have you experienced this type of loop dream

I just had a terrifically bizarre dream experience. The only thing that lead me to post here was that I could not find a similar dream account online. I'm wondering if anyone has encountered similar.

I believe what I experienced was a loop dream, but in a nightmarish surrounding. However all other loop dreams I've read about seem connected with paralysis. Maybe I'm wrong.

In this dream environment, I was wandering a typically wildly morphed version of my current reality. I live in a residential warehouse community, so I'm surrounded by interesting converted warehouses. The dream setting was night time. I explored my environment, and became aware it was descending into nightmare. My dream recall is vague but I remember a state of anxiety and recurring bad omens.

What made it different was that I was able to wake up, but would find myself back at square one. Not my bedroom, it was actually an enormously larger and decayed version of a neighbouring warehouse, but always in the same spot. I would begin my exploration, and soon find that I was walking the same route once again, eventually leading to new locations and situations within the environment, all with negative outcomes.
I remember thinking 'screw this' and waking myself up, only to find myself back at square one. After countless loops, I began to confront the negative omens, be they people, sights or sounds. I would wake and pray that I hadn't fallen back into the loop, but within minutes would be exploring new ways of confronting or attempting to ignore the omens. It became very neurotic and panicked, like I was stuck in a cruel game.
Sometimes I would be able to get quite far before what felt like lingering evil prevailed. I'd see fnds, their faces hard to make out, I'd come across new rooms, and would never feel physically restrained or disabled.
Every attempt to wake would reset the dream, with a new and increasingly desperate resolve to overcome the nagging, returning omens. The constant cycling became very maddening. Sometimes I'd feel like I was 'winning', before realising the dream had merely allowed me to think that momentarily, plunging me back on to the same old trail and geographical sequence of omens (can't recall specifics here) so as to madden me further, like a cat toys with it's prey.

When I finally real - life awoke, I felt instantly that I'd had the dream many times before, like a sense of deja vu, but soon realised I hadn't. I was so perplexed by this quickly deteriorating recollection of being trapped in a dream within a dream that I took to Google, but only found lucid experiment reports and dreams of repeatedly attempting to get up from the same bed. Or multiple false awakenings, but never back to the start of the same environment.

Worth noting is that I was physically assaulted with a weapon quite badly two days ago while out with some friends, and that I'm in a high stress period. I'm sure there's a post traumatic factor here, though I didn't confront anything directly related.

I'd be very curious to hear if anyone has experienced this type of loop dream! How strange and awesome our human minds can be. Thanks for reading!

Hey Alexmemory!

That is such a cool experience! I've never had an event exactly like that but I'm almost jealous :D it sounds like it was crazy but really fun in the end.

The closest Ive come to that is false awakenings. I once had 6 false awakenings in a row! You might already know this but a false awakening is when you wake up from a dream and ur actually still in the dream, really similar to what you experienced.

Then I finally woke up lol it can be really surprising but its also a very cool experience. Robert Wagoner talks about false awakenings in his book Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self. Its my favorite lucid dreaming book. I recommend it if you haven't tried it already

And welcome to DreamViews M8! Happy Dreaming

Hey Wisher, thanks for the reply. It certainly was very weird! Not that enjoyable but after reading through this forum a little bit I'm starting to see how things like lucid dreaming can open some very interesting doors, and with some more education maybe I could have had a better experience.

XD for sure false awakenings can be as scary as that first drip on a rollercoaster. I remember asking myself if I would ever wake up, :D lol but you do and you learn to love it

Anything you're curious about in particular? You have a very inquisitive mind

I have experienced these looped dreams before, with what appear to be repeated restarts as you mentioned. Some nightmarish, some less so. When it happens it always feels like a game to me though: Reset, try hard, fail. Reset, try harder, fail. And so on...

Now, this might be just due to the fact that my recall is highly unstable even after years of practice, but... I always assumed that this type of thing actually happens more often than we realize.

The sense of deja vu is what leads me to this conclusion, really. When I wake up too fast and only remember one single scenario, it seems very possible to me that the occasional sense of deja vu I get exists only because the dream had been looping that way for who knows how long.

In any case, letting that panic take over is what seems most undesirable about this dream to me though. Panic over the looping would essentially do more harm than good, I would think...seems counterproductive. Just as it would be in a real life scenario.

Think of it that way maybe, I find it helps ground me in reality.
Even when my brain is somehow convinced that reality has gone out the window...

Knowledge is power!
x}

I haven't experienced looping dreams per se but I've had pretty much the same dream twice in a row, the only difference being that the first time I was somebody else and was with a fictional character and a couple of dream characters, and the second time around I was myself and with my family. Also, in the dream I found a cat I named "Cat", but immediately wished I had named it "Sissel" instead. So when I had the dream again, I named it "Sissel".