Last week’s Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast had a great discussion on this topic.
How do you know you’re not stuck in a dream RIGHT NOW???
[Waltzes kicks boulder.] Thus I refute Jackson. 
Similar things have happened to me. Sometimes I have woken up, but go back to sleep and continue the same dream. Sometimes I think I’ve woken up and gone back to sleep and returned to the same dream, but it turns out the whole thing was a dream.
It’s similar to what the previous poster was describing. I will try whatever I can to physically wake myself up – try to physically lift my eyelids up, or roll myself off the bed onto the floor, and in the dream I will imagine doing exactly that, and then go about my business, walking around the house, grabbing a snack, getting ready to go to work, etc., and then I realize that I’m still dreaming. Rinse, repeat.
It’s hard for me to say how long it lasts, since dream time and waking time do not always correlate. I will say that this happened more frequently in college, when I would lay down for an hour or so to take a nap. It used to happen perhaps once every few months, before I was able to recognize the triggers and avoid them (biggest trigger is trying to sleep without setting an alarm, unless I’m planning to stay down for the night).
In talking with my friends who have not experienced this phenomenon, I have noticed that I am an unusually conscious dreamer; in other words, I become aware that I am dreaming much more frequently than my friends do.
And no, no one else in the house knows that it’s happening. Apparently, no matter how fervently I try to scream for help, no sound comes out and I don’t even stir in my sleep.
This sort of thing happens to me from time to time, but I’m not completely convinced that I actually wake up intermittently. It sure seems like I do, but it might be that I just dreamed I wake up. It’s really very fuzzy until I actually DO wake up.
I don’t think sleep paralysis is the same as lucid dreaming. I don’t remember having sleep paralysis, but have lucid dreamed all my life. I was nearly thirty before I read a magazine article on lucid dreaming and was shocked to discover that not everyone did it.
I can’t imagine trying to wake up just because I know I’m asleep. Even if bad things are happening, I usually know they’re coming up before they happen and I can take steps. If I don’t take steps fast enough, I can rewind - or fly - or just remind myself that it isn’t real. I even teleported once.
As to Doctor Jackson’s question, I know I’m not asleep because I can feel gravity and I can’t feel what’s going to happen in the next few minutes. Also, I can’t change my point of view to look at myself and don’t feel that tug that I can pull back on to fly or rewind.
I was a lucid dreamer as a kid. I used it to wake up from nightmares. Since I knew that I always woke up if I fell from a high enough distance, I’d “change the scenery” so that I was in a high spot and jump.
Once I was with one of my sisters in a dream and tried to wake her up, too, by pulling her off a cliff with me. But, sadly, she was still asleep when I woke up.
I have always had very VIVID, crazy, sometimes violent dreams that I remember all too well after waking. It’s always amazed me how the emotions I was feeling in the dreams would still be with me once I woke up! THAT can be very unsettling… especially when those feelings linger for most of the day…
I used to tell my family and friends about them until they started giving me really funny and worried looks, like they were wondering if I was mentally disturbed or something… :eek: I stopped telling anyone about what I dream. I’ve pretty much experienced it all…sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, the ability to wake myself up if things get TOO out of control.
I also have a certain reoccurring dream… For me, these are the most disturbing dreams of all. You see, there’s this house I dream about… a really big house… that I’ve been dreaming about for the past 35 or 40 years now. It’s definitely NOT a house I’ve seen or been in in real life. Nor is it a house I’ve seen on TV. BUT I KNOW IT SO WELL… and BAD, BAD things have happened in this house. I’m seriously terrified of it!!!
When I wake up after a dream about this house, it worries me and I find myself fretting about it ALL day… I’ve dreamed about it so many times and I remember every awful detail… and I don’t want to! I DO NOT WANT TO!
I was looking at Real Estate videos of houses a few months back and I saw a house with some similar features to the one in my dream. This house was on a dead end road and you had to drive past the house to enter the driveway. As the person filming drove down the road, the house was on the driver’s right. They drove past the house, then turned right into the driveway. The driveway then veered sharply right so that it ran parallel to the road, this put the house to the left of the driver and the road they’d just turned off of was to the right. The driveway passed in front of the house to circle around to the side where there was a sharp incline downward to get to the garage on the back. There was a huge tree with branches that hung over the driveway and the right corner of the house that you had to drive under to go around the house.
I have to admit, my heart started beating alarmingly fast as I saw these similarities to my dream house. So much of the scenery and the drive up was like my dream house BUT the house itself was not the same. This two story house was painted a bright white with yellow shutters. Not at all like my dream house… But it was disturbing to know how I was affected by just those few similarities, how seeing that video caused my heart to beat faster and my adrenaline to spike… so damn scary… It’s just a dream, right?
I have never experienced exactly what you decribe but I’ve had sleep paralysis several times and indeed it’s very unpleasant.
What I’ve started experiencing fairly recently is having radom images flash before my eyes in the seconds after I wake up. It feels as if my brain goes into panic mode: “What, time to wake up already ? But I haven’t processed this yet. And this. And this. And this.”
Weird.
Typically, the reason I want to wake up is because I have something I want to do, like I know I’ll go out in a few hours and I want to start getting ready, or I want to get a workout in before it’s too late in the day – something like that. If I’m sleeping, realize I’m dreaming, but know I don’t have to do anything for a few hours, I’ll just keep on trucking merrily along in my dream.
OK, that makes sense.
Clever. I especially like the experiment with your sister. If she had awakened, the world could be a different place.
This happened to me today. This was the first time it happened. I was stuck in my sleep. I wake up and then realize this might be a dream and I try to wake up finding myself in the stuck in the same way again. I had thought twice that I have woken up but I wasn’t until the third time. The worst part was when I realized I was dreaming and wanted to wake up, I couldn’t move, couldn’t even shout for someone. After I woke up for real I have been asleep for only about 20 minutes. So after staying up for a while I went back to sleep only to happen the same thing more times than before. I tried to wake up desperately and when I did I was happy and normal but to find that I haven’t woken up yet. I tried desperately to wake up. I tried to shout out to someone, to move my hand to make any sound, to clap, but I couldn’t. Even after waking up I was not sure whether I was really awake or not. I am so scared to go back to sleep now. It was like trapped inside an imaginary reality. It was scary. I didn’t sleep more than an hour. I’m sleepy but afraid to fall asleep again. I thought I was mentally sick or had psychological problem until I read these comments. But still I’m afraid to go back to sleep.
Top this one:
When “lightly dreaming” - not usually lucid - if I need to “get out of this stupid dream” but am not conscious - my mind generates a perfect mimic of a doorbell - it is always a two ring sound:
Ding-dong
Ding-dong
This will wake me.
I’ve had real sleep paralysis twice - the first time was BEFORE I knew that this was possible.
A truly scary thing - you’re awake and able to move eyelids and eye balls - and nothing else.
Definitely one of those “Actually, I CAN live without this little trick, you stupid mind!”
Yes, but not recently. The strange thing is, if it happens at night, it’s usually a bad dream I’m trying to escape from. On the other hand, if it occurs during the day, it’s usually because I’m trying to wake up but I just can’t seem to do it, even if I’m aware of my surroundings. I’m not the best sleeper at night, but if I nap during the day I can go out like a light.
Reviving this thread because it happened again this weekend, and it was a particularly awful one because I was suffocating (in the dream, my bedsheets had wrapped themselves around my face and were smothering me; I couldn’t awaken myself so I was trying to scream for my husband before I ran out of air but of course that didn’t work).
Yesterday my husband asked me “Why don’t you take a nap?”, and I responded “Because I almost suffocated the last time I tried that.”
I’m looking for sympathy and company, since this doesn’t seem to be any sort of genetic thing that anyone else in my family suffers from, and my friends don’t suffer from it either.
Also wondering if there’s any literature out there that further explains what’s going on and why it happens to some people and not others.
Upthread you mentioned that you are lucid in some / all of these dreams?
With my paralysis dreams, instead of trying to focus on moving, I just focus on imagining something to destroy whatever the current threat is. The more over the top, the better.
So if there’s some creature stood at the side of my bed, instead of trying to move, I imagine lasers, bombs, fire, everything, converging on this poor creature.
If nothing else, it’s enough of a distraction for me to avoid panicking. I know it sounds like a tip from a cheesy movie or something, but it works for me.
When I originally created this thread in 2010, there was so little research done on the phenomenon I was experiencing that I didn’t even know the term for it. It’s false awakenings, which is different from sleep paralysis. I took to the Internet this morning, checking again to see if any sort of research had been done on the subject, and was very pleased to see that a few articles have actually been published in the last year or so on the condition. The articles start out by stating that it’s been pretty under-researched and not a lot is known still, but I’m glad to see it at least being acknowledged, and hopeful that more will be understood about the condition in the next decade.
Here are the articles I found:
https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/false-awakening
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dream-factory/201912/false-awakenings-in-lucid-dreamers
It happened to me in the last week or so. My wife didn’t like it either.
I don’t know if this is being stuck in a dream or just lucid dreaming, but I do recall experiencing a dream of where once I was very thirsty and needed a drink of water, but I couldn’t because I was sleeping. Another time of wanting to take a piss…but I couldn’t because I was sleeping.
Epilogue: as to the second scenario, when I did indeed awake, the bed was dry.