Sorry you're going through that Explorelife, it's obviously very awful for you. You are, as you said, afraid of the dark, and the causes of which probably do stem back to the past, yes. But I personally believe it's the hyper-vigilance caused by fear that is responsible for creating the human shapes and figures you keep seeing. They're not there in reality, obviously. It's quite similar to a common phenomenon known as pareidolia where a person sees faces in say the clouds or the trees, when in fact no face exists. If you can begin to trust yourself more and more, your sense of reason, your inner conviction that it's only the mind making these things seem real, then these fears might start to diminish over time, little by little, and eventually may disappear all together, as fear of the dark tends to do in a lot of people. It would be something good to work through with a therapist too, yes, so eventually the day will come [the night actually] when you can finally have a very peaceful nights sleep.