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Sleep Paralysis In a Dream Within A Dream

OneWingedBird

OneWingedBird

Beloved of Ra
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Aug 3, 2003
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thought i'd put this in here as i couldn't find a thread for nested dreams/dreams within dreams (merge away if there is one) and it's odd enough i didn't think it would sit well in either the 'vanilla' dreams or sp threads.

Last night i was having a dream where i was in a cinema, don't recall what the film was, but i was sat like i was watching it and struggling to stay awake, only i kept falling asleep (3 or 4 times) and each time i fell asleep i went into an episode of sp. No goblins or the usual not quite right bedroom in any of them, each time i was in a dark place, unable to move, and with a terrible sense of dread. Then i'd struggle to move, or try to yell to wake myself up, until i woke, to find myself back in the cinema again, still trying to stay awake.

The final time i fell asleep in the cinema, instead of sp, it was like my head had fallen backwards into another room, where i could hear screams/whimpering, then i woke up for real.

Thought this was uber weird 'cos although i'm no stranger to sp (in fact, i purposely don;t sleep on my back to try to avoid it), it's never happened in the '2nd level' of a dream before. I'm not even sure if i was having classic sp episodes, or just dreaming i was having them :shock: :? There was just someting very strange that each time i awoke from an episode, instead of waking proper, i re-awoke into the cinema dream!
 
Very odd. I have had something similar, where I get drunk in dreams and pass out and then am unable to move in the dream despite being aware of my surroundings, I guess it is like sleep paralysis. It's awful :(
 
I once had a "multi-layered" dream where I was wandering round a house trying to find hidden treasure. In this dream, I could go to bed & fall asleep, which would put me into a weirder & more dreamlike version of the same house - with doors and windows in different places, walls removed, and things generally being more surreal than wherever I'd fallen asleep.

Because of the extremely weird layout of some of the deeper levels I was able to accomplish things + find objects that were inaccessible in the more realistic, shallower levels. Then, if I pinched myself a few times, I would "wake up" back in bed in the previous layer of the dream!

Anyway, I fell asleep one time too many and ended up trapped in the foundations of this house, aware but paralysed - I could feel vague discomfort & numbness in my limbs, which I used to get when I got yer actual sleep paralysis as a lad. I couldn't move enough to pinch myself and get out again :(

I panicked, which was enough to 'wake me up' and deposit me back in the previous layer of the dream - carried on as before, eventually I did actually find the treasure at which point I woke up entirely.

I blame video games, myself :)
 
I have had experiences where I've dropped off, dreamt I've awoken, done one or two things only to freeze-frame for an uncomfortably long amount of time......then wake up, done one or two things only to freeze frame........etc etc, going through 5 or 6 cycles. It got to the point where every time I "awoke" the only way I knew I was asleep still was because the sky was pink.

These experiences happened when I was newly diagnosed as being Narcoleptic and the quack was trying me on different drugs. Can't remember the name of the offender though.
 
On two occasions I have had this happen to me.The first time I would have been 7 or 8 years old,back in about 1975/76.It was about 1pm.I was dreaming of a sun setting over a hillside.It was a beautiful deep orange colour sky and silhouetted against the sky were 3 or 4 fantasy knight figures on horses,it was as if I was watching a film.I then started to wake up to find myself lying on the floor in front of our old coal fire(I regularly used to dose off there as a kid).Sitting on the settee was my Mother and a friend of hers who was the mother of one of my pals at the time.They both said hello and I heared my pals mother say that her oldest son would be over soon to pick her up(odd I thought because she only lived over the road opposite my house).I then dosed back and returned to the hillside dream.Slowly I awoke again only this time I was in my own bed and it was first thing in the morning.As you can imagine I was pretty confused when I realised that "It was all a dream"!!

The next time was around 1990.Every morning at 8am my mother would knock on my door to wake me so I could get ready for work.She would then bring me a cup of tea and put it on my bedside table(yep,I know i'm spoilt).I thanked her but dozed back off to dream a very bawdy dream off ladies in tight bodices being very "Carry On" with me.I then heared a knocking sound.It was my mother waking me to get up and get ready for work.There was no tea on my bedside table,off course,i'd dreamt the whole thing.From a Fortean point of view I was really pleased to have had the experience but secretly gutted because who knows what those ladies would have got up to with me if I hadn't been so rudely awakened!!!
 
Strange and rather creepy! A dream I've always remembered having was a dream i had when I was about 8. In the dream, I was in an alternate reality, where there were evil witches in my house. I knew this because there were crumbs on the stairs which apparently meant witches. They were trying to take over and pretended to be my family. They were in our kitchen. My real family were in the living room. I entered and suddenly knew I was dreaming. I couldn't be bothered having this dream (or something) so I crept back up stairs and huddled under my duvet and tried to 'wake up' by falling asleep. Every time I tried to do this, a big flashing sign infront of my eyes said 'DANGER. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO AWAKE' - or at least something along those lines. I kept trying anyway, and instead of waking up, i kept waking up in the dream and I couldn't escape. I could sense something evil would be waiting for me if i did wake up, that the witches would still be there. Anywayyy, just my story of my dream within my dream. :)

I have sp sometimes, but more when i'm in that state between being awake and asleep. And I've always had a lot of lucid dreams too. Infact in in most of my dreams, i seem to realise i'm dreaming.
 
I once had a horrible dream within a dream or should I say nightmare. I dreamed that I was in bed and I sat up and lifted the cover and a bloodied screaming corpse sat up. I woke up at that point and after calming down remember saying, Thank God it was only a nightmare, to which I pulled back the covers again to see the same screaming bloodied corpse. This time I woke up and after this time finding nothing there, lay awake with the light on until dawn. Scare the hell outta me. Anyone had this sort of thing happen to them ?
 
I've told this story here before, but when I was a kid, about seven or so, I woke up one morning to see a corpse lying in bed with me. After about fifteen seconds I realised I was looking at my teddy bear, but why it looked like a dusty dead man at first is a mystery.
 
Before I'd actually ever tried it, i once took LSD in a dream, and then spent the rest of it dreaming that I was 'tripping'. it was quite accurate, from what I remember, though strong.
 
I had lots of dreams within dreams over the years. The witches dream reminds me of a very realistic dream (non-layered) I had when I was a little kid. My bedroom was upstairs, separate from the rest of our second-floor apartment. I woke up and had to go pee, so I walked downstairs, through the hallway and through the glass door that led to our apartment. I went to the bathroom and when I came out, I saw three or four hideous creatures in the hallway, pressing their noses against the glass door. I instinctively knew that they were coming to kill my parents and me. I was absolutely terrified. I don't remember the rest of the dream, but at some point I woke up and was glad it just had been a dream.

My weirdest dream-within-a-dream experience (which I have already described elsewhere on this forum) was on 9/11. My husband drove a truck cross-country at that time, and I was with him. We had parked overnight in some parking lot in a small town near Boston, and when we had our morning coffee, listening to the radio, we heard Howard Stern talking about the WTC attacks. It was totally surreal. A few hours later, I went back to sleep and dreamed that I woke up in the truck, remembering the "9/11 dream" and saying to my husband, "You know, I just had the weirdest dream... some airplanes flying into skyscrapers..." Then I really woke up, and was completely disoriented.

It took me a while to comprehend that the "surreal" situation was actually reality and the "normal" one had been the dream... Ever since, I'm not so sure anymore what is dream and what is reality... :shock:
 
The chap who did the Shining doc Room 237 has turned his attention to sleep paralysis with his new film. Interview here:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompson...ly-sleep-paralysis-doc-the-nightmare-20150130

"There seem to be a half-dozen common ways people interpret what they see and I wanted to represent the most common ones, and there's a strong religious representation for people who go through sleep paralysis. There were people I interviewed who, on an emotional level, didn't come off as believable to me and I wasn't sure if they just wanted to be in the movie. One thing I tried to do in the sequencing of it was to end on an ambiguous note. Personally, I hadn't ended on a definitive answer on why people see what they see. So I wanted to represent a couple of different ideas, that last moment is like the scene in 'Total Recall' where he's trying to decide if he's actually a secret agent on Mars or if he's in a machine simulating that. They're kind of at that same juncture: is this real or is it not real?"
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Sounds like a must-see!
 
I remember during my first episode I saw a man screaming horrifically in a desert, and then the interior of a nearby house which I had never been in. When I woke up I had developed a Peritonsillar abscess over night and had to go straight to my GP in excruciating pain.
 
GNC said:
The chap who did the Shining doc Room 237 has turned his attention to sleep paralysis with his new film. Interview here:
http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompson...ly-sleep-paralysis-doc-the-nightmare-20150130

Sounds like a must-see!
Click to expand...

Hmm. I'm always wary when it comes these things. I once refused an invitation to appear in a documentary about sleep paralysis because I've never liked the way the condition or the sufferers are portrayed in such programs. Science disregards it (it's "just" sleep paralysis!), everyone else wants to talk about aliens and demons in your bedroom. Sigh.
 
FrKadash said:
I remember during my first episode I saw a man screaming horrifically in a desert, and then the interior of a nearby house which I had never been in. When I woke up I had developed a Peritonsillar abscess over night and had to go straight to my GP in excruciating pain.
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jeesus. I fall asleep in front of the telly a lot,(yes I know its crap for u), but my dreams often take on whats going on in the docu which is usually history/ww2 stuff.
 
Ulalume said:
Hmm. I'm always wary when it comes these things. I once refused an invitation to appear in a documentary about sleep paralysis because I've never liked the way the condition or the sufferers are portrayed in such programs. Science disregards it (it's "just" sleep paralysis!), everyone else wants to talk about aliens and demons in your bedroom. Sigh.
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What makes this more sympathetic is that the director is (or was) a sufferer himself, and wanted to portray all sides of the experience. Probably should have mentioned it's called The Nightmare.
 
My last episode inspired me to try and express what I saw through a painting.

10959370_10152618979666994_1063695945442540844_n.jpg


20H x 16W'' oil on board.
 
You've definitely nailed the hazy, grainy quality of dreams and SP, although I'll confess that mine are (with one single exception) in monochrome. Or maybe there isn't a colour in dreams at all and doesn't need to be.
 
It's a while since I last suffered from SP although, at one time, I used to get it fairly frequently. I made the mistake of telling my ultra religious former neighbour about it and all of a sudden I had "caught" demons (apparently you can catch them by having sex with someone you're not married to; a bit like a dose of the psychic clap) I always assumed that it only happened during periods of stress but the last 18 months have been utterly horrible and not an SP episode to be had. Shame because some of my nocturnal gentlemen callers could be quite *ahem* entertaining :rolleyes:
 
Andy_X said:
Christ, that's disturbing.

In a good way.
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This was a couple months ago I think, and I can still hear (well clearly remember) the scream a man let out during the episode. I mentioned in an older post that I saw and heard a man screaming during my first episode, but this one was much worse. Also during this latest one something was repeating my full name (I'm John BTW) with a slight whispering tone; ''Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan, Johnathan''. I thought about that scream afterwards and realised the closest example I could think of was the death scream of a soldier in Romero's Day of the Dead (1985).

 
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Oh, that is a horrible scream. Deserves an Oscar.
 
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