false awakening

Disclaimer: This dream journal is about sleep paralysis/demon encounters. I want to clarify that sleep paralysis and intense nightmares like mine aren't normal, nothing about this is normal. I don't recommend that anyone attempt to do this. I've been dealing with SP and demon encounters for over 20 years. It's not something to take lightly or recommend, this is just my own very personal dream life that I'm sharing.

I also want to point out that there's a lot of misinformation in the LD community about LDs causing sleep paralysis, despite how useful LDs are at combatting SP. lucid dreaming didn't cause my SP. Rather, lucidity is the way I've learned how to get out of SP/nightmares and this dream shows how.

Anywho.

As I fell asleep consciously, I felt a demon's claws sinking into my back. Its nails brought an uncanny electrical sensation through my spine, as if a poison was being injected into my spinal cord directly, shooting straight through my nervous system to the rest of my body. This caused waves of pain with occassionally intense spikes, growing more and more intense by the moment. It was dreadful.

The demon was standing behind me (I normally sleep on my side). I don't know if I was paralyzed because I didn't try to move. My goal was to combat this mentally through calm meditation, not physical struggling.

I already know how to break SP with physical movement, and that's not what I wanted to do here. This was a planned encounter. I invited a demon to induce SP.

"This is fine. Keep going." I thought in my mind, wanting the demon to continue as I practiced my mental fortitude to combat the feeling, mentally wrestling with it and pushing it out of my mind. It was overwhelming, but I kept going.

The demon cranked the pain up a tenfold. I started getting severe spikes of pain going through my nervous system every few seconds, increasing in frequency. I stayed calm and still didn't react despite the pain.

I've been inviting this demon to come visit me in my sleep for a few weeks now. Why? Because I'm stagnating, I've exhausted my the resources of my personal dreamwork and I can't figure out how to push myself any other way... I need to grow, I have to keep going. My life is a mess right now and I'm desperate to become stronger so I can deal with it.

The demon stopped after a while, since it wasn't breaking me. I felt its energy fade, and I too was fading into a dreamed version of my bedroom. The color of the walls, lighting, and layout of the house slowly changed in the emergence of the dreamscape. I was still technically my house, just an altered version of it.

I felt an uneasy presence in the room and knew the demon was still standing somewhere nearbby watching me, invisible and waiting.

I decided to walk out into the livingroom. This part I'm not going to share because it's too personal, but one of my insecurities manifested in the next dream scene of loved ones yelling at me, and it quickly snowballed. My calm demeanor slipped as I felt my mind spiral out of control from the insecurities. I was upset. In that moment of clouded thinking, I actually lost my lucidity.

This was not normal. It's rare for me to lose lucidity when I'm upset. This went on for a few minutes before I regained my lucidity. Being upset normally triggers lucidity for me, so I got it back pretty quickly.

I felt the demon laughing at me, though, and realized it did that on purpose. Impressive, I thought, but I was still freaked out. I realized that this demon had found one of my weakness. It couldn't get me with sleep paralysis and pain, so it had (successfully) targeted a psychological weakness instead.

Challenge accepted.

I quickly walked into another room, intending to change the dream scene to get myself out of that negative emotional state. If I could calm down, I could regain control and prevent the demon from weakening me any further.
This was kind of thrilling, I have to admit. I like playing these mental games, and learning from my mistakes.

I suddenly woke up for seemingly no reason, which is unusual for me. I typically always have a reason for waking up, whether because of an alarm, the natural end of a dream, a nightmare, or my own intention to awake... I don't just 'randomly' wake up from my dreams.

So I sat up in bed, unaware that this was a false awakening, which is AGAIN unusual for me. I haven't fallen for an FA in a while, yet this time, I really thought I was awake.

Now nonlucid dreaming, I walked back out into the livingroom and ANOTHER one of my insecurities manifested. Some of my personal embarrassing text messages were revealed to people I didn't want to share them with! Thinking it was really happening, I was mortified. But then I became lucid again (since negative emotions normally trigger lucidity for me) and was incredibly relieved that this embarrassing moment wasn't actually happening.

The demon was laughing at me pretty hard though. I knew it had tricked me into having an FA and being nonlucid.
I suddenly woke up again. The demon was trying it's trick a second time.
"No. Not this time~" I told myself, laughing maniacally.
Fooled me once, shame on me...

I was kind of unsure though, so I did a reality check and it failed. My hands were solid.
Whatever. I don't trust reality checks anyway, so I wasn't nonlucid just yet.
I tried to use dream control next, going to fly upwards towards the wall. Normally my dream control works, but this failed too.

"Huh... " I thought, starting to believe I might actually be awake...
Reality checks and dream control can fail, though, I thought, so I still wasn't fully sold on this being waking reality. I was really thinking hard on this one.
Could still be a dream.
I was determined to not be tricked again and I was pretty sure that my uncertainty meant this was for sure a dream.
What a puzzle.
I normally ALWAYS know when I'm dreaming, so this was... really weird.
The weirdness of it alone made me even more suspicious.

I proceeded to have several more false awakenings, over and over again. Sometimes I knew it was a dream, and other times I wasn't sure, but I felt like the demon was flipping a light switch back and fourth repeatedly trying to break my lucidity.

"Mother-" I cursed and laughed.

Normally I'd be fine continuing this game, it was fun, but I knew I had to get up early in the morning and didn't want my sleep quality to be obliterated tonight (lucidity doesn't affect my sleep quality, but nightmares like this can when they go on for too long).

So I decided I was going to end this by waking myself up.

First, I found an alter for the demon in the dreamscape (which had offerings on it). "Thank you, that was impressive. No hard feelings~" I said to the demon as I destroyed the alter, shoving the whole thing off the table and breaking the artifacts.

Then I woke myself up (for real). I checked the physical reality clock and realized... That whole thing only lasted an hour?!

It felt like 4+ hours had gone by, so I was shocked. This is also unusual of for me, since I've specifically trained myself to not experience time dilation (I don't like when my time perception in dreams doesn't match waking reality).

I reached for the protective pendant I keep on my desk (which keeps demons away, but I had intentionally taken it off before bed as an invitation). It was shoved under my photography lightbox for some reason, kind of wedged under there (not where I put it, but ok). I was going to put it on when I realized the chain was torn off.

This was in waking reality. I searched high and low for the necklace chain. I found the chain on the floor and put my pendant on, did some other protection stuff in the room, and went back to sleep.
Had normal dreams for the rest of the night.

Final note: this dream happened the night before last.

This dream was from 3 nights ago.

I boarded a subway with sectioned rooms big enough for one or two people. Each room was empty with just a handrail.

I stood inside, waited for the doors to close, and felt the train move. Stood there for what felt like a few minutes, thinking it was a bit odd that my dream wasn’t changing. I can normally sense the motion of my dreams and things change around me.

Something felt off.

Then I felt something wash over my spine (the sensation I get with SP). I noticed a presence in the room and looked up. There was something nonhuman hanging on the handrail above me. I didn’t want to see it, so I blocked it from my mind with a blur effect as soon as I realized it was there.

it’s been a while since I’ve been scared like this, normally these don't get under my skin. I attempted to wake myself up, but did an FA into a room that looked nothing like my bedroom. I recognized it as a dream, but played along with it until I started feeling the sensation again of SP again and saw the creature coming back for more.

Woke myself up for real that time.

I kept accidentally DEILDing back in several times after that, though, and having waking hallucinations.

So eventually, I got up and walked around to wake myself up enough to stop the DEILDs.

I’m so glad this isn’t common for me any more. I used to go into SP multiple times per week and the experiences were a lot worse (this wasn't too bad). Once it would start, I would get stuck in endless DEILD chains.

The dream control skills I’ve picked up from this community make a world of difference. I didn’t lose sleep or experience any panic like I used to. Pretty great improvement.

One hour long dream. I did V-WILD but decided to just pay a lot of attention to the process, feeling it, being present. I've been running lots of tests like this lately to try and get a better idea of how it works.

After doing V-WILD into my bedroom, I climbed out the window. I noted how a lot of things were different in my neighborhood like lighting and rearranged buildings.

I decided to test out waking myself up in a way where it’s more dream body instead of waking (trying to get a better understanding for the difference between dream and waking body lately). I tested to see if I can trigger a false awakening.

Yes! Maybe? I woke up back in my bedroom. I assumed this was either a dream, or I woke myself for real. I did a reality check with finger through palm and it didn’t work.

I was pretty sure it was a dream anyway though. I didn't take the failed RC too seriously, since I know that happens sometimes. I plugged my nose and breathed, that worked.

I proceeded to practice false awakenings a few times. Knew I was still dreaming each time, got a better feel for it.

Most of the time I was with my dream character version of SO. She watched me do all this nonsense lol. Most times I told her it was a dream, she acted mock concerned like half-heartedly gasped. I responded “Yeah, I know if you were my rl SO you would be rightly concerned about me thinking everything is a dream, but since we both know it’s a dream, you’re fine. No need to act all shocked haha."

I eventually woke myself up for real when it felt it had been an hour. My timing guess was right (I seem to still have a good sense of RL time in dreams).

Followed a biologist named Ethan to an alien planet. Him and a group of researchers set up a base of operations to study the native wildlife. There was a slothlike creature that he was creating a 3-D model of (they recorded many different animals and plants). They brought a dog with them and whenever I went near the dog, I started levitating. At some point I asked whether there was something causing me to levitate around the dog or if it was a dream thing. Suddenly all of them looked at me demonically and I got scared and either woke up or got a false awakening.

This hasn’t happened to me in a while. I think maybe I broke immersion too harshly and spooked myself.

It was a fun dream though so I decided to go back into it with WILD.

I reappeared in a futuristic version of Earth in which many years had passed. Everything was tightly controlled and monitored. People weren’t allowed to communicate without a device listening and tracking them. The government kept tabs on everything people said.

I decided to look for Ethan. After messing around with my phone a bit, but deciding the phone wasn’t worth it because of the tracking, I looked for him in person. I found him in a truck parked in an alleyway, and told him I could break him out.

He didn’t want to be freed, though. He was worried about the government catching him. Turns out they were following me anyway. They already knew.

So (in my dream dragon form) I grabbed him and flew out of the building.

Outside, there was a shore and what looked like ocean. I started flying over the water in a random direction until I saw some land. An escape, I thought.

I thought we were making it out, but then I realized they had cows on a boat heading in that direction. We were heading straight for a slaughterhouse.

I realized in that moment that there was nothing out here. The whole world head been reduced to this one island and section of ocean.

I was still being followed and they were laughing their butts off at the fact I was going straight for the slaughterhouse. I turned back and was captured. I didn’t want anything to do with the void beyond the ocean, so I just let them take me back.

I then journaled this dream inside the dream and then woke at 5:09 AM real time (checked clock).

I went back to sleep and re-entered the dream again, back to being caught.

I don’t think much happened but they brought me back inside and seemed like they weren’t sure what to do with me. They knew what I was and that I wouldn’t be here long. Eventually I woke up again to 7:00 alarm.