Thread: Repeating False Awakening Nightmare

I had a repeating nightmare unlike anything I’ve ever had before. It’s called a false awakening. But it just kept happening over and over and over. I was trapped in a horrible loop that I couldn’t wake up from. Here’s a little backstory:

Before I fell asleep that night I was watching TV on the couch by myself. My husband David was already in bed. At some point a little after midnight I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up a little after 2 am and wandered to the bedroom to go to sleep. I fell asleep relatively quickly. I had a few dreams before the repeated false awakening. They all had a relatively dark tone. The lighting was always very low, and there was always something a little creepy about them.

Then the repeating nightmare started. Any time below where I write “I wake up”, I’m not really awake, but I think I am (until the very end).

I wake up. Just as I begin to wake I get the feeling like I’m freefalling for a split second. (This feeling will reoccur every time I wake up). I’m in my bedroom and everything looks exactly as it does in real life (which is strange because whenever I dream about being home it’s always in a past childhood home or some strange home I’ve never been in). I look at my alarm clock on the left side of the room and it’s 3:21 am. David is sound asleep next to me. I have this feeling that I’m scared, that I just had a bad dream and I want to turn on a light. I keep a small lamp clamped to a small shelf to the right of me. I reached up to turn the switch for the lamp on. The lamp glows faintly for a second then dies. I try re-switching the lamp on and off, but the light is dead. (This fit with real life because the bulb had been weakening, getting near death, so I didn’t think much of this). I turn to David and touch him. I call out his name and ask him to wake up. Just as he’s starting to stir, the dream restarts.

I wake up (freefall), I think to myself “that must’ve been a dream” but now I’m sure that I’m awake. I look to the left. The clock says 3:23. I look to the right and try to click the lamp on. It’s dead again. This time I remember that I also keep a tiny book reading light pen on that shelf. I feel for the little light pen and try to turn it on. It has two modes, a blue light and a red light. I try them both, but they’re both dead. (This does not fit with real life. This pen is really new and shouldn’t have dead batteries yet). I feel uneasy about this. I really want a light to be on. I know there’s a light switch in the bedroom facing me on the far wall. But I’m too scared to get out of bed myself to turn it on. So I turn to David and shake him. I call out his name and ask him to wake up. This time it’s a little harder to get him to wake up. But he sits up a bit and I start to tell him I had a bad dream and I need to talk to him. The dream restarts.

I wake up (freefall). I look at the clock. It’s 3:25. I try both lights. Both dead. This time there’s an even more urgent need for me to wake up David. Something’s not right. I’m realizing that I’m repeatedly waking up and falling back asleep. I feel 100% positive I’m really awake, but I somehow doze off instantly as I’m trying to wake David up. (this isn’t what’s happening of course, but I can’t tell) I turn and shake David more aggressively. I call out his name. He’s still asleep. I being to yell at him, shaking him. Finally he wakes up. He sits up and looks at me, a bit angry that I woke him up so rudely. I tell him that I was having a bad dream and I need to turn a light on. He tells me to go turn it on myself. But I’m too scared to do it myself. I look across at the wall with the light switch and I get this feeling that something else is in the room. In the closet. There’s someone or something evil in the closet and I’m scared of it and need David to turn on the light for me in order for the scary thing to go away. I ask him politely to turn the light on, but before he can respond the dream restarts.

This time when I wake up, I don’t move. I don’t turn to look at the clock, I don’t try the lightswitches. I’m very frustrated and scared. I tell myself I need to try something different so I just lay there and listen. I hear a man outside our bedroom wall (the other side of our bedroom wall is the alley) walking towards the alley’s exit. I hear another person walking the opposite direction. It’s a woman walking her dog. I hear her talking to her dog briefly, something like, “Come on puppy!” and a few seconds later I don’t hear them anymore. Hearing normal things occurring outside makes me feel a little more at ease, even though I feel like it’s weird there’s so much traffic going through the alley in the middle of the night. I feel as though this time I’m finally awake and turn to flip the light on. The light, again, is dead. This makes me feel worse, so I turn to wake up David. This time it’s easy to wake him, at least, and he sits up and talks to me. I tell him that I was having a bad dream that kept repeating and that I really wanted to go into the den and watch TV for a while. He’s trying to listen to me but I can see his eyes are closed and he’s falling back asleep. I try to force him to stay awake by yelling at him and shaking him, but he’s too tired to stay up. He falls back asleep. I look around in the bedroom and see something scary in the closet. It’s a man. A man in a suit. A nice business suit. The man is really tall. So tall that he has to tilt his head down a little to see me past the upper door frame. He’s looking at me. His face is leathery and has stitches all over it. Old stitches. Like scars in the shape of stitches. His face is kind of like a baseball glove. He’s looking at me but he doesn’t move from the closet. I get really scared and reach out to shake David awake again. The dream restarts.

I wake up, look at the clock. It’s 3:31am. This time I immediately realize the scary man in in the room. I immediately try to wake up David. He won’t wake up. I decide to shake him as hard as I can and yell at him. He still won’t wake up. The dream restarts.

I wake up. I’m incredibly frustrated and panicking that I keep falling asleep. I tell myself I need to keep myself awake longer. I’m focusing on staying awake. I want to wake up David for sure this time, so I decide to scream as loud as I can. (Normally in dreams when I try to scream, no sound comes out, but this time I’m able to scream perfectly well, which is another thing that leads me to believe I really am awake) I scream and it wakes up David with a start. I tell him very insistently to go turn a light on. Any light in the house. He gets out of bed and starts to walk towards the lightswitch. The scary man is in my closet, watching David, but he doesn’t do anything. Just as David’s about to turn on the light, the dream restarts.

I wake up. I’m extremely upset and scared. I decide to keep my eyes closed and pray to God. My prayer is short and went something along the lines of, “Please help me wake up David. Please don’t let me fall asleep again. I BEG you.” As I finish this sentence suddenly there’s this overwhelming feeling that jolts through my body. A bad feeling. A feeling like I just did something very wrong. Like my prayer didn’t work. Like it backfired and I caused something even more evil to come out. I can almost hear something evil laughing at me. Or is it God laughing at me? I’m not sure. All I know is my prayer isn’t going to be answered. I feel doomed. I hear something rustling outside in the alley (There’s an empty lot directly across they alley from our house). A bright light is shining in that empty lot from some kind of tower. That light is shining through our bedroom windows and making the room bright enough to see well in. I see the scary man in the closet. But now there’s also another creature. It looks kind of like a flying chinese dragon. It’s not particularly frightening, but it’s flying around in my bedroom like a ghost. I turn to wake up David. He wakes up and I squeeze his arms and beg him to stay awake. I just keep talking to him loudly, saying, “Stay awake David. Wake up. Don’t fall back asleep. I need you right now. Please stay awake.”
I try and try to keep him awake but he falls back asleep. The dream restarts.

I wake up. In desperation I try to turn my lamp on, I switch it over and over again, trying to will it to turn on, but it won’t. I knew it wouldn’t but I had to try. I tell myself I need to try something different. I think about getting out of bed. I begin to move towards the edge of the bed, but then my eyes focus on the man in the closet. I’m frozen. Too scared to move. Instead I reach over to David again to wake him up. He sits up. He puts his arm around me and tries to comfort me as I begin to tell him about my nightmare. The dream restarts.

I look at the clock. It’s 3:42am. I’m extremely upset that I keep falling asleep repeatedly. I don’t know what to do. I feel like crying. I feel like screaming. I really really need to turn a light on. I try the lights on my shelf. They don’t turn on. I turn to wake David. He stirs for a moment but then falls back asleep. The dream restarts.

Then a series of very short repeats happen. All I can manage to do when I wake up is immediately turn to David and try to wake him, but within a second or two the dream restarts. Sometimes the man is there. Sometimes the dragon is there. Sometimes I don’t notice either. This probably happens about 8-12 times. At some point the thought crosses my mind that maybe I’m dead and this is hell.

I wake up. I look at the clock. 3:50am. I try the lights. Nope. I get really angry. I wake up David. He sits up. I tell him something is wrong. Something is happening to me and to the world outside and we need to get out of this room. He is confused and wants to fall back asleep, but I say no. I push him out of bed, make him stand up. I walk him towards the bedroom door. The scary man is in the closet just a few feet away, tilting his head, peering down at me, just watching. David opens the bedroom door. Now we’re in the kitchen. This is something new. I feel relieved that I’ve made progress. I tell David to turn on a light. He seems reluctant to do this because David hates bright lights when he’s sleepy or has just woken up. But he goes to turn on the kitchen light. But the lights don’t turn on. I yell, “The power’s out David!” I hear sounds outside in the alley, like people are scurrying around, scavenging for scraps of trash from the bins. The thought crosses my mind that people are panicking outside. Like something bad has happened out in the world. An apocalypse? I highly doubt it, but the thought stuck there with me. David doesn’t seem too concerned about the power being out. He starts to move back towards the bedroom door to go back to sleep, but I grab him. I tell him we need to find a light that will turn on. I run to the kitchen lightswitch and try to turn on the lights myself. I flick the switch on and off, but the kitchen light doesn’t turn on. I tell David that we need to walk together to the den and try turning on the TV. If I can get the TV to turn on, everything will be ok. (The TV has always been my primary source of comfort after having bad dreams). I get into the den (and, of course, everything in my kitchen and den are exactly as they seem in real life, which is really unusual for a dream) and I push the TV button to turn it on. I wake up.

I wake up for reals this time. The first thing I do when I wake up is gasp. Then I look at the clock. 3:51am. This makes me feel uneasy, like maybe I’m still dreaming since the clock is still following the progression of time from my dream. Then I turn to David and shake him. I wake him and yell that I had a bad dream and I need him to wake up. Expecting another struggle with him to keep him awake. But he wakes up and puts his arm around me and tells me he’s there and that it’s ok. After a couple seconds of comforting me, I feel the need to make sure I’m really awake. I look up at my lamp and reach to turn it on. For a second I hesitate, afraid that it’ll be dead again, but I gather an ounce of courage and flick the switch. The lamp turns on. A HUGE wave of relief washes over me. I tell David about my dream, how horrible it was. How I thought I was in hell. How I prayed but it didn’t work, and then I freaked out about the clock. How was I dreaming the correct time? Last time I looked at the clock in my dream it was 3:50am. When I woke up it was 3:51am. How was that possible? Was I actually waking up over and over and looking at the clock? Or does my subconscious somehow just know what time it is? It didn’t make sense. I felt completely awake in my dreams. As awake as I felt right now. I started crying. Then I started hyperventilating. But the panicking only lasted about a half a minute and I calmed down. I tried laying my head down for a couple minutes, but I started to get that uneasy feeling in my skin. In the past when I’ve had nightmares, sometimes I’d get this feeling in my body. Like a pressure, like maybe something or someone was laying on top of me, or that my body was as heavy as lead. I knew that if I fell asleep again that I’d go right back to being trapped in that nightmarish loop again, so I decided to get out of bed and go watch TV in the den.

It was about 4 am and I knew that a repeat of a TV show I liked called “Angel” was on so I flipped to that. The episode was one I’d never seen before. It happened to be about a character who was stuck traveling back and forth in time – just a few minutes would pass and then she’s be back where she was to start. Or she’d shoot forward in time a few minutes. That freaked me out a little. But I thought to myself that this show always had crazy storylines and it was just a coincidence. After that episode aired, I switched channels to watch a repeat of Buffy. This is when I got really weirded out. This Buffy episode was one I’d never seen before either. These bad guys were tormenting Buffy by messing with time. At first they were shooting her forward in time, making her miss her class. Then they decided to put her in a time loop to test her. She was stuck working in the magic shop, and certain situations would repeatedly happen. They were taking bets to see when she’d finally pass the test. There was one thing she could do to break out of the loop, she just had to figure it out, and if she didn’t do the right thing they would start her over and make her repeat the scenario over and over again. I watched her go through this, figuring out she was trapped in a loop, and then go through similar emotions that I had gone through in my dream. Freaking out, wanting to cry, feeling like she had gone crazy, getting angry, trying to do things differently to break the cycle. Eventually she passed the test and broke the loop, yada yada.

But it really weirds me out that those were the TV shows I watched after having that nightmare…. Really weirds me out.