I was reading a post on Linton’s Blog today regarding his unusual half-waking experience with what may be the Bogeyman! This inspried me to write up a post about my own strange experience with a frightening creature in my dreams or sometimes when only partly awake. Now, I don’t really believe in these sort of things as real beings, but I do believe that we have all had experiences like it that we can chalk up to various weirdnesses within the human mind and with the way our brains interpret reality under different circumstances. That is to say, we have all had our own versions of a perhaps shadowy figure that seems to be visiting us in the night, enhancing our fear during dreams or while we are half-asleep and just seeing things that aren’t really there. They often coincide with things that are really happening with our bodies - ever had a dream about having to pee and then waking up and really having to go bad?
My version of the shadowy figure, is what I call “The Hag”. The Hag is really my childhood bogeyman. I believed, as a child, that this creature lived in my parents house, only coming out a night to visit me in my dreams. It lived in the basement in a little crawlspace we called “The Cubbyhole”. My hag was a nasty-looking, extremely aged female figure with a shadowy cloak that she always tried to envelope me with. She caught me a few times, but, after being plagued by this nightmare for many years, I eventually came up with a scheme to rid myself of her forever. And it seems to have worked! (crosses fingers) What kinds of bogeymen(women) have you experienced and how did you get rid of it (if at all).
EDIT: A couple of links:
Used to be scary… when I was like 6. 
I didn’t really have a bogeyman/woman but I did have a few really bad nightmares.
The one that really got me was one where I was walking through a swamp, almost exactly like the one in The Neverending Story but that came out much later. In the middle of the swamp there was a whirlpool of mud and floating above the whirlpool was the severed head of a donkey. As I would walk up to the whirlpool, the donkey’s head would be looking away from me but would then slowly turn to look at me. It had glowing red eyes.
We found out later that it was actually a poster somewhere but my parent have no idea where I would have seen it at such a young age.
Another reoccurring dream was about one of the houses on our street. I would be walking down the street and flying pigs with red eyes would fly out of the chimney and attack me.
The other was one where all the people I knew were in a long line moving very slowly. At the front of the line was a man with a three pronged garden hand rake and as the people walked by he would vicariate them with the hand rake. I couldn’t get out of the line and I could stop it from moving forward.
I soon learned how to control my dreams and I haven’t really had a nightmare since. Whenever things start turning scary in my dreams, I mentally change the scenario. “A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.” “How much like it? Was it the same cat?”
I guess I have had two “partially awake” scares too. The first was after watching Exorcist 3 while falling asleep. I was certain that there was an old lady crawling around on my ceiling. The other was when I called the cops on Molly.
Left by Archangel on August 10th, 2006