false awakening

In which I break my #1 rule yet again. >_<

04.02.2013

Music Defines Reality + Sleep Paralysis (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I become lucid after some weird episode of talking to my friend's GPS. It is a very low level of lucidity.

I'm walking down the road, convinced that it is important to go home right now. As I'm walking, I look behind me and see a woman walking a little girl on a leash. It becomes apparent that the little girl is a zombie. They are pretty far off, so I figure I am not in any danger.

Suddenly, suspenseful music begins to play. It's really creepy, and I look behind me to see the zombie girl growing closer. I keep walking. Now, the music is growing in intensity, and I hear rapid footsteps behind me.

I fly into the air, figuring I'll be safe up here. I'm wrong. I turn to see the zombie in the air with me. She tears into my arm, ripping the flesh away to reveal blood and muscle and bone. It is incredibly painful.

This somehow triggers me to become stuck in sleep paralysis. I am now lying in what feels like my floor, unable to move. This horrible sensation is now shooting through my leg. It isn't pain, but it is uncomfortable enough to be just as bad, if not worse, than pain. I would have been writhing and screaming in agony if I could actually move.

After this passes, a rather unpleasant woman in her mid 40's begins molesting me. Again, as I am unable to move, there is nothing I can do about this. This goes on for quite a while until I have a false awakening. I sit up in bed thinking it's over. As soon as I sit up, my vision goes fuzzy and I see weird shapes floating all around me. I can't get a grip on what's happening, and soon fall back over into sleep paralysis.

I am sick of being paralyzed. I consider turning this into a lucid dream, but I worry that I'll just have more chains of false awakenings and sleep paralysis issues.

At this point, I manage to open my real eyes, still unable to move. It is already morning according to the level of light. I struggle to keep my eyes open, but I manage to focus on my colorful bedspread until I finally jolt awake for real.

03.08.2013

Old Hag Syndrome (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I "wake up," incredibly thirsty. "Definitely gotta get up and get some water," I think groggily. My mouth is so dry that my tongue is practically sticking to the back of my throat.

When I open my eyes, the first thing I see is a tall, dark figure. It is a tall old woman, wearing a black hat and a big black dress. I stare at the woman calmly, fully believing that I'm really just seeing a normal object, my refrigerator maybe, and that my brain is just still half asleep and making me hallucinate. I fully expect her to disappear within a few moments.

She doesn't.

Instead, she glares directly into my eyes and lunges right at me! I let out a yelp of terror and shut my eyes. "OhmygodOhmygod I'm being attacked," I think frantically.

Then I realize that I can't move and that I've been stuck in sleep paralysis this whole time.

The realization actually makes me feel a bit better. At least now I know that the old woman isn't really real. Every time I open my eyes, I see her back in the doorway. Each time, she lunges toward me. I always close my eyes before she reaches me. Even though I know she's not real, it's still creepy as hell.

I really want to look at my clock: my one anchor to the physical world. But with the old hag constantly attacking me, I can't focus enough to do so. I have to get rid of her.

I open my eyes once more. The old woman comes toward me. I focus on speaking. "Don't. Touch. Me." It is an effort to get the words out, but I am pleased at how dangerously angry I sound. At the same time, I use an old trick of mine: I gather my fear and send it outward in an aggressive wave. The old woman halts in her tracks, stunned at my sudden retaliation.

After her initial shock, she says something along the lines of, "I will destroy you!"

"You can't hurt me," I growl in the same deadly tone.

She cackles. "Wanna bet?" She grabs ahold of my elbow. Pain radiates down my arm, but I've had worse and I only laugh.

"Even if you can hurt me, it doesn't make any difference," I taunt. "You're not real. You don't even exist."

Infuriated, she releases her hold on me and howls in rage.

"Now get away from me!" I yell. She stands in the doorway for the rest of the dream, not daring to attack again.

Now I can look at the clock. I struggle to make out the numbers: It's almost six in the morning. I've been stuck in SP for a while now, and I'm getting sick of it. SADLY, I fail to remember that I'm SUPPOSED to turn it into an LD or an OBE. Instead, I focus all my efforts into trying to wake myself up.

Nothing I do is helping. The only physical parts of me that I can control are my breathing, my eyes, and my tongue, but I can't do anything significant enough to wake myself up! Now that I'm not being attacked (and the vibrations aren't as intense as they have been), I'm getting incredibly bored and fed up with being forced to lie here not doing anything. How much longer could this possibly LAST!?

Screaming at my roommate to wake me up just results in more pointless hallucinations. So I remain stuck in SP for a while longer until I FINALLY snap out of it and wake up for real.

01.16.2013

Sleep Paralysis (DILD)

NON-DREAM DREAM LUCID

I suddenly become conscious of myself, paralyzed and floating in the black void between dreams. I am not concerned about anything; I just passively wait for a dream to pull me in. It seems as though it's taking longer than normal.

Eventually the faint buzzing of my body grows into great roaring vibrations, far more powerful than normal. It is unpleasant, but I recognize the feeling of being pulled towards a dream, so I do not fight it.

Suddenly I am "waking up" in a chair, with my head hanging uncomfortably back off the arm. "How did I fall asleep in this chair?" I wonder groggily, painfully pulling myself to a sitting position. I do not suspect that I'm dreaming at all. I am wondering how I got back into a house that no longer exists, but more pressing concerns distract me: my teeth seem to be misaligned so that my mouth cannot close properly, and I taste blood.

I stumble to the bathroom and am horrified to find that I have a disgusting looking underbite. My teeth slide together painfully when I try to close my mouth. I push my teeth back and close my mouth the right way, but whenever I open my mouth my teeth go all crooked again. Freaked, I suddenly am reminded of the taste of blood. I start spitting up large globs of blood all over the sink.

Okay, this is definitely a dream. I remember the sleep paralysis now, and find myself silly for not seeing this sooner. However, the sleep paralysis overtakes me once more before I get a chance to move. The feeling is once again extremely unpleasant, so much that I struggle to wake up.

I succeed briefly. I wake up, then roll over and immediately go back to sleep.

Now I am in a doctor's office, talking to a nurse about my sleep paralysis and the possibility that I have some kind of sleeping disorder. She laughs at me derisively, as if she doesn't believe me. She instructs me to go into this small room to take some kind of test, which I assume will verify that my problem is legitimate. It is a small room with a desk and a computer screen- no keyboard or mouse or anything.

I sit in front of the computer. Suddenly a demon comes out of it with a horrible demonic chattering filling my head. I can tell it is trying to drain my energy. I become lucid once more. "I'll just force it back into the screen with my telekinesis," I think, not worried in the slightest. But when I hold out my arm and try to exert my will upon it, the demon shoots up my body and drags me back into sleep paralysis.

The demonic chattering accompanyied with the thundering vibrations in my head and body is almost unbearable. I struggle, but any movemment I succeed in making is never with my real, physical body. Somehow I manage to open my eyes. At first, I don't believe they are my real eyes, because I am still entirely paralyzed, but I manage to focus on my clock. It is hard for my eyes to focus on the numbers, but I make out 2:34.

I am getting really concerned, wondering if I'm actually having some kind of seizure. It is a struggle to keep my eyes open, but I concentrate as hard as I can on the clock to keep them from closing so I do not have another endless cycle of false awakenings and more sleep paralysis. I HAVE to wake myself up.

The air is shimmering and moving, the way heat looks coming off a hot blacktop in the summer, and that demented chattering is still screeching horribly in my head. Am I really being attacked by a demon? I cannot move any part of my body except my eyes and possibly my mouth (though it's hard to say if it's my REAL mouth that is moving), so I instead quicken my breathing. If I start breathing really fast and irregularly, maybe it will jolt me awake.

After a few more agonizing moments, the heavy breathing really does force me awake. I am panting heavily, my heart pounding. I look at the clock. The time confirms that my eyes were actually open, as it is now a few minutes after 2:34. After I compose myself and go back to sleep, I have more disturbing dreams, but no more sleep paralysis.

Night of 11/8/12

I am standing in my room when I notice a small yellow jacket flying around. Great, how did a bee get in here? I am looking for something to smash it with, when suddenly a whole SWARM of bees is in the room, covering litterally every inch of the walls. Completely freaked out, I bolt from the room, screaming, swatting bees out of my hair.

Out in the hallway, I realize Alex (my roommate) is still in the room sleeping. "Alex!" I yell. "Alex! You'd better get out here before the bees sting you!" But as I look around the hallway, I notice to my extreme horror that it is also filled with bees! Is it a yellow jacket plague!? What do I do??? There is nowhere for me to walk without upsetting the swarm. I am so alarmed that I jolt into a false awakening.

Now I am standing beside my desk, telling Alex about my dream. Before I can get more than a few words out, however, she suddenly freaks out and points at my wall. There, is a small bee-like insect. "Don't worry," I tell her nervously, "that must have been what caused me to have the dream."

But as I get a closer look, I see that it is not a bee at all: it is a tiny demonic looking fairy wearing a gas mask. The fairy gives me a look that clearly says, "You'd better not tell anyone you saw me."

I immediately grab Alex and drag her out into the hallway to tell her what I saw. Out in the hallway, however, we are alarmed to find the massive swarm of yellow jackets! "This is just like my dream!" I shriek, before doing a reality check.

No wonder. I'm still dreaming.

Another false awakening. Now, I am in the bathroom with Alex, Jake, Sadie (my cat), and Roxie (Jake's dog). Roxie turns into a clone of Sadie. They alternate between hissing at each other and rubbing against each other affectionately. "What's up with them?" I ask Jake.

"Oh, they do that all the time," he says nonchalantly.

I bend down to pet them. At first, they purr and lean into my hand. Then, Jake says, "And that's what demon cats do."

Suddenly, the cats become completely feral and tear up my arm. It hurts a bit, but it is also accompanyied by a feeling so terrible, a feeling of complete and utter horror, that I am once again jolted into a false awakening.

This time, I am lying in bed in my dark room. Freaked out, I instantly do a reality check and determine that I'm still dreaming. A dark skinned girl with long hair sits at the foot of my bed, holding my large HP Lovecraft book. She is rambling about aliens crawling through her ears to her brain. I instinctively know that she's about to enact some sort of dream torture upon me, and I'm screaming at her to go away. I am stuck in sleep paralysis, unable to defend myself.

As a last resort, I close my eyes and let the darkness wash the dream away. I'll wake up in a better dream, I'll wake up in a better dream, I think to myself frantically, but a feeling of utter terror has taken over the entire atmosphere, and I know the next dream will be worse than the last.

I struggle to get out of sleep paralysis and into the real world, but every time I open my eyes, the most terryfying figure is looming over me. He has incredibly long arms which are wrapped tightly around me, pulling me out of reality toward a worse nightmare. His face is the most twisted, demented thing I've ever seen, it can't even be described with words, and he's wearing a large top hat.

Knowing that it is just a dream does not protect me from the agonizing feelings that he is inflicting in me. I am still frantically struggling to wake myself up, but each time I pull myself from the paralysis enough to do a reality check, I am still dreaming!

After what seems like ages, I finally jolt awake, panting heavily. I am instantly annoyed with myself for breaking my most important rule: DON'T WAKE YOURSELF UP.