Weird Dream(s)

[JoeP]

Insmouth? Underwater ruins?

[Corona688]

Not ancient ruins or anything, just kind of reefs made of jungle gym. Nothing to walk on, no room to boat through, you have to swim. No idea what the name's from. Not like I've ever been to Wyoming either.

[JoeP]

Innsmouth - Wikipedia

Great Cthulhu is noted for planting ideas through human's dreams.

[lisarea]

I had the stupidest sequence of those half-asleep dreams last night, where you're dreaming but you know where you are and what you're doing.

I knew I was in bed, sleeping, and I first thought it was fully bright outside like daytime. I was wearing my sleep mask thing, but I'd push it aside and look out the window and see the sky all blue and the sun out even though I knew it was like midnight.

And there was a boy lying on the floor, like about 10-12 years old, wearing a winter coat, just lying there all stiff, giving me the side eye like he was waiting for me to ask him what was wrong, so I half woke myself up by saying out loud, "You OK, buddy?" and he just rolled over and pointedly ignored me.

I figured he was probably awake because the sun was out in the middle of the night.

Then, I heard someone open the door and set something down--sounded like a backpack or something--and then shut the door again. That finally woke me all the way up and I got up to check the door and get my bearings and figure out what was real.

The only thing I can think is that I was a little stuffed up, so I'd been kind of half-propped up with pillows so I wasn't fully lying down and maybe that wasn't letting me get all the way to sleep. So when I went back to bed, I laid all the way down and it didn't happen again.

[But]

Those half-asleep states are the most interesting. When I'm not tired enough to fall asleep what sometimes works is that I try to think of a word. Doesn't matter what, just something the subconscious comes up with. Then the next one. They turn into sentence fragments. When I manage to keep this going and not interrupt it by worrying about something in reality, I start feeling drowsy and there is some imagery. Sometimes it works, but sometimes exactly at the moment when I'm losing control and slipping into the dream there is something like a knock on the door. Then I'm wide awake, I realize there's no one there and I have to start all over.

The other phase is getting out of the dream. There was one recently where I was lucid and came so close to being awake that I could feel myself lying in bed and check that I was lying comfortably while the dream was still going on. I was sure that I could move my limbs any time I wanted which would then stop the rest of it.

[lisarea]

I sometimes like falling asleep to a TV show. I start drifting off, but I can still hear the dialog and just sort of fill in the video, and it gradually gets more surreal. I've tried it with podcasts, but that doesn't work as well because they're self-contained. I need to have that visual element missing so I can fill it in myself.

I haven't done that in a while, but man, I used to have some super-weird Law and Order themed dreams.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by lisarea

and look out the window and see the sky all blue and the sun out even though I knew it was like midnight.

Topical. You were having a reverse eclipse dream. Espilce.

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I had the stupidest sequence of those half-asleep dreams last night, where you're dreaming but you know where you are and what you're doing.

These things are happening at least once every night now. I am asleep in bed, I know I'm asleep in my bed, and I clearly hear things happening in the bedroom that are not in fact happening. People coming in and out and sometimes talking to me, the dogs coming in and digging at the bed, things happening outside.

They're not like regular sleep paralysis. I've had those, and they're terrifying. These are not at all scary or anything, and I can always wake right up. I've started not to, though, because they're happening multiple times a night, so I can just tell myself it's one of those and go back to (regular) sleep instead of investigating.

Is this my life now?

There's a really sketchy nursing home at the end of the street. Should I just walk down there while I'm still lucid enough and make them take me in?

[Ari]

Based on all your descriptions I would guess there's something that's keeping you partially awake and aware of the environment, which is indeed different from sleep paralysis. Especially if it's happening multiple times a night. If it's only when you fall asleep then it's most likely just out of sync brain regions and until they sync up, often through extra rest, that's your life. Otherwise there's probably something that's either outright annoying and drawing enough of your attention to your waking body that it's feeding over or that's not really conducive to deep sleep. I especially assume this because you're even dreaming of or aware of the room itself, just with some additional overlays.

Sometimes in the mornings when I don't have to do anything and am still sleepy I'll fall back asleep on my back on purpose to keep me from falling deep asleep and upping the chance of lucid dreaming.

[Dingfod]

During my alcohol withdrawal I had lots of dreams while I was still aware of the room, the fan I must run for white noise.

[Ari]

Oh I bet the alcohol withdrawals really intensified it.
A fan or other low hum of electronics can certainly do it. While it's not always a problem, get certain levels of neurotransmitters or an otherwise sensitive watcher system and that little bit of your brain that's still monitoring outside things will hear a fan or running water or any kind of randomy non accounted for noise as potential whispers, oh it's not sure if they are and hasn't picked up any actual words to alert you but it's not sure what it is and it's side eyeing it really hard. So hard some other bits have stopped what they were doing and come to look but haven't really told everyone else.

I say whispers because the language bits of your brain are already going strong and so they might just give it a go. While falling asleep and having hypnogogia I've heard a running toilet babble at me, but it was just chucking the noises into the word guesser so random words and phrases were coming out. Amusingly "Go buy a new rubber stopper, they're like $2 and the hardware store is right down the street!" wasn't among them.

[But]

Originally Posted by lisarea

These things are happening at least once every night now. I am asleep in bed, I know I'm asleep in my bed, and I clearly hear things happening in the bedroom that are not in fact happening. People coming in and out and sometimes talking to me, the dogs coming in and digging at the bed, things happening outside.

They're not like regular sleep paralysis. I've had those, and they're terrifying. These are not at all scary or anything, and I can always wake right up. I've started not to, though, because they're happening multiple times a night, so I can just tell myself it's one of those and go back to (regular) sleep instead of investigating.

Is this my life now?

There's a really sketchy nursing home at the end of the street. Should I just walk down there while I'm still lucid enough and make them take me in?

You should take a look at Sleep disorder - Wikipedia and read through all of them, that should calm you right down. I mean, what you are describing is definitely somewhere in there and nothing compared to all the other weird shit.


I guess the knocks on my door could be described as a mild episode of Exploding head syndrome - Wikipedia



I had one recently that I would have described as a lucid dream of me lying in the same bed in the same position. There was sleep paralysis, I couldn't move my limbs. I tried the out-of-body thing again. I had that before, but not in this lucid state. When I try to move my limbs by force there is this pulling sensation as if locked in place by strong rubber bands which give this sort of electric sensation, for lack of a better word. But with enough back and forth I wriggled my right hand free, then the arm, then the upper body. I had the sensation that I was about to fall over backwards out of the bed, but decided to ignore it. I mean, it's not even half a meter, who cares. This is too interesting. I fell backward in slow motion, coming to rest on my back on the floor. I looked at the ceiling and the lamp above me. I wanted to check every detail and it was very vivid realistic imagery, but I think the bulbs were wrong. There were CFLs and I have LED bulbs.


I got up from the floor and it quickly turned into a lucid dreaming spree, all I remember is that is was a really fantastic one. Apart from the end when people started attacking me with knives, they cut my hands and it really hurt. It seems that imagining something not to happen is a lot harder than the opposite. At one point I said out loud "No more knives now, OK?" The response was "Oh yes" and the person carried on. That was a pretty interesting conversation between me and the subconscious. Do you know that part of you that when you're trying not to think of something, just sort of provokes you by bringing it up anyway? It was almost like that.

[Ari]

Where you ultimately able to get a real world hand to move or did the movement eventually occur in internal world lucid dream and not in the real world?

[lisarea]

I have had sleep issues since I was a kid. I'm just not naturally good at it, and I've resigned myself to it being a lifelong maintenance thing rather than something that can be cured.

Apart from the periodic insomnia where I just can't sleep, I also seem to have a disconnect where I can't always do that thing where your body is supposed to paralyze itself so you don't go acting out your dreams, but the paralysis is supposed to stop when you wake up. I've fucked it up in both directions. I haven't had a major sleepwalking episode probably since I was a teenager, but I do every now and again wake up as I'm walking out of the bedroom or something. And I've also had sleep paralysis periodically, which I hate so so much. Even if I'm lucid enough that I know what's happening, I'll try to stay up on purpose the rest of the night because it's too scary to go back to sleep.

Anyway, that miscalibrated paralysis one of the reasons that Ambien is a hard no for me. I am almost positive I'd be one of those people who would go driving around in my sleep and doing murders and stuff.

I've probably mentioned this before, too, but when I'm going through a regular sleeping period, where I can just go to bed and fall asleep and wake up in the morning, I sometimes start to miss insomnia a little bit. I'm just so used to being up in the middle of the night all by myself when everything is dark and quiet that I start feeling kind of discombobulated when I haven't done it in a while.

[ceptimus]

I dreamt I was out in the garden of a house I lived in forty-odd years ago and there was a sort of beehive there, but it was home to some kind of flying beetles rather than bees. The beetles weren't scary or aggressive and were just coming and going from the hive going about their business.

For some reason we had to map the directions and altitudes that the insects were departing and arriving in. I say 'we', because there was someone else helping with the task, but I can't remember who it was. We were looking up into the sky and trying to estimate how many beetles were in each thirty-degree sector of the sky, and at what altitude. The ones that were high up were pretty difficult to spot and I wondered if I was missing some of the highest flying ones and would be better off using some low magnification binoculars .

[But]

Originally Posted by Ari

Where you ultimately able to get a real world hand to move or did the movement eventually occur in internal world lucid dream and not in the real world?

It was definitely not the real one, that usually wakes me up immediately. I don't think I got visual feedback about a dream-real arm moving, I'm not sure. I didn't see myself lying in bed either, but I was completely covered by a blanket and had a black T-shirt over my head so I could sleep in the middle of the day.

[But]

Fascinating. I just had another one exactly like that. I guess it's possible that it was triggered by my posting about it. There is a fairly normal non-lucid dream, then I notice the paralyzed real body, separate from that and then starts an unusually vivid totally lucid dream. It's as if the sleep paralysis constrains the motion in the dream (like those dreams where you can't really run as if held back by rubber bands), and after the dream body gets uncoupled from the perception of the real one, I can act freely.

The content wasn't that extraordinary, a house with several rooms and 6-7 people in there. On a table there was an unfinished, let's say large cigarette with green leaves and stuff in it. They said it wasn't weed but something else from some other part of the world and not as strong and I tried to roll it. It didn't work in the weirdest way, I tried to light it, the pack of rolling papers somehow turned out to be inside it, the paper tore and I ended up with half of the finished product in my mouth. Before or after that, I saw my father who died a few years ago, I asked him how he was, he looked relaxed and in a good mood, he said he had just been to the workshop and gave me what looked like a sort of URL (which I gathered were directions to that workshop).

[Dingfod]

I dreamed I was awake for three hours during the night. I don't think I actually was, but I'm kind of tired.

[lisarea]

I was trying to privately and discreetly shave my armpits with an electric razor, but all those rude assholes on the bus kept looking at me.

[Ensign Steve]

Did I ever tell you guys that I have had a recurring dream for as long as I can remember where I'm trying to masturbate but I can't get any privacy, like my mom or my grandpa or whoever keeps coming in and asking me stupid questions about towels, or I better get my pants on quick before a bunch of random people come in for some reason. But where are my pants?!!

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Are you sure it was a dream?

:tooreal:

[Dingfod]

I have that problem without dreaming.

[erimir]

I dreamt I was appointed to the Supreme Court, but the dream consisted mostly of me getting messages of shock from my friends, changing my work status on Facebook ("erimir started working at Supreme Court of the United States"), checking my Wikipedia page (they, predictably, misspelled my last name), and then at some point becoming very anxious because I don't actually have any legal expertise and now I'm going to be expected to write legal opinions and oh god I have to study shit.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Register as a Republican and the competence problem goes away.

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by erimir

I dreamt I was appointed to the Supreme Court, but the dream consisted mostly of me getting messages of shock from my friends, changing my work status on Facebook ("erimir started working at Supreme Court of the United States"), checking my Wikipedia page (they, predictably, misspelled my last name), and then at some point becoming very anxious because I don't actually have any legal expertise and now I'm going to be expected to write legal opinions and oh god I have to study shit.

1. Real friends wouldn't admit they were shocked. friends wouldn't even be shocked.

2. Your avatar needs a black gown. Supreme Mario.