Happened to me three times last night, fucking viscerally terrifying even though I recognized that’s what was happening after the first time and could kind of get a handle on the panic the subsequent times.
I actually have not had a false awakening sense childhood tbh. Sounds awful though
When I was about 21 I read about training yourself to do lucid dreaming by repeating to yourself that you would remain in control of your mind as you fell asleep. Within just a few attempts I was successfully lucid dreaming, although with somewhat limited control. I was hoping to keep practicing and get better at it.
But shortly after this success, I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time ever. It was absolutely as horrifying as everyone says it is. I couldn’t move, but my eyes were open, and my “sleep paralysis demon” took the form of the black drape I had covering the window in my bedroom, which my brain was interpreting as some huge and pitch black entity looming over my bed while I couldn’t move.
I stopped trying to lucid dream, but now I still get sleep paralysis once in a while, like a couple times a year at this point. The last time it happened I was sleeping next to my girlfriend, I couldn’t move and I kept thinking I was hearing someone loudly stomping down the stairs to our bedroom. I managed to make some extremely strained, high-pitched but not loud “screaming” noise - sorta like when you try to scream but keep your throat closed but like… wrong - and my girlfriend was able to shake me awake.
She knew about my sleep paralysis because it happened not long before that and I told her about it, and so she was ready to help me, but I still thought she would be more unsettled by the very disquieting noise I was making, lol.
Anyway yeah that shit sucks, do not recommend.
I’ve never gotten the trick of inducing lucid dreaming, though as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten better at not letting it destabilize when I randomly become lucid and then managing to take some limited amount of control at times, often by sort of prompt-hijacking it with a spoken statement of what’s going to happen and the forcing a change of scenery by walking through a door or something. Although sometimes I’ve gotten into a weird loop of realizing I’m asleep, false-awakening, realizing I’m still asleep, false-awakening again, and so on.
I remember the first time I had sleep paralysis was sometime in my early twenties too. Weirdly I didn’t panic then: I recognized what was happening and at the time my old dog was still alive so there was a huge, hundred plus pound dog laying across the only door to the room so I felt entirely safe and secure; I distinctly remember fighting as hard as I could to lift one arm and flip off the shadow hallucinations (I probably didn’t actually manage that, but it felt like I did) while laughing maniacally in my own head; I knew the figures were hallucinations and felt such complete contempt for them because of that lmao.
I don’t get it often, and I don’t usually feel the terror people typically describe, but this is the first time it’s gone along with auditory hallucinations and merged seamlessly into dreaming that I got up to investigate them. I guess lately I’ve been on edge and becoming hyper alert at weird sounds that are usually just my fan clicking a bit or one of my cats hopping onto something in the hall by my bedroom.
When you catch yourself your brain is in a very limited, paniced, broken record which you are also aware of which adds to the fustration. It’s a chemical misfire in the “wake from sleep” part of your brain. You need to focus on going back to sleep to restart the thing like cranking an old car.
But yea i’ve had 100s of sleep paralysis episodes including false wakes where I would be astro projecting around the house until I realize something is amiss and I’m not really up. Then there’s the time distortion because lighting can look different when projecting. So when I do wake up it’s a panic to see what the real world time is.
A couple of weekends ago, I dreamed that I was being poisoned by a shady hotel owner, and that I died and my murder was being investigated by Columbo. Except I didn’t die, and that part was a dream, but I couldn’t wake up until Columbo stopped monologuing about every tiny fucking detail of the murder, and all the while I’m being forced to breathe in broken glass shards.
When I finally woke up from that, it turned out I had a nasty nosebleed from some seasonal allergy bullshit, and I’d been laying on my back and inhaling some of it. Don’t leave your window open overnight when it’s below 40 degrees out, folks… Or you may just get a visit from an affable and overly verbose sleep paralysis demon
Ever wondered if you’re still sleeping?
Nope. Text doesn’t work right in dreams. I’m almost constantly reading something so I’d notice if the text was suddenly inscrutable or kept changing as my eyes ran over it.
It’s difficult. It deals with very short term memory. Then on top of that when you recognize a word you start to think of other things asociated with the word on top of realizing you’re in dream land which your mind struggles to keep in with because it didn’t anticipate you editing “the script” your subconcious cooked up. Trick is to anticipate and train your mind into accessing it by telling yourself you would like to read and understand. Memorizing small lists of like 10 words before and after sleep can help train and prepare your mind. Both in pre reading to say this is a normal thing don’t panic, and improving your immedate short term memory. Don’t just read the text in your dreams but repeat a few times like you’d practice a word list for school.
It’s really fun to google what you remember right away. There were many dreams where I read signs in and around the communities of Lake Victoria in Africa. I never been there, but the names of places match exactly as I’ve seen in lucid dreaming. Google Earth the stuff and holy shit there it is. Looks the same too.
Or Blue Honey - never known what that was until the Other Side showed me and then I googled it and it’s totally a thing. Never did shrooms either.
I’ve managed to do WILD before, but I have a hard time falling asleep while maintaining that sort of focus. I kind of rely on doing a sort of story-scene visualization thing to fall asleep in the first place, building out a detailed worldspace and characters and playing through some story like I would when trying to form a scene when writing although in practice it’s more like falling back on a handful of rote scenes that just get iterated over and refined over time some of which are bits from things I’m working on and others are just nonsense. That is also a technique for priming lucid dreams, but it’s never carried anything through into actual dreams for me, it just knocks me out almost immediately.
The most I’ve been able to prime dreams is when something inadvertently induces the tetris effect and I get a disjointed, fitful loop of related nonsense until I wake up.
In the comment above I was just saying that I know I’m not asleep because I can read things and they work right, so I never doubt that I am awake when I am in fact awake. Dreams have a way of making problems like text not working just confusing rather than immediately alarming, although I’ve gotten sharper at jumping from text being broken to recognizing that something’s a dream.
Yeah, that’s happened to me before. I try to make myself wake up and get out of bed, and I think I did it, then I realize I just dreamed I got out of bed. Over and over again. Not scary, but frustrating.
