questioning a strange dream I hate having

**amc11e** · 04-03-2013 09:01 PM

Hi guys new here... just posting out of curiosity to see if anyone has the same type of dreams I keep having. Basically i start to dream that i am laying in bed awake and I can't fall asleep. This is confusing because my brain fully thinks that I am awake. I am usually looking around in the dream trying to fall asleep and all of a sudden a HUGE unrealistically huge bug of some sort will either crawl across the wall or ceiling or sometimes the bed or even fall onto me sometimes from the ceiling. Because i have convinced myself in the dream that i am fully awake I panic so bad in the dream that I wake myself up and i jump out of bed screaming and my heart is always racing and i feel weak i guess because I just went from sleep to complete shock. I once had one where a whip scorpion fell onto my face...if you don't know what that is google it real quick and see how terrifying that would be haha and I jumped and tripped and fell onto the floor face first and really hurt myself so I don't want this to keep happening. It takes me a couple of minutes to get myself together and realize it wasn't real. It is a really scary experience and it happens every few weeks and happened twice last night which is a first. I really hate it and I want to stop having this experience. Has anyone had anything similar to this or know how i can make it stop? Thanks guys!

**Oceandrop** · 04-05-2013 01:24 PM

Mh instead of stopping them, can't you try to use these happenings to your advance? Try daydream the scenes but add that you become lucid because of it? Or just use a mantra before falling asleep that you will do a reality check and become lucid the next time you see something like that/wake up in your bedroom, because you know it is impossible to happen in real life?

**Arra** · 04-08-2013 08:31 PM

Something similar, maybe the same thing, used to happen to me. Except I'm still not sure whether I was dreaming or hallucinating. I thought I may really be hallucinating because a couple times I'd sit up, still see the thing I saw, and then get out of bed. If I'd been dreaming, I would have been unlikely to sit up while still asleep. Hallucinations during the onset of sleep are somewhat common (well most people don't get them, but it isn't unheard of).

For about a year, every few nights or so I'd hallucinate large spiders. Occasionally there were other things (like plants seeping through the corner of my room) but 95% of the time it was spiders of unrealistic size. In this way, it seems very similar to your experience, since you saw 'bugs' too which you were afraid of. It's also similar because I would also sometimes get up screaming. On a few occasions I woke up my parents with my screaming which was pretty embarrassing afterward. I'd usually run to the bathroom and start taking off my clothes because I felt like the spider was still on me somewhere. As with you, it took me a few seconds to a couple minutes to realize that it was probably just a dream. But in the beginning, I'd look through all of my covers before going back to bed, just to be sure. There was a stage in my life at which this all happened, similar to the 'stage' in which I experienced sleep paralysis almost every night. I have no idea what caused it (possibly stress), but it lasted for about a year. At the worst point, I was getting it maybe once every couple nights. But it did start to go away, and I haven't experienced it now in months.