nightmare

Multiple false awakenings and paralysis made for one hell of a night. Enjoy the terror I just went through to make it easier, since everything runs together, I bold the spots where I have a false awakening and my commentary when I'm awake will be in italics

I don't really remember the dream leading up to this point, but I remember getting ready for bed. My boyfriend's already asleep on his side, and I've got an unknown person (I knew him in the dream, but I dont know who it was now) sitting on my side, leaving just enough room for me to lay between them and my boyfriend.

Instead of getting in on the side, I decide that it makes sense to crawl into bed from the bottom. I'm halfway up the bed, and I see a small shadowed figure flicker in front of me. I remember saying, "Oh hell no, that's it for me. I'm done," and I wake myself up. I reflect on what a weird dream that was, sitting up in the dark in bed to gather my thoughts. The end unsettled me, so I was trying to calm down.

I'm just beginning to lay down when I feel the bed shift from behind me (my back is to the side of the bed, I'm facing my boyfriend). I immediately think cat just as a hand grabs my upper shoulder. I let out a squeak of alarm and jolt awake. And of course, I've got some sleep paralysis going. I rarely ever experience this, so it's making me panic. I'm trying not to. I'm struggling to keep my eyes open, and I want to move to keep myself awake, but I can't. I try to call out to my boyfriend but I can't talk.

I get this slow, cold dread that trickles through me because I'm realizing there's a good chance I'm not actually awake again. I have no way to confirm if I am or not. I want to force myself to stay away but I just can't. I feel the bed moving again, like someone crawling from the end of the bed up to me, and I throw myself into panic overdrive.

I jerk awake and though this time I'm sure I'm awake, I still can't move. I can barely keep myself awake but at this pint I know if I fall asleep I'm right back where I left off and I don't want that. I slowly, slowly come out of the paralysis and I roll over. I get up and check the light in the bathroom (my reality check is to make sure lights stay on when I turn them on. It's always my tip off, more to let me know if I'm in a false awakening over lucidity). It works, thank god. I'm exhausted but terrified to sleep.

I finally make my way back to the room. I lay down, and toss and turn for a good ten or fifteen minutes. I shut my eyes and try to drift off a few times but keep rolling over. I lay on my stomach and hide my face in my pillow and really do my best to sleep.

Again, I roll over. Damnit, I thought I was asleep, and I'm still just lying here. I've had it. I don't feel very good, and I'm going crazy just laying here. I untangle myself from my blankets, and pet my cat for a few moments, since he's lying on the end of my bed. As I put my feet over the edge to stand up I turn on my bedside light. It flickers and turns off and I have half a second to panic and think "oh no, oh my god I'm asleep" when hands grab my ankle and I scream, jolting myself awake and also waking my boyfriend.

He's not mad, he understands I'm terrified at this point. He motions me to come over, and I do. I scramble back and lay down, my back to him. He wraps his arms over me and hugs me tight, reassuringly. The man from my first dream is back, but again I know him, and to me it makes sense that he's there (still no idea who he was). He sees I'm terrified and he lays down, facing me, and hugs me too.

I shut my eyes and try to fall back asleep. The bed trembles like someone's running over the mattress. My eyes snap open and with no warning about 3 or four hands and arms wrap around me. One around my neck, one around my waist, one around my lower legs, and one like, goes up the leg of my shorts and comes out the waistband, and at once they all haul me back to my side of the bed, telling me something along the lines of "you aren't waking up again".

I wake up into paralysis again but the terror is so great I manage to whimper out half my boyfriend's name before it completely takes over. He doesn't wake up (jerk) and I'm stuck laying right where I was when the demons were dragging me. I am terrified, I have no idea if I'm awake or not and no way to tell. I'm trying desperately to keep myself awake and I can't. I want to keep myself awake until the paralysis wears off so I can check the lights, but I keep dozing. At this point I'm not sure if I've already fallen back asleep or if this was just me being paranoid and scared, but I remember dozing and then jerking my eyes open again when I felt my bed begin to shift, like someone was crawling on it. I thought I was awake, because my mind was like, "no this isn't happening. Things like this only happen in your dreams", but now I don't know if I was actually awake or not.

Finally the paralysis wears off, and I'm scrambling up. It's morning and light's coming in from the window. My boyfriend is gone, in his place are my mom and my uncle, and WWE diva Alicia Fox (who is apparently my best friend, even though she's not even one of the diva's I actually like...). I tell my mom, "It's happening again. The false awakenings are getting worse" and she and my uncle share a look.

"The demon's are trying to take you," my mom explains. "If you hadn't woken up when you did, they would have dragged your soul from your body and you wouldn't have been able to wake up."

"What do they want from me?" I ask, following the three of them to the living room. My uncle turns to look at me.

"We don't know. But you'e not falling back asleep. We're sending Andrew (my older cousin) instead. He'll ask them what they want."

This strikes me as really stupid and dangerous, and I shake my head.

"No. I need to be the one to go." Mom and my uncle try to argue with me and I don't let them. "They obviously want me, and they want me alive. If they wanted me dead they would have killed me. And if we send Andrew instead of me, they'll kill him. Let me go."

As we're having an argument over who's going, Alicia goes and hooks herself up to this machine that induces dreaming. Straps with little sensors on them go around her waist, wrists, and ankles, and a cap goes on her head. She's standing in my room (now with no beds, just this contraption) hooked to this thing, and her dream is broadcast on TV monitors.

She confronts the demons. They need me for something (no idea what) and Alicia wants to go in my place. They tell her she isn't good enough and she gives this huge, long speech about how she can handle whatever they throw at her, etc. At one point she rips off the sensor around her waist (that was apparently holding her in place) and throws it down in defiance. This turns into a promo for her for wrestling. There's a crowd of fans watching her, and as she stands up to them the crowd starts chanting "Lisa! Lisa! Lisa!"

Apparently that's for her, and her parents (standing with me watching her) cry with happiness that the crowd loves her. The wrestling show ends and the crowd leaves. I'm walking to my car (because now it's at an arena, not my apartment) and I see two divas I actually do care about. They're playing basketball and their ball gets away from them. I get excited because now I get to hand it to them and meet them, but when I turn, they're already walking away and someone else takes the ball.

The divas meet my eye, and I give them a sad smile. This morphs into me going on a picnic with a whole car full of WWE Divas and the last memory I have is taking off my watch and laughing with two of them as I slowly wake up.

As I said sleep paralysis is really uncommon for me. I can count on one hand the number of times I've experienced it. I dont know if it counts having that paralysis in a false awakening but it was really weird now that I think back on it.

EDIT: As I've been thinking over the dream throughout the day, I remember a few pieces I've left out. We're having really bad wind here right now (category 2 hurricane force winds) and I remember I was really worried about my bird feeder. One of my false awakenings had me waking up and going out to the balcony to check on it. It was broken, and I remember trying to get the broken piece from under our patio furniture when someone/something made me rush back inside and leave it for morning.

I remember at one point as well explaining to my mom, uncle, and Alicia that I knew this was a dream that we were in right now because the lights wouldn't stay on. Alicia asked why that mattered and I gave a lengthy explanation about reality checks and how this was mine, how it worked, and then said, "it isn't gonna work this time though because one, I need some more sleep, and two, we're in the middle of something."

Another fragment, sorry! I remember the false awakening but nothing about the first part.

I was at work and trying to troubleshoot. My phone was on and I couldn't stop my damn Pandora (I was listening to it while falling asleep) and the customer was getting mad because they couldn't hear me over my phone. I finally got it off and I don't really know how or what happened after that.

False Awakening: I was in my bed lying on my side, how I'd fallen asleep. I knew there was someone/something in the ground but I couldn't look and see. I figured sensing this is what had woken me up and I was panicking. I was already awake; how was I going to handle someone attacking me?!

Sherlock was trying to jump down but his claw was stuck on my shirt. He was getting vicious and aggressive with me. I finally wrestled him free but he wouldn't jump down because there was someone/something there. I was trying to shove him off because he was hurting me and scaring me. Something about my friend Devin's Facebook? I had this like... moment where I was begging that this wasn't real because I was so scared, and I squeezed my eyes shut. I forced them open and woke myself up.

Again, I really suck at keeping a dream journal because I either always startle awake and lose most of the dream, or I'm just lazy and don't write anything down. But this dream has stuck with me for like two months now and I want to share it, mainly hoping someone might have some insight? Opinions? I dunno. It just freaked me out.

I don't remember much because I woke up so terrified I was on the verge of crying. What I do remember, though, is an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. I'm at my boyfriends house, and we're having a normal day. Watching the game and folding laundry. I remember he's sitting across from me, and he checks the time. He makes this face like, 'huh, that time already', and he stands up. He shuts off the TV, and for a while he just stands still. I'm staring up at him perplexed because we never shut off the game. Ever. And he just turns and walks towards his room and motions for me to follow.

"What's going on?" I ask him as I come around the corner, and I freeze. He's standing by his bed holding his shotgun, and he looks almost apologetic.

"We need to kill ourselves today, remember?"

I just stare at him. He's so calm, and I'm being calm, but again terror is flooding me and I begin to internally panic.

"What do you mean? I don't want to kill myself!" And I remember having a distinct fear of dying. I am terrified to die.

This is very, very interesting for me, because IRL death doesn't scare me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suicidal or anything, but the thought of death intrigues me and fascinates me, and never in my life have I EVER been afraid of dying. Ever. It's not a fear for me. The few times I've been in actual life-or-death situations my literal inner monologue was 'huh. well, whatever happens, happens.' So for me to have a fear towards death was so perplexing enough it actually snapped me into lucidity immediately.

But the weird thing was, even being lucid, I wasn't able to staunch the paralyzing fear of dying. Even though I knew that I was dreaming and I knew I shouldn't be afraid of death because I normally am not, I couldn't it.

So at this point my boyfriend has his shotgun and he sits on the bed. There's a bit in between I don't recall, but the overwhelming fear of dying is constant. I remember sitting on the bed, and he hands me the shotgun.

"Go first. Kill yourself and I'll be right behind you."

I had an overwhelming urge to run. Up until I was lucid, committing suicide had been the goal of my dream self. And now that I was lucid and I wanted to live, I couldn't change the outcome of the dream. I remember holding the shotgun and crying because I was so scared to die.

When I woke up, I was crying. It took me almost an hour to calm down, and when I did, I couldn't shake the fear of death. Once I woke up the next morning the fear itself was gone, but the feeling of that dream followed me all day.

I've been having reallllly weird dreams lately, compared to my weird stress-induced dreams about work. I've been waking up in a panic unfortunately because of them so I lose a lot of recall on them, but this is what I remember. I would really like feedback on the dream from 10/1/14, just because I've never had a dream like that involving owls


9/30/14

My boyfriend and I are at a football game, namely the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos. I know it's this game because one, we're wearing our Seahawks jersies (and so are a lot of other people) and because I just know it's in Denver. Does that make sense? Anyways, the stadium is half of my high school's football field and half of Safeway, namely the checkout area. We're shopping for snacks, about to head into the game, and these little kids keep running around and fighting with each other. My boyfriend and I are sick of them fighting, so he chases them around the stadium and I'm waiting to catch them. They run into me and I grab them and say "interception! that's what happens when you play the seahawks!". Only putting that one in because I'm 99% sure I said that out loud, because my boyfriend asked me why I was talking about the Seahawks in the middle of the night.

Well we jump from capturing the kids to sitting on the field. We're sitting in metal bleachers on the very end, and a storms coming in. Just like in all my dreams about storms, the sky goes to a really deep navy blue, and the bad part of the storm turns black. We realize it's about to be a tornado, but we don't have time to leave. We're trying to hunker down, but the storm comes in too fast and we get sucked into the tornado. I wake up in a panic because I'm freaking terrified of tornados (even though in my city the last actual tornado to actually do anything in my city was back in 1979..). I know more happened after that but I woke up so suddenly I lost it



10/01/14

This is the interesting one. I am with my family, but it's not my family. It's me, a younger sibling (I think a girl for the most part, but it's gender switched) and our aging father. We can fly, and we're flying in search of something, like food or money. I don't know what, but it's just this feeling of needing to find a supply of something. My father lands us in the mouth of this cave, halfway up a mountain. It's dark and somewhat gloomy, and there are shelves built into the wall. There is a back room you can get into through an arch built into the stone wall. We're rummaging, looking for something. I get the feeling we either own this cave area (somehow) or it's an unmanned shop. We collect items (cant remember what) and we're getting ready to go. I remember my father figure standing off to the side, holding an armful of things. I remember he lays down on his stomach in the mouth of the cave, and he's smiling. He's happy, and I get the feeling it's because he owns the cave (at least I think). A good thing to note is that in the dream I'm standing off to the side with my sibling, but I'm watching him from an upper angle to his left. I'm staring down at him, and suddenly, he's thrown back and I'm now the father. I'm in his body, and I know that it's me lying on my back, but I'm still watching from the same angle.

This giant owl that's about 3 or 4 feet tall, light brown with a white face and chest, lands on me/father figure and pins down the body. He says something along the lines of, 'this is what your price for treachery is!' and then he sinks his beak into the neck and rips it out. And I mean, it's pretty gore. He slices the neck up and just goes to town on it. And I know it's me dying, but all I can do is watch. The owl is up to the side of me on the wall,opposite of where I'm watching from. My view switches from up above to the right to looking up at the owl beneath him. He spreads his wings out and says, "if only you had done your part, paid what you owed, you would have lived!" and I got this really heavy feeling of like, I don't know, a gang or something. Like me/father figure was in the business with the owl and we didn't do our share so the owl killed me/him.

I woke up pretty startled, needless to say, and I lost a lot of bits from the dream