Photo by Ben
Whenever I have a dream where I experience a small level of conscious awareness (or lucidity, if you will), and am able to think about the fact that I’m dreaming and do a few interesting things – often consisting of marveling at my hands and putting them through objects – when I wake up, I typically question the experience.
Was it a lucid dream?
Or what it a dream about a lucid dream?
This thought haunts me to be honest, because there are many “lucid dreams” where I question if they’re really true lucid dreams or just dreams of having lucid dreams.
Granted, I realize this sounds crazy – so for the love of god, if you’ve ever had this thought, please tell me! J
(To clarify, I’ve had dreams with a very, very strong level of awareness that I do not question at all as being anything but a real experience of being aware while dreaming. This insanely lucid dream for instance comes to mind. It’s just the low level lucid dreams that bother me.)
Anyhow, this relates to my dream below in the sense that back in 1999, on my 19 birthday according to the date in my dream journal, I had a very strange dream: one in which I dreamt I was astral traveling.
Here’s what I wrote down back then.
I’m standing in my room, astral traveling.I knew I was really just dreaming, but I was really standing up.
I look at the window and think about jumping through it because it won’t matter; this is a dream.
At this moment, I wake up. I’m lying on the bed. I open my eye and know this feeling of WAKING, of separation, of coming back into reality.. this sensation was very felt. I’m confused, but amazed, but too tired to think clearly.
Then I wake up AGAIN and turn around in my sleep.
After this, in my dream journal I added the following:
What really happened to me was that I dreamt I was astral traveling, then dreamt I woke up from a dream where I was astral traveling, then woke up in real life. I remember waking up FOR REAL this time and thinking that I felt way too heavy and too tired to actually be walking around.
I do have the memory of standing next to my bed and at the same time, I could feel my arms asleep, and I was thinking “I’m not really awake right now.” However, I do not know if I was sleep walking or I dreamt of that.
I also remember, somewhere in this dream sequence, of dreaming up DREAM WORLDS where everything floated; it was a kind of spaceless land. No floor, no ceiling. Instead, there were flat, spherical stones as steps. It was like a comic book. I remember waking up, knowing that this was a dream world.
This dream also has the element of a false wakening, an experience that fascinates me! The earliest false awakening I can recall happened when I was about 7 years old, and I’ve had only a few since then; false awakenings are such a mind fuck, I treasure having them. And then with the dream above adding in elements of astral travel and lucidity, you can see why this dream has stuck with me even though it was more than a decade since I experienced it.
If you’ve had a similar experience or have any thoughts on this dream experience, I’d love to hear it.
I’ve definitely felt as though I dreamed I had a lucid dream. That’s what happened on my first quasi-lucid experience. The dream didn’t have any of the vividness that lucid dreams are supposed to, and I was not thinking rationally as one is supposed to think while lucid. It felt just like a normal dream. I was disappointed, because it made me question whether becoming lucid was a worthwhile endeavor.
Some time after that, I had my first really lucid dream. There was no mistaking that this was the real deal, and that it was not a “dream within a dream.”
I’m surprised you like false awakenings. I’ve had five false awakenings, and they were all from lucid dreams. In only one of those five experiences was I able to recognize it as a false awakening. In the other four, I lost lucidity. So false awakenings really annoy me. They certainly are interesting, though.
Hey Joshua!
OK – great, I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who has wondered about having quasi-lucid dreams like this. I think you mentioned a central aspect of why I question some of these low level lucid dream experiences; they lacked that sense of rational thinking. For me, when I wake up, these quasi-lucid dreams are more like a memory of a lucid dream than a memory of something I just experienced.
In regards to enjoying false awakenings: I “like” them in the same sense I like nightmares; the experience itself, aside from any unpleasantness, fascinates me, so whenever it occurs to me, I feel privileged to have had such a weird experience!
I guess I understand what you mean about the false awakenings. I do “like” them in that sense, but I don’t like them. Sometimes when I have false awakenings I feel like I’m trapped in some psychological thriller novel. Frustrating, but exciting all the same.