False awakenings are dreams that seem like waking life… until you get out of bed and fall down a bottomless chasm. True story. False awakenings can be frustrating, terrifying, and may even begin to impact your daily life, especially when they occur 5 or more times in a row.

The good news is that false awakenings can be managed with a few cognitive tricks and practices. FAs are basically pre-lucid dreams, as the dreamer is questioning reality. In many cases though, the dreamer actually cannot figure out if she is dreaming or not. Until the world is revealed to be an illusion!

It is our ability to think clearly in a false awakening that causes us to assume we’re awake. We’re not awake, we’re aware. So dealing with false awakenings necessitates a crash course in lucid dreaming.

Three Ways to Confirm You’re Dreaming

• If you doubt it, you’re dreaming. If you don’t know if you’re dreaming or not, especially after getting out of bed, you’re probably dreaming. Usually, we’re pretty good at discerning this kind of thing. So if you catch yourself wondering “Is this a dream?”, the answer is yes.

• Test your memory.  Try to remember the address of your current location, or your cell phone number. If you can’t come up with these details, you’re probably dreaming. Long term memory activation in REM sleep makes these details hard to get to. Some people suggest doing a “reality check” in the dream by confirming that “everything is in order.”   I find this unreliable.  We often do not notice incongruities, and assume we’re awake when we are in a dream version of our bedroom. That’s how I fell down the bottomless chasm. Sometimes there are incongruities but sometimes not. The lucid dream world is just as real as waking life to the brain.

• The threshold test. This is a caveat to the reality check method. Often, walking through a threshold can break the spell of a false awakening because the next room will turn out not to be the bathroom or the hallway, but another bizarre room or a place from your past.

How to Wake up From a False Awakening

Many people are alarmed when they realize they are dreaming. This fear can bring on the manifestation of whatever we think is the scariest thing in the world.  So it’s good to have some methods for waking up from the dream.  This works for waking up from nightmares too when you realize you’re dreaming and want to get out.

1. Try opening and closing your eyes repeatedly …. eventually your real eyes will crack open and break the dream.

2.  Stare at one object with focus… it may morph and change, but usually the focus wakes up the part of the brain (the forebrain) that moves us into the waking state.

3. In the dream, lay down as if going to bed. Just lay on the floor, don’t start the search for “your” bed. Close your eyes, and then try to move your pinky finger (or toe, or whatever extremity you choose!)   Just as in waking up from sleep paralysis, this can help synchronize the dreambody and the physical body, allowing you to wake up.

How to Prevent More False Awakenings

1. Exercise. Get out of bed and do 10 minutes of light to moderate exercise. Yoga, stretches, calisthenics, stairmaster… whatever is easy. Warning: for some, exercise may make it difficult to get back to sleep. However, this is better than a 100% chance of not getting back to sleep because you’re too emotionally exhausted and scared.

2. The Nap Snack. Have a small carb-heavy snack before going back to bed. Warm milk still does the trick too. But don’t have a nightcap; alcohol disrupts sleep patterns and can lead to more weird sleep occurrences.

3. Relax before going to bed. False awakenings seem to be related to hyper-vigilance.  So do what you need to do to feel safe and emotionally secure while falling asleep.  We all have our little rituals.  Time to bring out the teddy bear.

4. Stop partying so hard. In general, refrain from alcohol before bed, and stay away from caffeine anytime after lunch. If you’re prone to FAs, these substances affect your REM sleep more than others.  Also, getting good sleep at regular intervals will help.  This is why FAs are common with college students and those who work night-shifts, swing-shifts or don’t sleep much in general.

Turn False Awakenings into a Lucid Dream

Of course, if you are feeling adventurous, you can use the false awakening as a chance to explore the dream world consciously. Instead of scrabbling to wake up, take a look around. Explore the house. Walk through a wall and see what’s on the other side. Spin around and marvel at what happens next. In this way, false awakenings can be blessings in disguise.

If you’re having multiple false awakenings, this is a good move psychologically too.  Sometimes, these spontaneous lucid dreams may be caused by some emotional material that wants to be confronted.  So confront it.

I’ve noticed that, at first, my false awakening dreams are devoid of other characters.  But if I wait around, or walk into the next room, often I’ll find some one who wants to interact. Often, there’s drama involved.  Usually, though, an angry dream figure is looking for a chance to say some peace, to be heard. Most of a nightmare’s energy is the resistance to whatever needs to be expressed. That’s what makes a nightmare scary — the fact that are being faced with something we don’t want to see. Once you face it, with bravery and with love in your heart, the nightmare figure usually transforms and becomes more communicative.  It may never come back, taking those false awakenings with them.

Image credit: “Dream on” by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

Sleep Paralysis is a troubling sleep condition that is deeply misunderstood in our culture. Experienced by millions as an incubus attack or being “ridden by a witch,” sleep paralysis (SP) has biological causes that are related to sleep hygiene, stress, and insomnia.

In SP, you are aware of the body’s paralysis that normally comes with REM (dreaming) sleep.  This paralysis is what keeps us from acting out our dreams: a pretty important evolutionary skill that prevents us from injuring ourselves or our sleeping partners when we are dreaming about hunting tigers and bears.

This muscle paralysis is really frightening if you don’t know what is happening.  It can feel like being pushed down into the bed, being suffocated, or like a heavy weight crushing down on the chest and throat.

And meanwhile, you feel like you are awake, with full thinking capabilities.

This is the original waking terror that inspired the word “nightmare” which is old Anglo-Saxon for “a crushing sensation at night.”  The image above is Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare, painted in 1781, depicting an incubus demon sitting on a woman sufferer’s chest.

SP can also be a symptom of a more serious disorder, such as sleep apnea or narcolepsy.  However, isolated sleep paralysis (ISP) is not a dangerous condition, despite how terrifying it seems at the time.

Sleep Paralysis visions have physical and emotional causes

About 20% of the time, ISP is accompanied by realistic, and often frightening, hallucinations. In my opinion, the underlying physical causes of ISP do not invalidate the psychological impact these visions can have on dreamers.  Known as hypnagogic hallucinations (HH), these dreams are literally projected into the waking realm where we are laying down with open eyes.  All over the world, across cultures and throughout recorded history, people have told tales of being sat upon by demons, ridden by witches, and haunted by spirits when they are in sleep paralysis.

A scientific worldview does not invalidate these claims, as medical historians and folklorists have argued for over 30 years.  The night visitations of ghosts, monsters, vampires (and even aliens in many contemporary accounts) are psychologically real encounters, not simply stories that are fabricated because of a belief in ghosts and goblins.

In other words, the question is not whether or not if the demons are physically real, but whether or not they greatly affect the dreamer as an extraordinary experience.

Yes, they do.

These visions can be terrifying, and they can be equally life-changing.

Why demons won’t go away

So how do we cope with nocturnal spirit attacks in the 21st century?

Sadly, many people do not share their experiences, for fear that they will be laughed at, or that they are losing their sanity.  Others try to forget these hallucinations in the daylight of reason, but stay up late at night afraid to go to sleep.

This problem has affected me too, as someone who has suffered from ISP/HH for most of my life.  In fact, one of the reasons why I studied dream research in grad school is because I needed to find away to face these lucid nightmares that were robbing me of sleep and negatively impacting my life.

In the last five years, I’ve freed myself from unwanted nightmares, thanks in part to my nightmare reseach and dreamwork, and also to a supportive community and family.

A Holistic Approach to Sleep Paralysis

My solution is an approach that treats sleep paralysis and the accompanying visions in a manner that respects the physical, mental, cultural and spiritual levels of the phenomenon.  This holistic approach to ISP/HH allows us to untangle the various influences on the experience.

In this way, we can work with each “thread” to reduce the nightmares, lose the fear of the unknown, and start getting better rest again.

With time, these unique visions can also become a reliable gateway to other extraordinary states of consciousness, including lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, ancestral encounters, and guided journeys to realms beyond our imagination.

Free Download – The Report

To learn more about sleep paralysis, I invite you to download my free Sleep Paralysis Report. This 13 page report discusses the symptoms, causes and hidden opportunities of sleep paralysis. The report also discusses how to wake up from sleep paralysis and how to prevent multiple occurrences in the same night.

You don’t need to give up your email or anything, just click here to get the Sleep Paralysis Report for free.

It’s a PDF; you’ll need Adobe reader or another PDF reader (like Preview for Macs) to see it on your computer. It’s also not copyrighted, which means  you can share it with people you know who are looking for help with their sleep paralysis visitations.

“Those who were still suffering from nightmares after two months faced an even greater risk. These people were five times more likely to attempt suicide a second time,” says author of the thesis, Registered Nurse Nils Sj str m.

This study highlights the importance of nightmare assessment for suicide watches in psychiatric hospitals and other institutions.

In my mind, it also brings up the age old research question about nightmares: are they helpful in dispelling terrors or are they only creating more stress? This is no either/or scenario, but this correlation certainly begs the question. Could working with nightmares in this scenerio make a difference, or should researchers be looking for ways to stop nightmares from happening” What do you think?