Ask Readers: What’s The Scariest Thing You’ve Woken Up To? – Part 2 [30 Responses]

My parents and I had just finished checking the mail and crossed the street in the dark. Once inside, I climbed down the stairs to my basement room and went to bed. A little bit later I heard someone walk into my room. I knew it was Mom. I had been looking for something, and she had found it and was bringing it to me. I tried to open my eyes to tell her thank you, but they wouldn’t open. I tried again and finally wrenched my heavy eyelids open. A terribly tall man who looked like a cross between Steve from Stranger Things and Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events (played by Neil Patrick Harris) stood craning his neck toward me, a wide grin distorting his face. In a panic, I lunged at him, punching with a yell. My fist went through thin air and the man disappeared. He wasn’t real. I wasn’t at home with my parents but in my apartment about 150 miles away. In my dream I expected to see my mom, and in struggling to open my eyes, I woke myself up, but my brain expecting to see my mom, created a human figure out of a poster on my wall and the curtains. The adrenaline woke me up quite quickly. Pretty incredible (and terrifying) what a brain can do with a simple expectation. I admit I was pretty pleased that my instinct was to attack the hypnogogic hallucination though that punch would not have been particularly effective if the man had been real.