Mine are similar to Cardigan’s.
I have falling dreams occasionally & used to hit the ground or I wake up mid-fall. Skydiving a few years back has dramatically changed those once terrifying dreams into dreams about flying or controlling the fall like with skydiving.
I’ve also had a few similar sleep paralysis episodes. I just tell myself it’s not time to wake up yet & I go back to sleep with no issues after that. No paralysis-related nightmares either oddly enough. Ever since the fall-to-flight discovery, I’ve had very few nightmares. If I do they’re apocalyptic or they’re chase scenes.
I hit the ground once, during a dream where I was falling down an apparently endless cliff until I suddenly hit bottom.
It was during a thunderstorm, and as far as I can tell my dream mixed the sound of thunder in with my dream and interpreted it as impact. I woke up with a jerk so hard it felt like I levitated right off the blanket when I “hit”.
I dreamed I had been with a army squad somewhere in France. I had taken a few shots and taken out single enemies at distance, but not as a sniper - just general combat.
Squad sniper was not available for some reason, so my previous shooting had been noted and was told to fill in, got a few more hits as a back up sniper - but really again it wasn’t the sort of thing you might see on specialist sniping teams, again more a general grunt with good aim.
After a few of these shots made good I almost believed I had some talent for this, then I looked around the base of a tree for my next target - never even heard the round that ripped my head off.
Woke up and didn’t sleep again that night I can assure you.
Real weird dream, so specific and no history of it before or since
My version usually involves me driving on a dirt road on a cliff, around a hairpin curve, with water at the bottom of the cliff. The road usually gets too skinny to drive on or disappears. The sensation of steering while desperately hoping the wheels are still on the road is freaky.
Sometimes we make it. Sometimes, someone else is driving, and I’m usually on the outside seat. Sometimes we fall and I wake up, or switch to another dream.
Many many times.
As a child I slept on the top of a wood bunk bed set.
My parents would not go to sleep until I had fallen out of bed which I apparently did every night shortly after going to sleep. ( I have always dreamed a lot my whole life. )
Long story short as to why I needed to be on the top bunk and why other methods to keep me in were not used, at least Dad cut the legs down so I was not only closer to the floor, my little brother below had less vertical room and Mom put a thick rag rug Grandma made where I usually landed.
Now my side of the story.
I had a very specific dream and I always hit bottom. I learned to relax in my dream because I seemed to know it was a real event and that if I was totally relaxed, it would not hurt. I did this for several years, actually for as long as we were in that house. We had that bunk bed for many years after but I no longer had to sleep on it at the next house. Little sisters never had any trouble.
I have come to believe that because of the way my dreaming would go, this recurring dream would start just as my body was committed to the fall and I would get all the way to total relaxing before I hit the floor.
I have had other falling dreams over my life and I can sometimes control my dreams or watch them from a third person vantage point but in all the dreams I do not seem to die for one reason or the other, sometimes just waking up before I would have found out.
I have gotten up many mornings just plum wore out from dreaming.
Once I was on a island with my friends and other anonymous people and there was some kind of a red rope which looked like a plank, I started playing with it and randomly launched in the air and I was falling, but the weirdest thing is, I knew that I’m gonna fall and I was like “uhh, again?”. When I fell, I just stood and walked over to another island using some type of a bridge, there were my other friends, we did some random crap, talked and then literally a creepy orange-ish spider spawned aand it started running towards me, I was running and then just woke up (btw I fell like 3 times in that one dream)