Are ghosts and aliens real? Or is it just all in our heads?

The focus of this blog is not to disprove the existence of God in anyway, but to use science to explain why people see ghosts or aliens.

What is Sleep Hallucinations?

There are different types of sleep hallucinations, but the one will be discussing today are Hypnagogia hallucinations. The most common place people claim to see a ghost or alien is in the bedroom. This may be explained by hypnogogic (wakefulness to sleep) hallucinations or hypnopompic (sleep to wakefulness) hallucinations. Hypnogogic hallucinations is when you start to have visual or auditory hallucinations just as you start to fall asleep. Hypnopompic hallucinations happen just as you wake up from stage one of sleep (sleep stages: link 1 and link 2). People who experience these types sleep hallucinations don't realize they were asleep and when they wake up they won't remember the things they saw, or it will be hard to recall it clearly. Some of these visual hallucinations will be of people, shadow figures, shapes, animals, etc.. these objects will be either stationary or move around the room. Auditory hallucinations is when you hear a noise that isn't real. I could be of a baby crying when there is no baby in the room, or a woman's voice speaking to you, etc..

http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/05/16/hypnagogic-hallucinations-causes-types-treatment/

People claim to have seen dead relatives or ghosts at the foot of their bed just standing there or even speaking to them. The ghosts would then disappear, sound familiar? With aliens you have people claiming to have been experimented on or even rapped by these creatures. They come in with bright lights, some victims claim they were floating above their beds suggesting some type of lucid dreaming. And the aliens disappear.

Personal Experience

This is part of my blog where I usually share my personal experience of the topic I am writing about.

I've experienced these types of sleep hallucinations all my life, they started when I was really young. It used to be I would see a shadow figure in the corner of my bedroom or some odd shape moving around my room. It would scary me half to death. And it didn't help that my mom told me these demons in my room and that I should keep a bible under my pillow. After doing so the hallucinations wouldn't come back for a while.

Fast forward to my adult years and I am still having them. I would wake and see snakes all around my room, beside the bed, on the floors, and even on the ceiling. Some hallucinations are powerful enough to get you scared and running out of the room. The most recent thing I saw was too terrifying to remember exactly what happened, all I remember was I looked to the right of my room and saw my room twisting toward me, and I looked to left of my door and saw the same thing. I ran out of my room into the living room where I saw someone laying on the couch with his back turned to me. It was my father but my brain didn't quite process that, all I saw was a stranger. I once woke up and didn't see my brother in his bed so I went to look for him, when I got back to my room he was sleeping in his bed.

But the strangest thing that I've seen was these odd symbols all over my walls, writings if you will, they reminded me of what the biblical king Daniel saw. I always wondered if these strange words or symbols meant anything, even if they did I wouldn't be able to record it, because these symbols were only visible for a few seconds.

Daniel 5: The Writing on the Wall. If you never read Daniel 5, the story is about Daniel the king, one day while at a party drinking wine with his many wives and servants he noticed that there where fingers on the wall. And from those fingers and unreadable language was written by God. The king said he'd make anyone who could translate this message would be rich and be the third highest ruler in the kingdom. If you wanna know what it says you'll have to read the story.

Next I will be exploring more into hallucinations in ancient times.