I also used to see "shadow people" as a child.
I'd see them out of the corner of my eye and when I turned they were gone.

Also I used to have a re occurring dream that was really strange and always hard to remember,
years after having the dream I was on mushrooms and heard a woman's voice. I had a sudden realization that the voice and phrase were the exact same as my dream.
Before that I could never have remembered the dream well enough to remember there even being a voice.

Wow man, you and I had some pretty similar childhood scary shit going on.. I had all that. I still to this day have to pretty much bury myself in my covers so nothing can get in from the edges.. lol. It was more than just that though. I had crazy messed up horrible scary night terrors as a child too that really sucked. Picture your worst dmt trip on a 5 year old fairly innocent mind. I would look under my bed and just as I did I would be thrust into these night terrors. Damn that was some scary stuff now thinking about it. I am now confronted by the aliens damn near every single time I dose on mushrooms. Pretty much never encounter them on spice.

۩ have you ever read the book "Communion" by Whitley Strieber?..

You hallucinated goombas dioxyippus? that IS freaky

Yeah, it was. Sounds funny now, but for a seven year old it was terrifying

I discovered the soft press on eyeballs thing too as a child! I loved it, I remember the visual patterns would evolve and change from simple 2-d lightning bolt visual to "checkerboard" patterning and then it would go super 3-d and i could move about in the space and observe from different angles, there was a certain phase of the visual pattern that I remember especially liking that would eventually evolve out of the basic "checkerboard" pattern. I remember when I told my friends at a sleep over, about how you could see "fireworks behind your eyes" if you pushed softly and they all had never heard of it, we spent the next few hours ecstatically describing the various visual phenomena we saw. Good times... kinda reminds me of some the "sleep overs" I have now....

wow flood of memories....

as a child i could make myself have this same fun reoccuring dream just by thinking of it before falling asleep, it would be my own neighbourhood as a lucid dream and me flying around with this power ring to fight off men in suits from getting my friends/mom, but it was never scary.

around 7-8 i woke from a dream and stared into the face of a lizard/dragon for at least 20 seconds completely petrified before running out of my room

and when i was 22 walking home on a empty bicycle path around midnight a green orb raced past me and followed the path at a extreme speed it was not being projected from anywhere and the light semmed to emit from nothing and was suspended 15ft off the ground



edit- oh my god you guys just gave me a rush of nostalgia, i just remembered the pressing on the closed eye thing aswell!!

You two just reminded me of my first "I dunno what that was" experience/memory. It wasn't sleep paralysis, and it wasn't a dream. Hallucination? Of course. At 3 years old or even younger...I felt I knew the secret to everything! My first existential thought at such a young age. But I remember now. The giant gummy ball atoms in the shape of the double helix leading up! YES it twisted up! I was jumping from giant balloon red atom, to giant balloon blue atom as they led up, and up, and up inside my closet. Vivid music resembling the theme song from that children's show "reading rainbow" was playing. Where it would take me? Somewhere secret! Somewhere safe! I just felt it! I felt safe, going farther and farther away from the real world. I also had a sense of panic. I needed to make it there fast or else the path would be closed to me forever. Path to where? Perhaps going to a land like Terabithia or Narnia....I looked up. I saw the brilliance through a constantly shrinking pinhole of brilliant light, dancing JESTERS flying in the sky doing acrobatics fluid and free in a lush green land, blue skies and ponds, much like a clean suburban park. They played with these atom orbs and juggled them!!!

It was so significant that even now, as I recall, I have this feeling of pure safety, like a warm memory wrapped up in a safety blanket! Significant that about 5 years later, I would have this memory for my own as it was returned to me for the very first time through the medium of a very special video game called NiGHTS into Dreams. The game's protagonist was NiGHTS. A jester in purple that flew and did acrobatics chasing down nightmarians that gave children bad dreams.

Imagine to my surprise that just only 3 years ago, while looking for a way to minimize the occurrence of sleep paralysis, I stumble upon dmt, and here to the nexus. This lead to my reading of reports of countless jester contact in trip reports, not to mention the elves. Oh there were elves in NiGHTS into Dreams. They themselves transformed and sang, and their singing brought objects into existence and changed the games music. What was Yuji Naka smoking when he made this?

Anyways...pressure phosphenes yes. I did it. As a child I would rub my eyes to witness the flashes and patterns. Sometimes those flashes were so bright, that they hurt. I just knew that the longer I held down on my eyes, the more intricate the pattern would get. I would eventually see tiny little neon green onion bulb men running away from the center, and hiding in the flashing patterns. I don't know if I damaged my eyes, but I have a very serious case of visual snow now. Darkness is never dark, and I can't even see white as an individual color without the dancing of tiny red, green, and blue indistinguishable dots, and massive circular wave patterns permeating every shiny light source or complex pattern like a truck loading docking door, stucco popcorn ceiling, or even shaggy carpet. It's like I hold the entire multiverse (along with the gravitational lensing phenomenon in my very eyes!

pressure phosphenes fascinated me as a kid and i still do it from time to time. when pressing my eyes i always float through a swirling darkly multi colored cloud at the end of which is a fuzzy image (much like the center of the homepage) clears up into a really vivid image that if i move my eyes at all anywhere but where they were when the image came to be it goes fuzzy and i go back in the tunnel and have to keep my eyes still for a different image to appear.




i too have seen orbs. but the ones i've seen were white; one time on the way back from the airport from the maps conference last year on the highway at night a white orb appeared (and while keeping the same distance ahead and above me) and "scanned" across me in that it appeared moved across and disappeared (the whole thing lasting 2-3 seconds). i also once saw a triangle formation of these orbs 150-200 feet above someones yard one day driving back from school. i immediately turned around and it was gone. i've also had corresponding dream(s) one where i was on a hill playing with a football (go figure) and watching this mothership slowly unload little one man space ship type things with the white orb triangle formation with a pod attached big enough for say, one being. that was weird and one can only wonder the true correspondences.

but going back to things we've seen as kids. i used to be able to meditate on the fact of "what is the meaning of all this, why are we here, what would it be like if the physical realm didn't exist etc" and i would get a euphoric feeling and would "appear" (watching in 3rd person) three (orb/spherical?) entities chilling above where the earth would exist but doesn't in this black void. also one time i swear to god i was snorkeling with my family on vacation and saw three squid chilling, if you will, side by side with 2 eyes and a smile black spots on them. three smiling squids smiling at me.

very true.
i used to have pretty strong CEVs as a child too, just needed to focus a bit and BAM. colourful patterns and other weird stuff.
like fractalling lighting-like patterns and webs and stripes too. lots of stuff.

weird.

I always dreamt about fleeing away from this giant "thing", looking back at it I suspect it might have actually been more of a presence than a actual, physical thing. I don't for sure know WHY I couldn't see it, or if I simply didn't dare to do so. Yet I pictured it to be a giant, evil robot sent to destroy me and wherever I hide out, it would somehow find me but BEFORE it would indeed find me, I could somehow sense it coming close and ditched my hideout to keep running away from it.

This dream was clockwork for some time, I awoke terrified, drenched in sweat, sometimes I would wake up in the wierdest places; Once I woke up sitting in a fetal position in my computer chair completely soaked in sweat and urine, I had actually been so mortified that I had pissed myself and somehow managed to crawl up in my chair while still sleeping having no memory of my action at all.

To this day, I fear that hell-bent-on-torturing-me robot, althought I haven't dreamt about "it" for years it did reoccur once for 2 years ago, I had somehow forgot about my previous ayahuasca session including a rather large dosage of Syrian Rue and ate a BIG meal afterwards. The day after I felt dying, which I was due to a serotonin syndrome that had been caused by the adverse effects of the mao-i combined with the food I ingested.

After feeling as if I carried the badest strain of the T-virus ever for a week a fever broke out and I stayed in bed for another week and in the end of that week, the "robot-thing" reappered more real than ever which made me swear off psychedelics for quite some time.

Other than my hellish dreams stalking me with paranoi and sheer terror I haven't really "seen" to much as a kid. I was however, quite often by mishaps or just clumsiness knocked unconscious by random objects, because of it I share my mothers view on divine intervention, without it I would probably not be alive, on several occasions

To this day, I've always been shine upon by luck.

I used to lay in bed in the dark, around 4-6 years old, and keep my eyes open for as long as I could. So many weird shadow shapes/figures would come alive and do things. I never knew what was going on or questioned it, just enjoyed the entertainment. I've done this a couple times as an adult and have seen what's like a shadow cartoon playing out on a duffle bag that was on the floor in my closet. I thought that was super weird at first! I attribute it all to our natural fascination/awareness with what our minds are capable of doing. The fascination/awareness was as alive then as it is now, which is why we take the substances we take now. You seem to loose that fascination/awareness as you get older...I know I did at least. Glad to have found it again though. Thanks Psychedelics!
<3Carlinesque

I used to try and guide my visualizations when I was young. I remember when I was about 8 or 9 I would do this in class and when I was home. After a certain point I remember I was able to make fleeting shapes and figures. It was alot different then my current imagination, because the images would always seem fluorescent, like bright neon. Nowadays I can get a semblence of certain images in my head, but nothing like the ever-changing images when I was a kid. I do recall that I would be able to direct the ribbon-esque strands of lights into shapes that I would imagine. Sometimes I would even be able to make whole images. Not sure when I lost the ability to do this, I guess I just fell out of practice, though I always wondered if it could provide any type of beneficial psychological alteration to try and re-establish the ability.

The first time I did this was at church during a prayer. I saw Jesus rising above some rocks. I was completely blown away and for a while I thought I had seen Jesus. I continued doing this whenever I went to bed and realised that a lot of what I saw was residual imagery from my day, or stuff like clouds/galaxies and stars.

I still do it from time to time for a laugh.

Peace

PW

I too have had a few experiences as a kid that seem "impossible" yet I don't remember them as dreams and they really stick out as vivid memories surrounded by a fog of memory loss:

My earliest memory was when I was 2-4 years old. All I remember was laying in bed at night and seeing a bright "star" slowly "coming down from the sky, getting closer and closer to my house. It then "stuck" to the window of my bedroom. It was a bright, glowing classic "star" shaped object- I remember it as a "star coming down from the sky". I also remember "feeling funny". I don't remember what happened next.

Another incident, around the same time period, I remember being at my grandparents house, going down to the basement, and looking at a statue of a small dog. It then "came to life" and started growling viciously and barking at me. I was terrified. Again, my memory is a fog immediately before and after this. I am tearing up right now just thinking about these experiences. They were that powerful.

I don't remember these incidents as dream memories (and I am a proficient lucid dreamer and keep a dream journal so I have a lot of experience with dreaming and dream memories). Another weird thing about it is that I have no memories of anything else besides these experiences during this short time period of my life (first 3 or 4 years of my life).

Does anyone else remember any unexplainable, "impossible" things like this happening as a child?

I like this - not heard of anyone mentioning it before. Used to see strange imagery in condensation which is quite like low-dose LSA when I was young. Also watching patches of burnt-in light floating around my bedroom was fun for me too. Perhaps some sort of messed up foresight of future interest in psychedelics. I've always been able to see little bubbles when looking towards sunlight at times - anyone had this?

Before going to sleep I would get a strange mental feeling- like nostalgia, like dejavu - accompanied by a sort of extremely brief vision of 'something'. I would always think, 'what was that?' and sometimes it would repeat again. I would often wonder if it happens every time I'm about to fall asleep but it wasn't always an indication that I would be as sometimes I would not fall asleep until long afterwards.

The vision was kind of like cogs or machinery but at the same time absolutely nothing like that. I would witness it briefly and then instantly forget what it was. The closet description would be dirty, ancient, organic, biological, mechanical cogs.

EDIT:

Oh and one more thing, I remember being a little kid in the front seat of my mums car and I saw on the horizon up in the sky very far away what appeared to be the silhouette of a hot air balloon. But it was spinning from end to end - on its vertical axis. Very very odd.

I used to close my eyes when I was a child and see gray shapes coming at me in 3d. Like they were swinging at me, then away, then back at me. There were different shapes and they would take turns presenting themselves to me. This would happen any time I closed my eyes.
Another thing when I was small, was I could look up at a window on a building and I would get almost a flash image of what it looks like looking down from that window.

When my mom was a small kid she used to have a secrete language she would speak with her friend. They would be talking away and my grandmother couldn't understand them. There are two words I know of that they used. Taratomes were cucumbers and um ums were elephants.

I had a strange obe when I was 9ish in public bathhouse.
I was standing in the queue on the stairs for the waterslide. There was allot of people in front of me. Suddenly I was just this ball of consciousness traveling at high speed. I came in to a factory where they were making some cans of preservatives. There was a big commotion as someone had lost a finger in the machinery. I have no idea how long time passed but suddenly I found myself back at the bathhouse, half way up the stairs with NOBODY in front of me and a kid trying to walk past me as I was just standing there. I was confused and wonderd where all the people went as it was not a big place and they where just gone, but got hold of my bearings and went up the stairs and went for a ride on the slide. Trippy...

From PiHKaL: the Dissociative Spiral

1. Supernova. Ann Shulgin refers to this as "macrocosm-microcosm". There is a sensation that one's "core" is rapidly shrinking, growing ever smaller and smaller, down to the size of a subatomic particle. Accompanying this shrinking sensation is a feeling of one's "outer shell" expanding equally rapidly, until it fills the entire universe. This is generally considered as a pleasant sensation, with a slight characteristic of free-fall.
2. Lilliputian Hallucinations. After shrinking down to a proton, the Lilliputian Hallucinations begin. Everything that one imagines or recalls seems grossly distorted in size. Human figures alternate between tall and thin and stretched out like taffy, and shrunken and rounded. Many people see long, thin ribbons of multicolored energy.
There is a disturbing sense of Infinity with these hallucinations. Most find this phase extremely grating on the soul, mentally painful, perhaps because one is perceiving objects to have totally opposite characteristics at once. Some people are familar with Lilliputian hallucinations from fevers.
3. Veils of Light and Darkness. The third phase consists of alternating visual fields of total, thick black and ghostly white or greyish-white. Each visual field gives way to the opposite as if veils were being torn and dissolved. The "black veil" is often described as being much darker than ordinary darkness, since even the phosphenes (the patterns one sees with eyes closed in the dark) are absent. Most people also find this phase extremely unpleasant.
4. Contact. The fourth phase, and the rarest, is also the most spectacular. After passing through the last Veil, there is a sudden sense of being in the presence of a profoundly powerful, loving, intelligent entity (or occasionally, multiple entities). These typically greet the individual with empathic communication, sending messages of familiarity, joy, love, concern, and occasionally a vague sense of humorous curiosity at finding a human being in this place. This phase is the most profound, and the most pleasant. To my knowledge nobody has ever done an EEG during the Dissociative Spiral, but I have a hunch that the temporal lobes would probably be doing something interesting. Perhaps this is a common occurance, but one that most people are incapable of perceiving. In any case, it is frequently observed with DXM, typically phases 1 and 2, occasionally phase 3, and rarely phase 4. /end quote

Reading this completely freaked me out. Almost exact description of what I experienced a few times per week for several years in early childhood. The only lasting impression I held onto was a feeling of being in a small dark hole, somehow mentally connected to the universe via strings of energy. Whether I had died or not, and the amount of time I would be in this existence mattered little. Each progressive stage of the spiral was increasing uncomfortable at first, but after time I found ways to be at ease leading up to the final stage of the visions. The supernova effect for me was felt as if my hands/feet were 'balooning' to great size. If I opened my eyes and looked at them, the sensation would halt and cease to progress beyond that effect.

I have never tried Ketamine, so can't relate if the 'k-hole' notion fits at all with my childhood experiences that were not drug-induced. 3rd plateau doses of DXM w/ brainwave frequency stimulation succeeded many times at inducing the veil effect and triggering the full spiral vision for me - often times coming with a great wealth of recalled repressed/forgotten/blocked childhood memories.

With LSD, I never experienced this same feeling. Same with DMT so far after 3 breakthroughs - no familiarity with any profound visions from childhood thus far.

I have for some time now felt strongly that some type of factor set exists that, in effect, wires an individual's neural connections to 'prime' it for a certain type of experience. Some aspects in life are best aided with psychedelics, others with amphetamines, still more with stimulants, and so-on and so-on. A brain primed for a specific state (the root of an individual's 'destiny' or 'fate' if you will) could conceivably allow an individual to reach altered states of consciousness naturally without external factors.