Thread: Very weird and hard to explain experience

Sounds like sleep paralysis combined with hypnagogic hallucinations.

Yep, that thing this morning sounds like a classic sleep paralysis episode. You can actually open your eyes a bit while it's going on (but not see a great deal). While in SP, the mind disassociates itself from the body, and invents a "virtual" body- which is what you move in dreams. The actual body is cut off from the bran so you don't physically act out your dream. On the occasion that you get SP but you are not yet in a dream (like you had), it can feel like you are actually moving, and it's basically impossible to tell the difference. A few days ago (in SP) I heard my phone vibrate, so I reached over to get it. I even felt the phone in my hand before I realised that I hadn't actually moved at all. Hope that helps!

Yea that makes sense. The only thing i'm confused about is this. I could see about perfectly well, as if my eyes were completely open. How could this be if my eyes were closed?

Were you seeing your real room though, or a dream room? Was it dark?

I had exactly the same thing happen the other day, in my most recent lucid. I dreamed I wass laying in my bed curled up in a sort of fetal position with my face pressed up against the window. I couldn't move at all, but I could see all kinds of crazy stuff going on outside the window. It looked sort-of kind-of similar to what's really out there, but different. For instance, it looked like my neighbor's yard, only there was a waterslide there, and there were about thirty people there having a birthday party for my friend (who doesn't actually live there).

The only problem was... in reality my bed isn't next to my window. My face was actually pressed against the wall, not the window. Thank god my subconscious changed things around a bit or it would have been a really boring lucid!! Maybe at best I could have watched a bug crawl around on the wall...

Oh, I should mention, after a while I was able to move though. First my view shifted... from seeing the neighbor's yard I suddenly was seeing something across the street (only not what's actually across the street) and was thinking about lucid dreaming... there was an old brick building with some kind of yellow lettering over the door that I couldn't read and I was all like "yep... definitely a lucid dream... you can never read anything in a lucid". Then I remembered that if you look at one thing for long enough in a dream it's supposed to change and destabilize the dream. So I kept staring at the building trying to read the sign, and it did change, just very subtlely. It's like the patterning of the brickwork changed, and now I could tell what the sign said (without really being able to actually READ it). It said WalMart. Heh... looked more like a haunted house than a WalMart! I was laughing about this little discovery that at least I could do SOMETHING in this dream and then I was standing outside on a dark alley. From there I could move at will, though the dream only lasted a few more seconds.

So don't lose hope... even this kind of dream can result in a lucid where you can move.