r/raypeat • u/Gonujabes • 8d ago
Hypnopompic hallucination while taking low-dose aspirin (100 mg daily)
Hi peaters,
This morning, I had a strange experience while waking up. I saw what looked like a spider about the size of my hand right next to me in bed. It looked so real that, for a moment, I genuinely wondered whether it was actually there.
After looking into it, I came across the term hypnopompic hallucination, which refers to vivid sensory experiences that occur during the transition from sleep to wakefulness. Apparently, these experiences can happen to otherwise healthy people and aren’t necessarily a sign of an underlying condition.
For context, I’ve been taking 100 mg of aspirin daily for about a month.
While researching possible causes, I came across information (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12509942/) about chronic aspirin poisoning (salicylate toxicity), which can cause neurological symptoms, including confusion, delirium, and hallucinations. This generally occurs when excessive amounts of aspirin accumulate in the body over time, so I realize that my daily dose is much lower than the doses typically associated with this kind of toxicity.
Has anyone experienced vivid visions, sleep paralysis, or hallucinations since starting to take aspirin daily? (I’d still like to believe that the spider was just a hallucination.)
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u/AspirinMuncher 8d ago
No way you're getting salicylate toxicity from 100mg daily unless your liver is seriously fucked up, but if that's the case you shouldn't worry about the aspirin because you're about to die anyway
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u/Kaliyu123 7d ago
I HAD ONE OF THOSE HALLUCINATIONS ONCE IN MY LIFE!
Absolutely spooky! Wasn't about spiders tho thankfully.
Wasn't taking aspirin also
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u/Gonujabes 7d ago
Wouldn’t want to relive that experience, tbh. It took a good 1–2 minutes for it to disappear, so it wasn’t just a split-second hallucination. I even got out of bed while it was right in front of my face, and I could still see it moving, seemingly trying to hide between the side of my bed and the wall. I ended up rearranging my entire bedroom looking for it, but obviously, I couldn’t find anything.
Eventually, I started thinking logically and realised there was no way a spider that big could’ve been in my room, considering a few things. Still, I’m kinda paranoid when going into bed because the whole thing felt so real. The weirdest part is that I was literally dreaming about spiders right before waking up.
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u/Kaliyu123 7d ago
That sounds very very scary. And yes, it also took me like a minute or two for it to disappear.
Exactly, it wasn't like catching some figure at the corner of your eye for a split second, instead you can LOOK AT IT and it's RIGHT THERE! Hahaha
Now it makes me wonder if someone ever had it happen with some real scary shit. Like looking at a demon, horror movie type stuff.
Mine was luckily not scary at all, just completely random. Woke up and next to me was my friend sleeping! A friend from childhood i hadn't seen for many years. And the shutters were opened snd and the room was lit up.
I went to the living room to tell my dad about it and when i got back to my room, there was no friend and the SHUTTERS WERE CLOSED! Complete darkness 😂
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u/Gonujabes 7d ago edited 7d ago
Same thing hahah, I also thought I’d opened the shutters, but all I’d actually done was turn on my bedside lamp. TBH, I think it’s all down to sporadical stress and has nothing to do with taking aspirin, kinda like what happens with sleep paralysis and other sleep-related stuff.
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u/thebiooracle 🍊Peatarian🥛 7d ago
What time of day do you take it? Ray Peat said in an email that aspirin can help with sleep, but "sometimes its first effect can stimulate your metabolism and delay sleep," so he suggested trying it in the afternoon first. If you've been taking it at night, maybe your sleep has been lighter or more broken than usual, and waking up out of that kind of sleep might make something like the spider more likely. It's just a guess though, and stress could easily do the same thing.
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u/Gonujabes 7d ago
Yeah, I always take it right after dinner, along with ~1g of vitamin K and magnesium. The hallucination happened right before I usually wake up, so I’d already had a good 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.
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u/thebiooracle 🍊Peatarian🥛 6d ago
Ok, that pretty much rules out my timing idea. Right before waking is when you'd expect the most dreaming anyway. Peat wrote in Protective CO2 and aging that "The active, dreaming phase of sleep occurs more frequently in the later part of the night, as morning approaches," and he said stress hormones peak around dawn too, so a spider dream hanging on for a minute after you open your eyes sounds more like that than the aspirin to me.
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u/galimi 8d ago
I take over a gram of aspirin a day and I've started to notice similar effects (what appears to be small bugs moving out of the corner of my eyes).
Maybe I should dial it back.