one-time-i-dreamt:
This past night, I heard a soft whining and scratching at my door and I opened them, thinking it would probably be my dog, asking to be let in. There was nothing there and after waiting for a minute or two and softly calling out for him, I closed the door and went back to bed (my head is right next to the door so I can open them without getting up). This repeated twice more during the night and finally, I got up to collect whichever of my dog was making the ruckus and get them to sleep in my room without waking me every half an hour, only to realize that they weren’t home. I’ve been home alone this whole time. They went with my aunt to a sleepover the previous evening. After checking every room in the apartment, every closet, every cupboard, even behind doors, I ran back to bed in a hurry and tucked myself in, feeling a bit frightened about the whole experience and trying to convince myself I dreamt the whole thing. Only, it felt so real that it left me wondering about one thing.
Who was at my door?
Most likely? No one and nothing. Your sleepy brain was probably playing tricks on itself (I mean, come on, it’s a 3lb ball of jello trying to run a complex biological machine and supercomputer, and it has to do it all with less electricity than it takes to work a lightbulb; weird shit is just gonna happen).
So, it’s entirely possible that it was just a hypnagogic hallucination. Hallucinations don’t have to be visual and, especially with auditory hallucinations, it’s often difficult to determine if what you’re experiencing is real or not because your brain will lie to itself. It will pretend it heard something and then go “well I heard it, it must be real!” so it processes the imagined stimulus as if it were real, resulting in a hallucination.
Edge-of-sleep hallucinations are super common, pretty much everyone has had it happen to them at least once, because your brain is in the middle of moving from being awake into being asleep/starting to dream. So sometimes some of the “almost dreaming” leaks into the still-awake parts of your brain and you see/hear weird shit that isn’t there.
Probably, but I’d like to believe it was a ghost doggo trying to get me to play with him better than the likely truth.
just moving along like everyone else 