My first girlfriend experienced frightful dreams just before she woke up. She told me stories that she could hear someone in her sleeping room protecting her from bad things happening to her. Because she was a bit to alternative health and I am a rather sober guy I did not paid much attention to it first. When I looked it up on the Internet I found more stories of people experiencing exactly the same thing. It said that most people believed they were protected by their guardian angel and they prevented bad things. I did not knew what to think but I showed her the article I found and she was very happy that she was not freaking out and not being a weirdo. But when I went to University I found out that these experiences are indeed very common but through a disorder called Narcolepsy.

The most important symptom to Narcolepsy is that you have sudden attacks of sleep which you can not control. Your body is in control and decides when and where you go to sleep. Another frequently seen symptom of Narcolepsy is Hypnagogia. Hypnagogia are hallucinations that occur just before you wake up, some might experience this as someone watching out for them while others experience demons trying to strangle them.

Hypnagogic hallucinations are not so rare as you might think. Although not everybody will experience them so intensely as my former girlfriend, almost 40% of all people will experience them in some way.

Although Hypnagogia is related to Narcolepsy, it is not true that you have narcolepsy when you are experiencing these dreams before waking up. Hypnagogic Hallucinations will occur when you are in times of a lot of stress and when you are having problems falling asleep. Stress can do a lot of weird things to your body and when you are able to relax again they might dissapear again. This was also the case with my girlfriend, the moment she knew it was nothing to be scared off the hallucinations slowly dissapeared. First she had them everyday and now she is only experiencing them when she is under a lot of stress again.

It is important to realize that not freaking out when this happens to you is very important. When you know for sure that you will get back control within minutes than you have no reason to be scared. Another trick that often works is concentrating on 1 finger and try to move it. When you are able to move 1 limb you will likely snap out of the hallucinations.

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