Sleep hallucinations - anyone else?

[Rainlounging]

AIBU to think I’m really odd? Quite often I’ll wake up (it’s always when I’ve been asleep for maybe an hour or so) and I can see either someone/something in the bedroom or I’m convinced there’s stuff all over the bed, a spider hanging from the ceiling etc etc.

Often I ‘realise’ within a few seconds that I’m imagining it but sometimes I have to scramble to turn on the light before it goes away and occasionally it seems to get more and more vivid the more I look!

It’s happened most of my life on and off - I presume it’s stress related. I can usually go back to sleep fine afterwards once I realise there’s nothing there.

Anyone else??

They are called 'lucid dreams', not uncommon. You 'wake' while you are still asleep so you are not really awake but it seems as though you are - until you really wake. They can be good or not so good depending on the subject but it is possible to recognise the situation and learn how to wake yourself properly.

There's quite a bit of information about lucid dreams online.

I get these too, with sleep paralysis and the auditory ones, it’s definitely due to over tiredness, I think. Sometimes i experience this other weird occurrence where just as I’m falling asleep I get this kind of ‘electric shock’ feeling, charging down my head and through my body waking me back up again, it’s actually quite painful and on one occasion it happened all night and I just wanted to cry I was so tired, eventually succumbed to sleep at around 7.30am after a night of hell. Has anyone else experienced this?

There is a difference between lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis and hymnopompic/hypnagogic hallucinations. What OP is suffering with is hypnopompic hallucinations because they are able to move (not paralysed so not sleep paralysis) whilst hallucinating.
Please don't worry about this OP, it is usually anxiety/stress related, have you been lacking in sleep? This will make it worse.

I get them when I'm severely stressed, not sleeping well or if there is a big change in my life. My doctor was worried at one point as schizophrenia runs in my family. But I'm still functioning so far and I've had this since I was very young, I'm 31 now.

I get this quite a lot. It's always spiders crawling across my pillow or falling on top of me from the ceiling. Every time it happens I jump up out of bed, turn on the light and then stare at the bed. It usually takes me a few minutes to come round and realise that it was just a dream. It's crazy how real it seems at the time!