How often in your dreams do you wonder if you are dreaming?

In My Humble Opinion
1

We all know the cliche “pinch me, I must be dreaming!” But in a good percentage of my dreams (I’ve never kept a log but I’d estimate somewhere between 5-10%), I wonder to myself if I am dreaming. I almost always come to the conclusion that I am not dreaming, and the reasoning is always bizarre and wrong. Every once in a great long while, I do come to the realization that I must be dreaming, and I therefore have a lucid dream.

But most of these dreams involve me being able to jump really high, or being able to fly. I start thinking to myself “Hey, is this a dream? I can fly! No, it must be real life, because the grass looks so green and real…” or something along those lines. In my dreams, I never try to actually pinch myself, or do anything that would physically harm me, but I do often wonder if I’m dreaming, in dreams where I can do something physically impossible.

It’s odd to me that somehow, in my dream-mind, I am able to convince myself that the dream is actually real life. This used to be very confusing for me, as when I would wake up, it took me a good long while to realize that what I had just been experiencing was just a dream. This is now always immediately followed by a sense of sadness that I can’t actually fly, or I’m not the smartest person in the world, etc. I did SUCH a good job convincing myself using dream-logic that it was real life, and I was wrong! Ugh!

Please note, I’m not actually talking about waking dreams, or false awakenings, where you “wake up” within your dream and have another dream. Those are especially disorienting, but separate from being aware of the fact that you might be dreaming. But if you have those dreams, you can talk about them to.

So in short, how often do you think to yourself in your dreams, “is this a dream?”

(What’s funny is, in real life, I never wonder if I’m dreaming. So I should be able to rationally conclude in my dreams that if I AM wondering if I’m in a dream, then I must be. Since I never sincerely wonder about whether or not I’m dreaming when I’m truly awake)

2

I’ve only had that happen once that I recall. And when I figured it out, I was able to stop the bad thing about to occur from happening, so I guess it was a lucid dream.

3

I enjoy dreams of the semi-lucid variety. (Heck, I enjoy a reality of the semi-lucid variety…) About once a year, I will have an experience similar to what you describe.

(About once a month I’ll have a false awakening dream.)

And, once, not long ago, when I fell and dislocated my shoulder, and was in intense pain, I actually wondered, for a few moments, if I was asleep and reality was all just a dream.

(It wasn’t, and I very clearly remember thinking, “Oh, F***.”)

4

Yeah, in the 2 or 3 moments of my life where time seemed to slow down as I realized I was about to get into a vehicular accident (hyrdoplaning or skidding off the road on a sheet of water or ice, having a car next to me make a right turn in front of me without signaling from the middle lane when I was in the right lane), I had time to wonder, “if this was a dream, I’d be waking up right… about… now…”, and then I didn’t wake up. The crash, the impact, the flying around, the bumping my head and not feeling any immediate pain due to the adrenaline - it all seems unreal (especially the “no pain” part because of the adrenaline) for what seems like 20-30 subjective seconds, probably way shorter in reality.

5

It happens to me sometimes (infrequently) and yes, bad logic is always involved in explaining it away. “Grandma? But I thought you were dead. Of course, it all makes sense now! You were living here in your big rambling house with steps up and down from every room and long winding corridors that I keep getting lost in * all along*! Now let’s have a bizarre conversation about jewellery until my uncle’s dog gets lost and I have to search a field.”

6

I had a dream just a week or two ago (or maybe it was about a month), where my old cat Rocky was alive and well. I started to wonder if I was dreaming, but then my mom explained to me that he had just wandered back one day and was still alive. I figured, “That makes sense,” and figured it was real life. It was nice to see him again, but I was sad when I woke up and found out I had tricked myself into thinking my dream was real life.

It seems like these “semi-lucid” (nice term) dreams happen for me more often than for others. I wonder why that is?

Also, I wonder what the mechanism is for being lucid enough to realize you might be dreaming, but not lucid enough to rationally conclude that you are. It’s really boggling to me, especially considering how common they are for me.

7

The physiological answer is that the part of our brain that analyses our surroundings and our progression through time and space is one specific area, and that area is (usually) resting while we’re asleep. So you get your lovely imagination, and your memories, and your visual/spatial senses all going - essentially free-associating, and your analytical section is off taking a nap in the lawn chair so you can enjoy the ride without bothering about how logical or reasonable it all is.

That’s one of the reasons lucid dreaming is hard - it’s a fluke. You’re really really not supposed to be “aware” in any type of self-reflective or analytical manner while you’re sleeping. Those are the bits you’re supposed to be recharging. It takes a lot of effort, and a lot of time and practice for people to lucid dream even occasionally.

That said, most people will have occasional sleep episodes where that analytical bit doesn’t conk out entirely, so you do have those moments where you think “waitaminute, I can’t actually fly - must be dreaming” or “I can’t read this, and I’m close enough to read it, and - oh, there it goes, now it’s readable… waitaminute, letters aren’t supposed to change like that.” Our mind really doesn’t like us to be “noticing” that we’re dreaming, so we employ phenomenally bad logic to convince our spotty analysis section that it should go back to sleep because everything’s really ok, and that we’re totally awake and everything’s just normal everyday life stop looking at me like that I’m trying to sleep here damnit!

I have great fun ‘catching’ myself in dreams that way and trying in the morning to remember the psuedo-logical steps I took to handwave it all away, but mostly, I do just tend to enjoy the crazy. I have a hard enough time making my waking life logical and rational. I can have fun with doors that open in one house and exit in another country, or my mode of transportation effortlessly shifting from walking to bike-riding to airplane or helicopter flying as needed for where I happen to be.

ETA - stress and caffeine have both been shown to make REM sleep more intense, but I don’t know if anyone has shown that they increase moments of “lucidity” in normal sleep. I am curious about that, and really wish that more work would be done on dreaming patterns and how people are aware or not during various types and disorders of sleep and dreaming.

8

In one of my most vivid lucid dreams, I suddenly knew that I was dreaming. I said to myself, in my dream, “This is a really interesting dream. I should write it down so I can remember it in the morning.”

Now here’s the really interesting part. In my dream, I found a pad and pen and started writing down the dream I was having. Suddenly it hit me, in my dream, what I was doing.

I said, you idiot. This isn’t going to work. When you wake up you’re not going to be able to read this. The moment I realized that, the writing on the tablet dissolved.

Then I really woke up and really wrote the dream down. Because it was a very interesting dream.

9

I’ve never questioned it, in my dreams. But I have a certain ability to just…be where I am, wherever that is, despite where I was or am going…so it’s not odd that I wouldn’t question it. I’ve known I was dreaming before, but not in any useful way; it just made being gutted across the abdomen with a VERY sharp knife, then watching blood pool out as I fell backwards into death a lot less stressful than if I’d thought it was real. :wink: (Was still pretty shocking, though)

10

Lasciel - Thank you for sharing that physiological explanation for these types of dreams. It makes a lot of sense! I try hard too to remember the bad logic I followed to determine I wasn’t dreaming, but I rarely can make sense of what I remember.

Another type of dream that I seem to have is that it kind of feels like a lucid dream in the sense that I know it’s not real life, but it’s also like a dream in the sense that I don’t have control over what’s happening. I know it’s not real, but I also don’t know that it’s a dream. It’s kind of weird, and I don’t know how much of it is just my awake-brain making sense and re-thinking what was going on, but I’ve had that kind of experience too.

I’ve had real lucid dreams where I was keenly aware that I was dreaming, but as you said they are rare, and I was in complete control of my actions. It wasn’t like watching a movie where I had no control (like most dreams). And those semi-lucid dreams also seem more real, because I feel like I’m actually awake, in those dreams, and I AM in control of my actions within the dream (I just feel like it’s real life). Bizarre stuff!

11

This is a phenomenon I find fascinating! I often dream that I’m reading the Sunday funnies page from the newspaper…but I can read faster than my imagination can “paint” the pictures. So, if I want to read the funnies, I have to do so slowly.

(Otherwise, my dreaming mind will make up excuses… The page is torn, there are printers’ errors and blurs, the page is moving in the wind, etc.)

The same is true when I try to read text in a dream: if I read slowly, I get text. If I try to read at a normal reading speed, it gets jammed up. Mighty amusing!

12

I am an extremely vivid dreamer, with all kinds of crazy off the wall dreams. But I can honestly say I have NEVER tried to read in my dreams. I’ve heard that it causes problems for people when they do try to read in a dream, but my dreaming self has never ever done it.

Next time I’m in a dream, wondering whether or not I’m dreaming, I hope I have the good sense to try and read something and see if it’s possible!

Very interesting stuff!

13

I wonder it a lot, but it tends to be absolutely mundane details that trip me up. It’s like when people watch fantasy movies and then get annoyed by how some little thing is unrealistic. So for me, it’s like “Oh, the entrance to the park is an opulent palace. Cool. Wait… my foster dog’s collar is red, not purple. Is this a dream? That’s all wrong. Oh well, must have gotten him a new one and I’ll have to switch back to red when we get home. Purple is a terrible color for him. Into the palace we go!”