help, i'm falling and i can't wake up.

[smootman]

This is my last question for awhile, I swear, and it's the best, I swear. It's something that everyone says: If you are dreaming you are falling and you hit the ground before you wake up, you will die. I've had several dreams where I've been falling and I've hit various ledges on the way down, but I've never died (obviously). How did this "belief" start? It would seem to me, that the first person (if they exist) who fell to their death in their sleep would be unable to warn anyone about it. So who came up with this? Is there any truth to it?
Along the same lines, though, I've had dreams where I've been cut by a knife and when I woke up, the spot where I had been cut was tingling. Is the pain we feel in our sleep real pain (aka is my girlfriend scratching me or kicking me to move over?) Or is this phantom pain? Why does it linger? Why don't I feel like I actually fell from a great height and hit the ground when I wake up, but minor pain seems to "cross over".
Finally, I found it odd that this question isn't in your archives. Has no one ever asked this question? I figured it to be one of those "standard" questions that was present from the beginning.... If I'm the first one to ask this one, I'm sure I'm dreaming.

[Phage]

I suspect that people came up with the idea that you would actually die if you died in your dreams as a sort of explanation of their fear. Why wake up all sweaty over a dream when it was harmless?

Sleeping pain can either be real and integrated into the dream, or just something your mind makes up. When you wake up you find out that you are not plastered over the ground, so extreme pain does not have a chance to cross over. A minor cut is harder to disbelieve, so your mind is stuck for a while thinking that it really should be hurting, before forgetting about it.

[lesa]

What's probably happening when you dream about being cut, is you feel real pain for some reason, then it is incorporated into your dream. It's normal to incorporate things you are hearing and feeling into a dream. Have you ever had a dream where there's a loud noise, then woke up and realized it was your alarm going off?

As for your other question, think the idea obviously got started with people who dream they are falling, then wake up before they hit the ground. The dream is scary, and they start to wonder, "what if the next time I have the dream, I hit the ground?"

Sometimes I hit the ground in my dreams, sometimes I don't. I've noticed it's much scarier when I wake up before I hit the ground. For a second, I feel like I'm still falling. When I hit the ground, then wake up, I'm not afraid, because it's over.

[Mangetout]

I fell to my death in a dream once (or was it twice?) and when I woke up, I was actually dead!

[Phnord Prephect]

I've had more than one dream in which I fell, hit the ground, died, and continued to have the dream. In one case, I wandered my high school as a ghost for a while. That was fun.

Note that I'm typing... I didn't die in real life. Freddy was pissed.