What’s the origin of the concept of asking someone to pinch you to see whether or not you’re dreaming? And how’s that supposed to work? That you can’t feel pain in your dreams or that someone would never pinch you in your dream?
I would imagine it comes from the fact that being pinched would cause you to focus your mind more completely on the pain and make you more wary of your surroundings.
It’s the thing where you can’t feel pain in dreams.
There’s a lot of things you can’t do in dreams. One is to piss. When your bladder gets full at night you get a dream of searching for a bathroom, and awake desperate to go.
I personally don’t recall smelling anything in a dream, but I don’t notice scents much anyhow.
I’ve also never felt sleepy in a dream.
I thought the pinch was supposed to wake the dreamer up. Shrug
And I’ve pissed in my dreams. Only to find out the pissing part wasn’t purely dream.
I woke up soon after, and did a load of laundry.
You said that out loud, you know.
Yeah, I know. I have no shame. I don’t consider it breaking toilet training, In the dream, I had finally found a proper facility.
So we have at least one data point against According to Pliny’s assertion you can’t piss in a dream, he says you will wake up desperate to go. I once woke up and found I just had.
In my case, I dreamt about Niagara Falls. MMV and apparently does.
I occasionall urinate in dreams without wetting the bed.
BZZZZ - Bullshit! I’ve done all of these in dreams. I’ve also died in my dreams, and I dream in color. Pain and drowsiness factor into my dreams fairly often, and standing in front of a toilet peeing was my single most common dream as a child.
…Did you wet the bed?
Um, 'cause a few times while dreaming I was taking a whizz and… Uh, nevermind.
But yeah, I’ve read, I’ve felt pain, I’ve peed, and I’ve died in dreams.
The pain seemed more muted than it would in real life, but it was definitely pain.
The dying freaked me out a bit but actually wasn’t that scary. Coming back as a ghost sucked though.
“Pinch me , I’m dreaming…”, is a phrase said during waking hours, and refers to sleep by allusion. Simply means, “If I’m drifting to dreamy thoughts, pinch me awake”, or, Wake Me Up from whatever reverie.
As to the Pinch, my best memory is an early morning Psych class; bad teacher, interminably boring, and I’d weld my thumb and forefinger to my upper arm during slide presentations, trying to squeeze a futile attempt of “Pinching Awake” during the class.
Count me in as one who has urinated in a dream without wetting the bed.
I understand the expression to mean something along these lines:
“Life, as I am experiencing it at this particular moment, bears an uncanny resemblance to something out of one of my fantasies. So much so, in fact, that I suspect I am not actually living this and simply having a particularly vivid dream. If however, you would be so good as to pinch my arm (in a purely Platonic manner) my brain might accept the experience of a mildly unpleasant physical sensation as sufficient proof that this moment is really real, and not an hallucination from which I will awaken at an inopportune moment, dooming me to spend the rest of my natural life in bitterness and regret over what has never been.”
In other words, “I’m really hoping that this isn’t a dream. Pinch me so I know I’m awake.”
When I was a kid, I had a dream in which I began to suspect I was dreaming. I pinched myself, on the grounds that it wouldn’t hurt in a dream. It did, so I concluded that I wasn’t dreaming after all. Then I woke up.
I’ll just add that I believe that I’ve also experienced bain in a dream… I got whacked badly with a thick stick or a staff in the vicinity of my eye, and it hurt REALLY bad. Looked into a mirror, and saw that the skin of my face was cut and the eye bloodshot and swollen.
Ended up using that series of images and impressions in a story. 
I wonder if anything happened to your face in real, waking life. I had a dream that I broke my arm, and when I awoke, I found it wedged between my wall and the bed. It wasn’t broken or even hurt, but the sensation was uncomfortable enough that it was “broken” in my dream and most certianly hurt more in dream land.
Hmm… no, I don’t think so. It didn’t hurt any more when I woke up, and I can’t think of anything I could easily have done to my face in bed to account for that feeling. I remember looking at myself in the mirror again after I woke up, just out of curiosity.
I’ll go ahead and admit to having urinated and ejaculated in dreams. Both usually (but not always) require doing laundry. I don’t believe I have ever died in a dream, and I can’t remember feeling pain, but in my dreams I am terrified of heights (which really sucks, because buildings in my dreams have ladders instead of stairs).
I always assummed that “pinch me” meant “wake me up”.
That’s what I said back in post #4, before all the bedwetting started. Or “If this is a dream, I’d rather know now, so pinch me to wake me up.”
But If you’re chrisk, not even going upside your head with a quarterstaff will wake you from a dream.
Actually, I do think that I woke up pretty soon after the whack, or I wouldn’t have remembered it so clearly.