This morning I was having a dream where I was trying to escape from a facility that was well populated with armed men who were definitely the enemy. Using stealth and a good dose of luck, I made it to an exit door that actually lead to the outside and a real possibility of escape. The problem was that it was an alarm door.
I thumped my forehead on the door in frustration, did a couple of rolls to the side, and slid down to the floor. I realized the options were pretty basic. I could sit there on my haunches and wait until someone came and saw me, or I could trigger the alarm and hope for the best. The decision was suddenly made for me when I saw 4 armed men appear at the end of the tunnel. They were walking towards me.
I jumped up, opened the door, triggered the alarm, and ran like hell.
After 3 or 4 blaring pulses, I began to wake up. I realized that the “alarm” in my dream was my clock radio.
The only thing I can think of is that, somehow, my brain was keeping exact time, so it tailored my dream to reach that point so that the triggering of the alarm in my dream coincided exactly with the alarm on my clock
HOW?! Our subconscious, the place from which our dreams are supposed to emanate, can possibly be that precise?
I’d sooner expect you were simply dreaming at around your wake-up time. The real-world alarm started blaring and your subconscious heard that and incorporated it into the evolving “story”. About then the alarm got to the point you were aroused into wakefulness.
Heck, it’s even possible the alarm was retconned into your dream as you were transitioning from fully sleep to fully awake. Time is very much a fluid non-linear concept in dreams.
I’ve rolled out of bed and had my falling to the floor built into a dream. No fine timing there versus an alarm clock. Just real world real time perceptions being woven into the weird mental process we call dreaming.
When conscious, we have a linear perception of time. I think my confusion lies in the fact that I’m applying that to the dream state, also, and it apparently isn’t the case. The sequence of events in my dream would take several minutes if real but, perhaps, the brain creates it all in a virtual instant.
I know that I don’t know the real answer to that. I’m not sure science does either.
But I have had dreams with the odd perception that as the observer, I was observing it both as a linear passage of time, and simultaneously as observing the entire sequence at once. So true perception of 4D. It’s rare, but happens from time to time. I’m also somebody who rarely recalls dreams in the first place. Those I do recall must be special somehow.
Like @LSLGuy said, I think the alarm was probably going off for long enough while you were still asleep that your brain had time to incorporate it into a dream, and that last 3 or 4 ‘blaring pulses’ that you heard was after the alarm had already been going off, and you were in that transition between still dreaming and waking up.
I have lucid dreams every once in awhile, where I suddenly realize within the dream that I’m dreaming, and I think I’ve read that lucid dreams take place in that same transition period while one is still dreaming but beginning to wake up. I know that whenever I try to make the lucid dream change to be able to do or see whatever I want, I have little or no luck manipulating the dream-- I just wake up.
I had the same thing happen to me (c. 12 years ago) to the REM song “Saturn Return”–being a birdwatcher (an activity which got me to “awake” in my main life note), in the dream (a very vivid and yes lucid one) I was literally drowning in birds there were so many, flitting around and singing as Michael Stipe sang in the background. At the exact end of the final line of the song “No time to wake Galileo”, my alarm went off and I promptly woke up. [I usually don’t set an alarm since even when working my schedule was later in the day typically, but this day I had some appointment with a doctor or such and had set it to 6:30 am.]
Lucid dreaming. I’ve had a few dreams where I’ve been able to “edit” and “rewrite” dreams to suit myself, but only for a moment before I wake up. One that really left a lasting memory to me I was in a sort of adventure/action movie role. I was being pursued, and ran down to a seashore and out along a dock … and then I was stuck, looking down at the water and back at my pursuer. And I clearly heard myself say to myself, that’s no good. So I was instantly back in the situation of a couple of minutes earlier, on the shore, being chased, just like before, and running out onto the dock…but this time, when I got to the end there was a small motor boat with a driver waiting for me to jump into it and be driven off to safety ahead of my pursuer.
For a few moments. Then “I” realized I had successfully re-wound my dream and chosen a better-for-me ending, and the shock of that realization seemed to be what woke me up.
Something similar has happened in my dreams, maybe three or four times over 70+ years, and it always seems to startle me out of sleep.
OTOH, maybe it’s the waking that gives my brain back ‘conscious control’ over what I imagine, just for a flash before I’m totally out of the sleep mode.
It certainly feels linear, and in a topological sense it sort of is, in that we don’t usually remember events actually out of sequence. Though perceived duration can be very variable.
Like the (probably apocryphal) Einstein quote: ‘Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute’
I think maybe what the dreaming brain does sometimes is create an impression of a ‘memory’ of a (maybe recent past) experience. Certainly mine does: when dreaming I frequently encounter people or places I have never met or known in real life which in the dream world are completely familiar.
As a child, I was convinced that I had some kind of mental problem that made my dreams extra-weird - because whenever I described a dream to someone, they’d react like I was speaking in tongues.
Years later, I realized that it wasn’t the dreams themselves that were weirding people out, but the way I was describing them. I was launching right into the narrative as if all the characters and settings were completely normal and familiar to my listener, because that’s how I’d experienced them in the dream.
I do the same thing and I also trigger it by thinking “no, I don’t like that”. If I dream that I get shot, fall off a building, chased by a monster, etc. I will rewind it and change that part.
Also if I have that dream where you are trying to move, but weighed down I will sometimes dream that I have Tensor’s Floating Disk and then I’ll unload stuff onto it so I can move freely again.
I’ve only had a handful of what can be referred to as “active dreams” where I could influence the direction of the dream. I think it’s because I have to be at a certain level of sleep; i.e., asleep, yet not totally asleep to the point where only my subconscious is running the show.
I’ve had many dreams where the same events occur over and over until they finally happen in a sequence I like and can get to the next part of the story. Exactly like in a video game. Even while that is happening, it doesn’t feel strange or upset the progression of the story, it’s just how dreams work (which I think is trying to turn random imagery and sensory experiences into a logical narrative).
