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False awakenings
Kris from Reality Shifter has posted a thought provoking article about false awakenings and lucid dreams.
She describes the false awakening as occurring:
when you’re dreaming and believe you’ve woken up when in actuality you are still dreaming and only dreamed of waking up. You “wake up” and begin to go about your daily routine — visit the bathroom, brush your teeth, get dressed, etc. — until eventually you realize you’re still dreaming.
At that point, you may slip into a completely new dream or you may wake up from the dream for real this time. Or, even more intriguingly, you may have another false awakening and believe you’ve woken up when instead you’re still dreaming and once again only dreamed of waking up.
This phenomenon can be pretty scary because you’re not expecting it. I remember one false awakening I had in which I sat up in my bed, stood up and then fell through the floor into a bottomless cavern. Guess that was a dream after all…
If you’re interested in reading more about this bizarre feature of dreaming life, be sure to check out Keith Hearne and David Melbourne’s classic article, as well as Hearne’s method of inducing these experiences on purpose. Both of these resources are over twenty years old but since this field is so marginalized, little is still known about this state’s properties and possibilities.
Topics: lucid dreaming |
October 21st, 2007 at 8:46 am
I’m really interested as well in the state where you believe you’re awake, even though you’re not (at least not in any conventional sense), and it even seems real looking back on it. As far as I know - from experience and reading - this is really just the state connected to the “hag-ridden” nightmare type described in David Hufford’s book The Terror That Comes in the Night. Paralysis, malign presence in the room, etc. I’ve actually had experiences like this that vary from the classic model, but the distinguishing factor (in relation to “dreaming that you’re awake”), is that you would swear the experience was a waking one even after waking up “properly”. False awakenings are often vividly convincing in the experience, but seem to be easily identifiable in retrospect as dreaming. But some of my experiences related to the hag-ridden type experience only have the odd content to flag them as non-waking, even in retrospect. (The paralysis is often convincingly rationalized, like, “I’ll keep really still!)
October 21st, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Gyrus, I’m also very interested in the state you mentioned. When I was a teenager, I had frequent experiences of sleep paralysis without dreams (wide awake but with eyes closed and completely unable to move). I didn’t sense a malign presence in the room or experience other nightmare-like events, but the experience was a bit frightening simply because I was completely alert yet couldn’t move. It only occurred in the morning around the time I would usually wake up, so I always assumed it was just the result of my mind coming to full alertness a moment before my body did. The experiences didn’t have any odd content and instead typically had content I could verify as real events, such as my mother coming into my room to tell me I should get up or else I’d be late for school, which I could verify later by asking her if she had actually done it or if it had been part of a dream. I guess I’m lucky I’ve never had that kind of nightmare/hag-ridden experience. Even without the nightmarish content, it was a spooky experience. Now, after studying lucid dreaming and also meditating regularly for several years, I’m more accustomed to the “body asleep, mind awake” state and that sort of sleep paralyis experience doesn’t spook me quite like it did when I was a kid.
~ Kris
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:39 pm
like Kris, i too have had my share of terrifying sleep paralysis experiences… the first as a child with no knowledge of the state so of course i thought i was being haunted by various devils.
Gyrus is right that what these two experiences (false awakenings and sleep paralysis) have in common is the very “real” - apodictic - quality about them in the moment. both these states illustrate well how our “reality” is less fixed than our beliefs about it….
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Dungan: In my experience the quality of reality is different between the two (false awakening / sleep paralysis). Both seem very real at the time, but in retrospect false awakenings are obviously dreams, but sleep paralysis - even though it can be seen as a “non-ordinary” thing, still feels as though it was “real”, i.e. involved real-time perception of the physical world where your body was. Just my experience.
Something else along these lines is my experience of, apparently “dreaming with open eyes”. I had a dream once where after drifting off I “flipped” out of my body. I wasn’t really lucid, but I decided to walk out of the house to see what I could see. In the garden was an odd white house with something coloured on it. It looked really familiar, and gradually, gradually I realized it was just like the coloured poster on my white bedside set of drawers - only on its side.
Without any break, it became clear that I was actually staring at the poster next to my bed on the drawers. I was awake, with my eyes open, and the whole thing was “on its side” because I was, lying in bed! I’ve had a few of these.
It’s weird enough where you’re almost “zombiefied” in sleep paralysis and are hallucinating or having a perception of your actual surroundings. To transition from a deep dream experience to being awake with open eyes - what’s going on there?! (Kind of a rhetorical question, but interesting pointers might be cool
)
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:15 pm
i agree about the different qualities to the states - sleep paralysis truly is “in between” because you can open your eyes or sense external conditions. i wasn’t trying to lump them together by any means…
and i can definitely say i’ve experienced the eyes open/dreaming too. this to me really highlights how important interpretation is to our visual processing. these light sleep states are very close to waking consciousness in terms of biorhythms so it’s easy to slip back and forth. so dreaming isn’t so far from waking as it seems (compared to true deep sleep). hypnagogia is one of my favorite “in between” states personally. amazing visuals, sound hallucinations, textures and feelings of falling and drifting…. it’s a regular bizarro world in there.
October 24th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
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