Thread: Eyes sightly open while sleeping, Lucid dream overlapping with reality?

This happens to me a lot and my eyes dry up. This is not helpful at all..I sometimes use an adhesive tape to close my eyelids. Some people see benefits with sleep masks too.

Very interesting, this never happened to me. Not this visual encounter with the reality only sound a few times.

In some of my dreams, especially when im lucid and in my own bed in the dream, i can see my room and when i wake up from the dream, im staring at the exact same place i was in the dream. Maybe our minds can predict what we're looking at?

I hate to be slapping on terms that nobody quite understands, but it's possible it was along the lines of sleep paralysis or something similar to it (such as hypnagogic hallucinations)--your brain was asleep and trying to create a dreamworld for you, but your real eyes were open, so the real world became part of the dream. Did you feel paralyzed at all, did you not pay attention to it, or did it seem like you were really moving (which could also be a hallucination, honestly)?

I've gotten this before, I've had dreams while my eyes were open, so my bedroom got fused within the dream. I remember one particular lucid dream where it felt like I was endlessly falling; I was skydiving. But about 80% of my vision was blocked off a complete dark dark gray, from the top going down. On the very bottom I saw an island that I was falling towards, and surrounded by it was water, and water, and more water (obviously). I could feel myself falling, could even hear the wind in my ears, but my vision continued to stay blocked off, and willing the dreamworld to form in that area wouldn't work. The more and more I thought about it, trying to will my vision to be clear, I realized I felt something on my face, and that's what I knew was blocking my vision. I tried to pull it off, but even when I felt it in my hand, and felt myself pulling it, it wouldn't come off. There was something else, too, somehow it felt like my arm never moved in the first place.

Then, as I was still falling, and the ground never seemed to get closer, I realized what was going on. My real eyes were open, but I was paralyzed in real life--what was blocking my vision was my sleep mask, and through the cracks around my nose that my sleep mask has I was looking at my TV on the wall, which appeared to be the island. The wall of my bedroom appeared to look like the ocean. The falling, of course, was just an aspect of the dream, or a hallucination. I was sure of this when I could almost make out the actual boxy TV on my wall around the island, and the cracks or tides in the ocean appeared like they were actually part of my wall.

So, in other words, the real world fused into my dream because I had my eyes open--just like the situation you described.

Honestly, based off of personal experience, I don't think a sleep mask alone will fully solve this. If it completely obstructs your vision unlike my own experience, then sure, maybe your mind will try to create a dreamworld anyway in front of your eyes. But if I recall correctly, although it was months ago, I think what I did the day I had that experience was purposefully wake myself up, not move, and then perform a DEILD back to sleep (in which I fell down and finally landed on the island I was looking at the entire time, with 100% vision). This is kind of risky, though, since there's always a chance the DEILD will fail, and I honestly think that trying to close your eyes while that happens will work just as well. Really--if you know your eyes are open, close them! I don't know for sure, but yeah, everything would go black for a second, and then I think your mind would actually finally start creating a dreamworld for you once it realizes you can't see anything and you would enter the dream like you would in a WILD. By that point, you're most likely in REM sleep anyway, so I'd guess when you close your eyes, a dream would start to form nearly immediately.

I hope this helps!

Whoops long reply, TL;DR: I've had this experience before and managed to get out of it by waking myself up and DEILDing back to sleep, but simply closing your eyes once you know they're open would probably be safer and I think would work--most likely things would go black for a moment, but then the dream would start to form like it would in the beginning of a WILD.