Rational explanations

I've posted about my own experiences numerous times before, but I'll give a quick re-cap now.

I frequently experience sleep hallucinations — some times it can happen every night for several weeks, while it also might not occur for months at a time. It generally occurs just at that moment I'm about to drift asleep or if I awaken during REM sleep. I'll wake up, or at least I'll become conscious and be able to use all of my senses, and see, most frequently, spiders, rats, snakes, or other unpleasant creatures, often numbering in the hundreds, and sometimes very large, scuttling across the floor and walls; not only that, but I can sometimes hear the clatter of their feet on the wooden floor boards. Less frequently, thankfully, I'll wake up and see a figure: a person, usually a woman, standing in a corner of my bedroom or at the foot of my bed staring at me. I can see the figure as clearly as I would a real person, and I can hear its actions — its movements and breathing, for example — as if it were real. The hallucinations don't always manifest in the form of insects and figures: I'll often be lying in bed trying to sleep, but unable to because of the sound and flickering light coming from the television in my room, and get out of bed to switch it off, only to realise that it is already off, and then suddenly remember that I turned it off an hour or so ago. I sleep with a torch underneath my pillow because shining its beam on the apparition is the only way to "get rid of it." The whole experience is as if part of your mind is still dreaming, because you're not yet completely awake, but you're also conscious and alert, and due to this conflict of information — the information your senses are feeding you and the contents of your half-asleep consciousness — your brain amalgamates the two and makes as much sense of it as possible, with the consequence being the world of what you sense and the world of your dreams becoming one.

If I were a less sceptical and inquisitive person I would, by now, be convinced I have some connection with a supernatural realm, or believe that I'm the subject of a continual haunting, or be confident that I possess psychic abilities. I understand the cause of what I see and hear, and I find the whole experience quite enjoyable, to be honest, so I have no reason to believe that the paranormal has any part to play in it. Because of what I experience, I can tell when another has experienced something similar, even if that person doesn't have a genuine, rational explanation and believes the cause is paranormal or supernatural in nature. A lot of the events detailed in that thread (it's a great thread, by the way) can be explained as some variant or form of sleep hallucination. As a rule of thumb, immediately disregard any story told by a person who was in bed at the time of the phenomenon — I'll never be able to trust such stories because I have first hand experience of the fallibility of our own brains in moments of sleep and half-sleep.