed in with some dreaming. Ive been mind and no body before in such states.

There is also state in which I call “the void”… a place of nothingness. Its outside both time and space. (I think of it probably the place we pass throu right before we incarnate on this earth).

On the dutch LD4all I read that this is sleep yoga.
You are lucid while sleeping but you are not dreaming.
It is possible to create a dream.

I am not sure if we are talking about the same thing but, maybe it is at least similar?

I have had a bunch of weird hard-to-describe “night mares” or more unpleasant dreams growing up. I remember my first one about 20 years ago. I was just a kid and had just seen steven spielberg’s IT (scary clown movie). You would think i would have nightmare of the clown but, nope i had trouble sleeping that night. Then when i finally fell asleep i was super uncomfortable. All i saw was a black voided space. Then shapes started appearing. It was like little bubbles scattering around growing and shrinking. This continued to happen for the rest of that night. As i would wake up and go back to sleep it would just keep repeating.

Since then i have had a few. Dark voids and like toothpick shapes. It wasn’t particularly scary but it was uncomfortable and made it hard to stay asleep.