I have these dreams sometimes. I wonder if they are related to sleep paralysis. But in these dreams I am usually lying down somewhere, like in bed. I open my eyes… I OPEN MY EYES… okay, with some effort my eyes pop open and I see a fixed image. I get up and try to move around. I can move, sometimes I am restricted to shuffling around my bed area but in one dream I managed to dress myself, go out of my room and eat breakfast. But here’s the weird thing: my vision is “stuck” at the image I saw when I first opened my eyes, like a badly laggy webcam or whatever. If I try very hard I can sometimes catch a glimpse of my real surroundings, but the rest of the time I’m stuck staring at my carpet/wall. I’m not sure what happens after this but I don’t think it wakes me up; I think maybe I got back to sleep in my dream (yes, I SLEEP in my dreams). Anybody got any clue what’s happening?
Are you a somnambulist (sleepwalker)? It might be possible that you are sleepwalking and then going back to bed…
Somnambulance usually happens during deep sleep. It usually isn’t associated with dreams or at least remembered dreams.
I am a sleepwalker, I never know I’ve done it unless someone tells me or I wake up.
I believe it’s either a hypnopompic trance or a hypnogogic trance. Basically, you wake, but the part of your brain that puts a damper on your motor cortex (so you DON’T walk in your sleep) is still doing its job. You feel paralyzed, but you’re awake, and sometimes, some of the imagery from your dreaming brain leaks into your concious mind.
Maybe this will help. This is Cecil’s column on “sleep paralysis.”
Hope it isn’t anything bad, bro. 
Something like this has happened to me once. I don’t think it’s exactly sleep paralysis – and certainly not narcolepsy.
I was fast asleep, and dreaming that I was walking around my house. I went into my bedroom and heard David Letterman. I looked over to where the TV should be, on top of my dresser, and the TV wasn’t there. I walked around my bed, following the source of the sound, and saw that the TV was on the floor, on its side, tuned to Late Night with David Letterman. I stood there with my head cocked, watching his monologue, and wondering who the hell put my TV down there on the floor and turned it on.
While I was standing there trying to figure out what was going on, I became aware of my actual body, lying face down. I was seeing and hearing one scenario, and proprioception was giving me totally contradictory information. A very strange sensation of being in two places at once. Trying to move moved my “dream body.” I was “standing there,” beginning to suspect that I was dreaming. I wasn’t totally sure, but I was disoriented enough to feel that I’d better sit down, so I sat on the edge of my bed – and still felt like I was lying down, and sensed what position my arms and legs were in. Weird. I tried really hard to open my eyes, which was bizarre, because I had the strong sense that they were already open. Nothing happened, so I closed them tightly, and opened them again, wide. I was now looking at both a horizontally-oriented David Letterman on my TV set, and the pattern on my pillowcase, and feeling particularly disoriented, because they both seemed equally real. This lasted for a few seconds, while I lay/stood motionless, and additional waking senses leaked in – I could hear sounds coming from outside (birds and children) that didn’t fit with a Late Night schedule. After a moment, I was totally in my bed and the dream perception faded, and I felt silly for staring so intently at my pillowcase. I rolled over and thought “That was weird.”
No night terrors, thank god.
I’m pretty sure I’m not sleepwalking. If I left the little area outside my room I’d set off our alarm system. I’m also pretty sure it’s not sleep paralysis because my bedrooms in my dreams are often nothing like my real bedroom. It is a lot like what Larry Mudd described, though. 'Tis strange.
At least it wasn’t Jay Leno. You would have really had a nightmare…
:dubious: