I don’t have a very specific question here, but this sort of thing happens to me very occasionally. Let me explain by example from last night.
In the early morning, I’m having some kind of dream. A repeated noise enters into it; it’s something like banging on a metal surface and it gets progressively louder and begins to sound a little frightening and threatening. At first it’s part of the dream, with my dream self saying to somebody, “shh, do you hear that?”. But then the dream fades away and I realize that the noise is my sleeping mind picking up on the rhythms of the ceiling or window fan that is running in my bedroom. But still it is creepy and unpleasant, so I tell myself that I should wake up and end this. By now I’m reasonably aware of my real-world surroundings and am in partial control of my body. I move around in an attempt to wake myself, mostly kicking. I slap myself a bit. I pull the sheet up and down. Once or twice I even manage to open my eyes and see my room (though it is more blurry than usual). But still I don’t wake up, and the creepy noise continues. One thing I can’t manage is to speak. Eventually, though, by moving my head around enough, I do manage to fully wake up, and all is well.
I know next to nothing about dreaming, sleep phases, and the like. What’s going on here with this asleep-but-aware state?
Some portions of that experience might actually be dreamstates. That is, you might “only” be dreaming that you were experiencing the real world.
Conversely, real-world stimuli enter into dreams very often, even dreams not at all resembling the real world, so the whole border region between wakeful consciousness and dreams is fuzzy.
If you can remember to do it, the next time you find yourself in such an intermediary state, try to will yourself the other way, back into dreams, but retaining your awareness of it as a “dream” state.
Sounds a bit like sleep paralysis to me (which used to happen to me every so often). Except for the movement bit. Unless it was only imagined movement.
It sounds like you are describing a combination of sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming means that you are aware that you are dreaming and can control your dreams to some extent. It can be a desirable thing. Everyone gets sleep paralysis during some stages of sleep. It keeps your body from acting out on your dreams. However, some people wake up partially and are semi-conscious but still can’t move parts of their body. I tend to get it almost completely and it is terrifying and lots of others report the same thing. I can sometimes only move the tip of my pinky finger at first with great effort and work up from there as my hand, wrist and arm come back and use that to slap myself or push myself off of the bed to wake the rest of my body up if I can manage it. This isn’t exactly rare and it sounds like yours is mild compared to many people.
This sounds a bit like several experiences I’ve had with Mrs. DHMO—she would sometimes start talking in her sleep, full conversational volume, inflection and everything. At first, I thought she was awake and talking to me, but it soon became apparent that she was conversing with people in her dream, as I would only hear her side of the conversation. As I spoke, though, she would reply with an appropriate response, as though I was with her in her dream. Sometimes, I could influence the course of her dream by what I said.
Eventually, her “Dream Self” would get tired. As her DS fell asleep, Mrs. D would wake up! I asked her if she slept well, then I would amaze her by relating voluminous details about what she had been dreaming, as if I was there with her! This happened on many occasions, and I always found it entertaining, and quite bizarre.
I am not any kind of authority on this, but it seems the sleep states and processes are complex and multi-faceted, and we have only begun to tease out the details of what is really going on inside our heads.
Thanks for the replies. I did consider that all the movement is not real, although it certainly has seemed a lot more real than usual dreams. In any event I’m glad to know that my experiences are not as terrifying as they could be. That said, the last time this happened to me I felt conscious but was hearing a weird voice in my head, which freaked me out quite a bit and had me scrambling to wake up.
Man, sleep is weird. Now to see how tonight’s goes…
When I had sleep paralysis episodes, it was usually during a very stressful period or after a long period of little rest (usually after pulling an all-nighter writing up a term paper.) I would seemingly wake up, unable to move, and see and hear the room around me, but these visions and sounds would be intermingled with foreboding visual and auditory hallucinations/dreams. The most common involved the sense that an uninvited guest was entering the room to do me harm, and I couldn’t do anything to shake myself awake. I would think I was raising my arms (and perhaps I was, I don’t know), but I couldn’t quite turn myself “on.” At some point, eventually, I’d snap myself into reality and the weird dreamy stuff would disappear, and I’d be fully conscious and mobile. It’s actually quite distressing.
Wikipedia describes sleep paralysis as a state where you’re fully conscious. My own experiences have always been a little different–I’m in that half-way state between sleep and wakefulness. For me, it’s definitely a different sense of consciousness than truly being awake.
