Dream within a dream?!

Hope this is the right forum. Thing is, I've been walking around for about a week with a very weird experience. I hesitated to post anything here, but it kept popping back in my mind, so here I am.

I remember that I was in a dream. Now I maybe had one or two experiences in my life where I was lucid, but the last 10 years, nothing. Anyway somehow I was half-lucid when I decided to close my eyes and 'let go'. Let go, by which I think I mean letting yourself drop with your eyes closed, it felt in no way 'physical' but to letting yourself fall while you are under water.
Then it was instant, everything was black, and 'I' was floating in nothing. Seems I had no body, but felt very warm and happy. Then in the nothing there appeared for what it seemed a white bended geometric form, at least that\'s what I think it was. Now this moment with weightlessness felt like 5 seconds, I woke up feeling weird.
I just distinctively remember that 'nothing' and that white thing that popped up.

Now I thought there are a couple explanations.

1. Dream, nothing special
2. I somehow entered another realm
3. I thought up that realm myself, for reading too much stuff here

Hopefully any of you had a similar experience.
Probably a worthless thread, but had to tell someone .

I've had dreams within dreams before! Once it was like a video game I had been playing... and once I think it was about opera? And I had another one recently where when I fell asleep in my dream, I woke up in real life.

Dreams are weird, strange, mysterious things. I always like when that happens though. It's cool but kind of scary.

One time i was literally stuck in a dream. every time i figured out i was dreaming but i was dreaming in my own house and i didn't like that. The alarm clock was working but all the lights where out so i dived head first from the stairs to wake up. For weeks it would work but one night i would dive head first from the stairs and wake up in the same dream.

In total i tried it for about 5 or 6 times and everytime i woke up in the same bed (it was a high sleeper and i didn't have that bed for about a year) so i figured i'd just walk down the stairs and get out of the house to dream it out. The guys of sesamestreet where crawling out of holes in the street and i got chased by some neighbourhood bully. While running i realized i was dreaming so i should stomp him and be over with it. Never had the dream again .

I have always had lucid dreams. Many of my dreams are of every day life. It is not unusual for me to live weeks or months in a dream before becoming aware that is but a dream, not reality, whereupon I awake. In that dream state, I am fully cognoscente and cannot distinguish any difference from reality.

There have been a few times where I lived the daily routine of years in a dream only to awaken when I realized it was but a dream, to live out the daily routine of several more years again before waking up to discover that it too was only a dream. And although I can remember each of those passing days as if I had actually lived them, only a few hours in "reality" passed by.

The problem with such is that it really makes one reconsider what "Reality" is.

There certainly are many cultures and many religions of the past that considered our consensual idea of "Reality" to be a prison and that the real world exists in the willful abnegation of this life and finding a way into the dream world which was considered to be a reflection of the true Reality. This is the underlying premise of Gnoticism, for instance.

From a scientific perspective, what is most probably happening, is that your serotonin levels are increased and causing you to skip the initial Non-REM steps between sleep cycles. Normal Sleep Cycles are N1->N2->N3->N2->REM then again, N1->N2->N3->N2->REM. What is most likely happening is that you are dropping out of REM during the first cycle to N2 instead of N1 and returning to REM immediately instead of going through the rest of the cycle. This is more common for those with Sleep Apnea who don't generally have the initial N1->N2->N3 parts of their Sleep Cycle and go from N2->REM and repeat every 40-45 minutes instead of the 90 minute full cycles for most people.

Eating bananas or other fruit with a high ratio of tryptophan to phenylalanine and leucine right before bed will generally cause this same phenomenon to happen. (Contrary to popular belief, red meat or warm milk won't.)

It really is a mind-bender though when it happens...it also changes how one acts in Dream State.

(And just so you know, the usual tricks that one can use to determine if they are in a dream or a dream within a dream only work the first couple of times you use them...eventually your mind adapts and expects you to use them...providing you with false negatives. However, if you've never done it before, you can try reading a passage from a book, looking away for a moment and then re-reading the passage. If it is the same then you are awake. If it is different, then you are still asleep. Like I said though, eventually your mind adapts to tricks like that...but if you realize that your sub-conscious mind doesn't make use of the language centers of your brain, you can rely on that to devise methods similar to what a Doctor would use diagnose Aphasia in a patient.)

The only experience i had regarding this subject is during one of my dreams where after a while i suposedly woke up , just to realise that i have woken up in another dream . The second awakening was the real one...i hope

I think this is the time that we all are having strange dreams.

My dream a couple of days ago really wasn't that strange. The thing that was strange was that I was asleep and dreaming with one part of my mind but fully awake and with the other.

It was the strangest most bizarre thing that I have every experienced.

I do not mean that I was day dreaming. I was asleep. I woke up but only one part of my brain awakened. The other part of my brain remained asleep and dreaming. I could feel and see the dream as clear as a bell yet I was awake and fully aware of my surroundings.

I have never experienced anything like this before and I have never heard anyone else speak of this weird occurrence.

I wish I could explain it better but it is just too weird to explain so that other can really understand.

reply to post by mortje


Hi mortje, I've had a similar experience during a dream. It happened already in 1993, but I still remember it quite well, because it was so weird. It was a totally unique experience for me. I've not experienced anything similar since then. And hadn't experienced anything similar before that.

It started as a "normal" dream with quite exciting elements themselves, though. I was involved in a battle with a dragon, which in the end swallowed me. That's when it happened. Everything disappeared including me... but still there was some kind of consciousness left. "I" had no eyes, but could still sense the dark void. In the void there was still some faint "light", which is impossible to describe with other words. It had slightly circular shape.

The experience is very difficult to describe with words. Back then I tried to explain this with saying that it was like my soul had been sucked away from my body and this soul essence was me and it was "floating" in the void. But I guess that doesn't make much sense either

I woke up and my heart was beating very fast. I felt weird, kind of empty, maybe a week or two after this and it made me look into psychoanalytical theories, especially Jung and seek answers from the paranormal literature as well. I didn't find anything then.

Now I found this:

Should one be able to catch that point between waking and sleeping, where one is at the periphery of going into deep sleep, known technically as the hypnagogic state, one can gain conscious ingress into ones dreams. The technical term for ones egress out of ones dream between sleeping and waking is called the hypnapompic state. One will then have the sensation of being sucked into a void of a torsion tunnel as ones conscious awareness is introverted into that of the dreaming state via the captured hypnagogic state.

www.spiralnature.com...

Maybe that's what really happened. I was able to catch the moment between sleeping and waking... would be plausible explanation in my case.

I had a dream within a dream once and it took hors to get out of it. It was a nightmare and every freaken time I would sit up in bed and think I was awake, this person would come up at the foot of my bed and say you think your awake but your not. That was the worst nightmare of my life time.

[edit on 16-4-2009 by pmbhuntress]

reply to post by pmbhuntress


I get the nightmare within a nightmare very often. I tend to get them every Tuesday strangely enough.

They are terrifying, but I have learn't to recognise them and somehow am able to fight my up and out to a state of heart pounding consciousness.

reply to post by NightSkyeB4Dawn


A couple of days ago I wakened to find myself self still dreaming on one side of my mind. The dream was not remarkable or even worth retelling the only strange thing about it is that I was watching it almost like one would watch a movie. I was completely awake. I was completely aware of my surroundings and could hear my mother in the kitchen and smell the dinner she was making so I could eat before heading off to work.

It was the strangest most bizarre thing that I have every experienced.

I was “not” day dreaming. I was “not” asleep. I could see and tune into the part of my mind that was dreaming. It seems like it was in the left side of my mind and I could switch back and forth from one side to the other.

The left was the dream side and the right was the awake side. I knew that this was weird so I laid there and tested for a while to see how long I could switch between the two before it stopped. I realized that though I could switch between the dream side and the awake side that when I was focusing on the awake side that I could see what was going on in the dream side but it was a little more distant like I had turned my head from the TV set and was still able to see it out of the corner of my eye.

I was able to keep this up for about fifteen minutes but had to break the connection because I knew my alarm was going to go off. I had to get up for work since I had no time to spare; it hurts my Mother’s feelings when she takes the time to cook for me and I rush out without eating.

I have not done a very good job of really explaining this odd experience. I have never experienced anything like this before and I have never heard anyone else speak of this weird occurrence.

It was not sleep paralysis. It was not lucid dreaming and it was not astral projection. At least not as things as commonly described.

I have searched all over the web trying to find a report of a similar occurrence by others but none of what I have found comes close enough to my experience to call it a match.

Does anyone have an explanation for my experience?



[edit on 16-4-2009 by NightSkyeB4Dawn]

I'm going to chime in here because I do not believe in coincidences and yesterday for the first time in my life I googled "DREAM WITHIN A DREAM"... you see why I am skeptical of coincidences, right?

Anyway, I finally did that because I regularly GO TO SLEEP in my dreams, have another dream, wake-up in my first dream and carry-on. This is extremely common for me 1-3 ratio, at least, if not even.

The only 'norm' is that, generally, when I go to sleep in the first dream I am so tired I cannot possibly stay awake. I am not always going to sleep at the most appropirate times in the first dream, but have learned to not stress about it and just go to sleep now when I need to in the first dream...

The for sure best part, is I usually wake-up much more rested on these occasions.

TWISI

PS - It seems this is a common occurrance so perhaps we will attract the attention of someone who works in psyho-therapy, dream anlyisis, a versed Jungian etc.

reply to post by mortje


Mine was not the case of a dream within a dream but while I was dreaming, I KNEW I was, and this has happened many times.

I have dreams in dreams all the time. It is is treally bizarre. I was dreaming about my dream a few nights ago!

I have had dream in a dream experiences. They were average days, like in my dream, I rolled over from being asleep, got up, wandered about the apartment, alone, just doing typical things. Then at a certain point, I thought, it's time to wake up, and I did wake up, to find myself rolling over like the dream, only this time, the kids were there and it was real life.

I have had other similar dreams with in a dreams, like hearing my sister walk down the hall and turn on the faucet in the kitchen sink, only to awake and find her fast asleep, for it had been a dream.

Shame there is actually a 'logical' explanation for it. Though I think there is a lot more to it than just switching from conscious to subconscious. Can't remember a pulling or sucking feeling, I really hope I can experience it again. Maybe I can get myself to remember more.

i've had dreams like that before, i closed my eyes and it was like space brushing past me, i can only describe it as warp speed, And if I'm living in what I think is reality, how do I know it's not a dream??

Originally posted by mortje
Shame there is actually a 'logical' explanation for it. Though I think there is a lot more to it than just switching from conscious to subconscious. Can't remember a pulling or sucking feeling, I really hope I can experience it again. Maybe I can get myself to remember more.

Yet it is something that many are just opening up to.

The shame is that the ability to switch from conscience to subconscious is elusive to most and poorly controlled in even those that do have the ability.

I think that we would be capable of greater things if we had better control of our will and subconscious.

Maybe we really are coming upon a true awakening.

We need it.

Originally posted by mortje
Hope this is the right forum. Thing is, I've been walking around for about a week with a very weird experience. I hesitated to post anything here, but it kept popping back in my mind, so here I am.

I remember that I was in a dream. Now I maybe had one or two experiences in my life where I was lucid, but the last 10 years, nothing. Anyway somehow I was half-lucid when I decided to close my eyes and 'let go'. Let go, by which I think I mean letting yourself drop with your eyes closed, it felt in no way 'physical' but to letting yourself fall while you are under water.
Then it was instant, everything was black, and 'I' was floating in nothing. Seems I had no body, but felt very warm and happy. Then in the nothing there appeared for what it seemed a white bended geometric form, at least that\'s what I think it was. Now this moment with weightlessness felt like 5 seconds, I woke up feeling weird.
I just distinctively remember that 'nothing' and that white thing that popped up.

Now I thought there are a couple explanations.

1. Dream, nothing special
2. I somehow entered another realm
3. I thought up that realm myself, for reading too much stuff here

Hopefully any of you had a similar experience.
Probably a worthless thread, but had to tell someone

.

intresting story, thanks for sharing it. i have experienced this as well, i posted some of the dream on ATS, i have been working on writing it all down, just not done yet.

parts of it are here

i was lucid, and i had like 5 dreams in a dream, its like i kept waking up to a new altered reality each time, i woke up. it was very interesting, hope my story helps to what you are looking for.