Seeing shapes and other strange things when I am trying to sleep

Do not be afraid of what you are seeing , start slowly have patience and colour your shapes! The mind is a very powerful tool. :-)

ive been researching this for a while now and i think you're the closeset of similarities to my before dreams. when i shut my eyes i see a white background and a small black circle in the centre and its beeping in slow motion. then all of a sudden lots of big black circles all gather around like they're choking the small circle in a rush and the whole thing becomes black. then i open my eyes and thats it.ive been having these visions since i was just a little girl and im 21 now. for me its a scary thing, some people may think its funny that its just about shapes, but i think that this vision symbolizes something; something dark or a trapped memory maybe and i really wish to find out what it really means. did someone maybe have given you some details about it? thanks

I wouldn't try to 'fight' these visions off when you are trying to sleep. You don't want to turn bedtime into a battleground. I'm guessing you might be slightly creative? I'll just reitterate my solution that I found which helped me restore a normal sleeping pattern... So what I do is a work on my art projects in the evening. I spend time brainstorming my ideas too. if you are a writer or musician i reckon getting on with those hobbies would help too. It just seems to 'get it all out of my system' before I go to bed. But be careful not to overdo it though - sometimes you can end up overstimulating yourself but usually I'm out like a light. Anyway, I very much doubt there medically anything wrong with you.

Would be interested to hear more about this whether you find a solution or not.

Good luck

I can't believe I've found this post. I'm also a 19 year old male and I get near enough exactly what you just mentioned, pretty much every time I sleep or close my eyes (e.g. for meditation), but I've never been able to find anything describing it.

In my instance I see squares, triangles and circles, but also sometime octagons and other polygons. However I do sometimes see them in colour too, namely pastel yellow. I find that I lose all sense of scale, say for example if I were to envision my hands or my body, which I see every day, I would have no idea what they looked like or what the scale of them were until I opened my eyes, everything pulsates and becomes so insanely large it takes up my whole vision, or zooms out to be so insanely small you can barely see it (on a white background). 

As well as this, the texture of the shapes often changes between soft and pastel to grainy and dark, and I feel like my head is swimming. But the main thing is zooming in and out of things constantly. 

Can I ask if you're taking any antidepressants at the moment? I'm on Sertraline and never got this before taking it? I don't know. Anyway I get how frustrating it is and you feel like you can't sleep. I've always found that there's no point fighting it so either learn to embrace the visuals or do what I do which is to wait for about 30mins to an hour and try sleeping again, it usually goes away/quietens down by then. 

Anyway hope this helps, you're not alone!

But for me, i see a rounded shape/object (such as a baloon, shoe, or round person) and the objext keeps blowing up bigger and bigger. And getting larger until that alls i can see is one color. Normally white. Like when you zoom in really hard on something or keep blowing up a baloon. Except my object never pops. And i always expect it to.

Reading these makes me wonder if this has some type of mental connection between the past or something.

Seems like you're not the only one having these visions. My experience is slightly different, as in those few minutes that you describe, I can think of any vision I want, but the thickness of every shape I see goes without my control from being incredibly thin to incredibly thick (as thickest as I can imagine, up to a point where it fills all of my vision, and as thinnest as I can imagine). I can think of images, of people I know, of myself, every object - and it would go through that thickness game. 

Besides the kind of the shape I see, EVERY detail you described fits my story. The timing, the intensity and that radical image, the length, the inability to control it, etc. I’m a 21 male, perfectly fine without any issues. I can mention that when I were younger I had this experience 10 times more often, but it went less common through the years. Never bothered me though, it only intrigues me. 

Had anyone read about this thing? Had an opinion of a psychologist? Has a sense of the source of the phenomenon?

From what I've read about personality, there are people with "thin boundaries," meaning they are very perceptive of external stimuli and sensations. Maybe you have "thin boundaries." When I was younger, before falling asleep, there would be an object in space, like a tunnel, and it sped up until at the end there was some tiny dot, an I felt weightless- the zooming in/out phenomenon. Freaked me out and lost sleep over it, in addition to questions like why is there something and not nothing, or how could nothing exist? Also the feeling of losing gravity while sitting in a chair happened to me a lot. For me now there is mostly just a vision of a sun or circle that keeps radiating out from the center in grays and blacks, its not bright, barely defined, but just keeps moving, like going through a tunnel. At 15-18 I believe I was actually experiencing a nervous breakdown/psychotic episode, because I would see spiraling sorts of visuals that would keep me up all night, many nights for several months, in addition to bad anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and a general feeling of fear and disembodiment. Used to smoke quite a bit of pot, pills on occasion. In addition to the visuals, there was a sensation that it was better to sleep on the right side of my head, as if internal balance was thrown off when I lie on my left side. Waking up, there would be a sensation of shifting, like when you're drunk and getting the spins, but I almost never drank alcohol at the time. If your thoughts don't frighten you, or even if they do, I would meditate, read Strindberg, maybe see a doctor. 

Hi Tim,

I also have this same strange experience sometimes.

I will be picturing something in my minds eye, and without control it will randomly wobble between being extremely thin and extremely thick/wide.

I had this last night for the first time in a long time, a post-box popped into my head (perhaps because I had to remember to post a birthday card), and then it was about 6 inches wide, then about 6 feet. It's a distracting feeling, like ADSD/hyperactivity or something...I can't "hold" the image. Very strange that it always mostly changes width and rarely height.

The only thing I can think that might trigger it is trying to sleep whilst under the effect of a lot of caffine.

Another strange size illusion I sometimes have whilst trying to sleep is feeling as though the world is miles and miles away from me, like my origin of perception has shrunk to the size of a grain of sand.

I actually always enjoy these sensations and try and hold onto them when they happen, in a sort of medititive way.window.post_1488049174012_2 = function(win,msg){

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Hi,

To anyone who have this so called "problem". It's totally natural to have these visions, in fact they have a name "Phosphenes". It's a light reflections. We all have them, otherwise we would be blind but some people don't pay attention to them and some others do. I see them everytime I close my eyes and I still manage to sleep with no problem. I was always seeing them as a kid and used to find it amazing but when I grew up, I thought that I might have a mental issue and started to panic, insomnia... Then when I knew that it's normal, I started to be able to sleep again without any issue most of the time. Sometimes I can't lose it but it's totally normal. It's in your head, just stop thinking about it. 

Hi, not sure if you'll ever see this or not. I mean, I understand it's been 4 years since your post. Not sure if this will help, I see things just before going to sleep. I could describe what I see but I don't think that's important as everyone seems to experience their own unique things! For me, I think it is most imporant to "purposefully notice" or be aware of your thoughts at the time and if these visions inspire other thoughts, weather related or not. It may be some sort of message but not in words! Hope this helps!