The Giant Bee

This would have been sometime in 1999 or 2000. I was living in a little apartment in and going to school. I didn't take drugs.

The sound was as clear as could be: scrabbling, as of insect legs on the pillow, next to one's ear.

I was awake and on the other side of the room almost instantaneously, with no intermediate steps between. I flipped on the lightswitch.

On the pillow was a monstrous bee.

It was the size of a nerf football, hairy, its chitinous body glistening. It moved back and forth and up the pillow in the herky-jerky manner of bees and, cresting the top, crawled behind into the space between pillow and headboard.

I knew I was hallucinating. Of course I knew it. But I didn't only see the gigantic bee; I could hear it. When it moved its segmented legs on the fabric I could hear the rustling and when it agitated its wings now and again, as it did absentmindedly, I could hear the sound of its buzz emanating from its vibrating thorax.

I stood there, on the far side of the room, my hands on my head, for a long moment, breathing raggedly. I was panicking.

What did I eat today? Did anyone give me anything? What was the year? Who was the president? What is the fourteenth letter of the alphabet?

Had I been drugged? Was I having some kind of seizure?

I went into the kitchen and paced furiously. I knew there was no bee. But why didn't my eyes and ears know it? I poured myself a glass of lemonade and tried to calm down. I looked at the clock on the microwave. It was past four in the morning.

I went cautiously back to my bed. Did I check behind the pillow?

I did.

I have never seen the bee or any other nocturnal vision again.

I have wiled away hours on the internet trying to explain the experience. I often wonder if I had hallucinated another kind of animal if the whole episode would have qualified as a religious experience. Would the giant bee be my spirit animal? What if, god help me, I had hallucinated a person? What would I have thought, then?

The only thing I ever came up with was that, apparently, it is quite common for people to have audio-visual hallucinations just before falling asleep, all the while knowing full well that they are hallucinating. These are called hypnogogic hallucinations and are related to another strange nighttime phenomenon, the feeling of being paralyzed while asleep.

However, what I seem to have experienced is an even rarer form of the same sort of thing. Called hypnopompic hallucinations, they occur upon waking up and are basically the artifact of a brain still caught in a dream even after it has woken up.

Nowhere, however, have I read of anyone seeing giant bees.