Last night I had a particularly active dreaming session. I can recall at least three distinct dreams (exploring a Gothic castle, panty raid at my old summer camp, and fighting giant robots led by evil angels in a dystopian future). Most interesting of all was that during the summer camp episode, I went to sleep and had a dream within that dream. I dreamt I was an aspiring musician pitching my album to a record label. I even woke up from the dream back in my summer camp bed and my bunkmates told me they heard me singing in my sleep.
I don’t think I’ve ever dreamt I was dreaming before. Very weird.
I’ve never dreamed that I was having a dream, precisely, but I have dreamed of someone else having a dream, and being inside his dream. It was a very odd dream about a boy in a room in a big, Victorian-style house. My viewpoint was that of a passive observer, and the boy was catatonic (or otherwise non-responsive) when he was awake. When he slept, I was drawn into his dreams, in which he was locked in the room and another boy was running through the house, looking for a way to free him.
I recall posting a full description of the dream (or dreams, rather, as I had a series of them), but I can’t find it now. I suspect the thread was lost to the hamsters.
I suffer from chronic insomnia, and often dream that I am in my bedroom, trying to fall asleep. I also have dreams within dreams a lot.
One recent dream scared the shit out of me. I dreamed I was on my mat trying to fall asleep, looked up and saw my Boss and her two Yorkies in my room. Then I dreamed I woke up and they were still in my room. Then I woke up for real, absolutely terrified. It took me over an hour to calm down and fall back asleep.
Back in college, I would often study in the small library/event room for my language department. One day I was busy studying for a test of some sort there and was rather exhausted so I decided to take a brief nap on the couch there. About 15 minutes later I got back up, walked around a bit and sat down to resume my studying. A very ho hum standard wake up kind of thing, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. That’s when I realized I was still in a dream. Crap, oh well, time to wake up for real, I thought, so I tried to force myself awake again. Once more, I walked around a bit then got back to studying. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Then I realized that, still, I hadn’t actually woken up. This whole process repeated itself another few times, each time just as mundane as the previous, until I finally woke up for real. You can be assured that I pinched my arm and did as many of those “am I dreaming?” tests as I could think of.
I had been very tired that day so my conclusion was that my brain was trying to get me to sleep by whatever means possible, including outright trickery.
I’ve done that. Once, when I was living in a tiny studio apartment, I dreamt that I found an entrance to another room in the back of the closet; in the dream I thought I had somehow forgotten this other room existed. I went through the door in the back of the closet, only to find myself on the street outside, wandered about a little, and then woke up–in the dream. Still dreaming, I got out of bed and did the same thing twice more. When I finally did wake up in reality, I stayed away from that closet for the rest of the day.
So not just a dream in a dream, but a RECURSIVE dream in a dream, involving space warps.
