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[pmcd9]

Vaguely OT but I was just thinking about this yesterday:

Has anybody else had the thing where you're just falling asleep then you suddenly snap fully awake and it feels like your 6 inches in the air and suddenly fall back onto the bed?

I've had the first part of that happen, but I wasn't levitating when I came to.  It often happens when something important has slipped my mind.  As soon as my mind is relaxed it'll remember it and wake me up to remind me.

I've had that night terrors thing on a couple of rare occasions, but I didn't know that's what it was.  A very mild case I guess, maybe 10 seconds or so before coming out of it.  It seems like that is most likely to occur to me when I am napping during the day.  It's never frightened me, but I can see how it might if it had gone on longer.

I don't have any regularly recurring dreams, but I have had a few recurring themes in my dreams.  I can't recall the details of most of them, but a common theme is I'll find myself in some kind of grave danger and i'll attempt to flee from it, but ultimately I'll get cornered and must face the situation.  It's at that moment that I realize I have super human abilities, like being strong or really fast and I am able to prevail over whatever is threatening me.  I've never died in a dream because I always wake up right at the moment of certain death.  Once I dreamed I drove straight into a brick wall at very high speed.  That made me sit bolt upright in the bed.  I've dreamed I was in hell on a couple of occasions and I've dreamed I witnessed a nuclear blast from close proximity, like seeing Houston getting nuked from my vantage point 30 miles in the suburbs.  I wonder if i'll ever have another of those dreams now that I live right near the center of town?  I've had lots of great dreams too, but the details always fade.  All in all i've had many more pleasant dreams than terrible ones.

~Paul


~Paul

[jay-ell]

OMG I don't have quite that dream exactly, but I do have dreams where my contact lens is really huge and I can't get it in my eye.  Often part of that same dream where I'm trying to get ready for work in a strange bathroom.

I have this dream all the time.  I've never met another person who has had this, but then again I don't know that many people who wear contacts who I've also discussed dreams with.  Mine's like AlohaDawg's, where I start messing with it (although usually I don't have any solution, I just have to wing it) and it gets bigger and bigger until it's about the size of a dinner plate, and then I invariably say, "Dammit!  I hate when that happens!"  You know, is if it happens all the time.  

Sometimes I have dreams where I can't open my eyes all the way.  I can only see this little slit in front of me, and I try really hard to open my eyes but the harder I try the worse it gets.  I think that this happens when I actually am sleeping with my eyes slightly open, so the more I try to open them further the less of the dream-world I can actually see.  As if the dream-world is being projected onto the backs of my eyelids or something.  

These are worse than the dreams where I'm being chased (invariably by pinstripe-suited gangsters with tommy guns) and my feet feel like they're encased in concrete.  I had this dream recurrently for fifteen years, and I always ended up in the house where I grew up, trying frantically to get up the stairs.  When I make it up the stairs, I can move again, but I would always hide under the bed in my brother's room, and the gangsters would find me.  They'd lift up the bed skirt, thrust the muzzle of the gun underneath, and I'd watch my face explode from the inside.  Then I'd wake up screaming.  One night, when I was about seventeen, I had this massive attack of deja vu in the middle of this dream, and I knew that I had to hide someplace else.  So instead of my brother's room, I went into the den and shimmied down a rope which happened to be hanging conveniently out the second-story window.  I have not had this dream even once since then.  It was awesome.

[CortJstr]

Vaguely OT but I was just thinking about this yesterday:

Has anybody else had the thing where you're just falling asleep then you suddenly snap fully awake and it feels like your 6 inches in the air and suddenly fall back onto the bed?

Or am I even crazier than I thought?

I almost always have this while dreaming that I'm falling off a ladder.  It's always within the first five minutes of sleeping, and it's always a ladder.  

You think my dream-self would learn not to climb ladders, but no.  Instead I end up jerking like a jerk and kicking poor Pedro in the calves.

I haven't done it lately but when it did happen I swear I would bounce when I hit the bed. For a while I though maybe I was standing up to sleepwalk but woke up midway and fell back down. Except I've never actually sleep walked. Maybe I'm just really really bad at it.

[CortJstr]

These are worse than the dreams where I'm being chased (invariably by pinstripe-suited gangsters with tommy guns) and my feet feel like they're encased in concrete.  I had this dream recurrently for fifteen years, and I always ended up in the house where I grew up, trying frantically to get up the stairs.  When I make it up the stairs, I can move again, but I would always hide under the bed in my brother's room, and the gangsters would find me.  They'd lift up the bed skirt, thrust the muzzle of the gun underneath, and I'd watch my face explode from the inside.  Then I'd wake up screaming.  One night, when I was about seventeen, I had this massive attack of deja vu in the middle of this dream, and I knew that I had to hide someplace else.  So instead of my brother's room, I went into the den and shimmied down a rope which happened to be hanging conveniently out the second-story window.  I have not had this dream even once since then.  It was awesome.

Oh my God! I don't have time to get detailed right now but something similar happened to me. I used to have a recurring nightmare when I was little involving a store, glowing red ***** skeleton, and a good/evil reversed Masters of the Universe world. I'd always escape somehow but one time I recognized that it was a dream was able to rush through the script. After that I never had the dream again.

[AlohaDawg]

This is the weirdest coolest thread ever.

I used to do that jerking thing too, mine was always riding a bike and then crashing the bike. It kind of FEELS like you were levitating and dropped but I figure if I were levitating in my sleep, someone would have told me by now...

[andalucia]

Oh man, I wish I could defeat dreams.  For a few years, I had really atmospheric, vivid dreams that were all set in one sinister and totally imaginary city.  It was pretty great, since it was this entire self-contained, consistant world.  However, now my dreams are just the usual fairly blatant crap.  The symbolism is disappointingly transparent.

[jay-ell]

This is the weirdest coolest thread ever.

The wierdest part is seeing someone else describe a dream you often have yourself.  Dreams are so personal, so unique -- or so we think.  It makes you wonder -- if dreams really are just a random series of neuron firings, what makes certain neurons fire in a particular order some people and not in others?  And if it's some cosmic way of wrestling with our subconscousnesses, what is it about me and AlohaDawg and Wombat, that makes us panic over supersized contact lenses?  

Freeky.

[Choop]

First off, sorry about my cheesiness back there. Oddly, though, it's pretty much true about the lack-of-flying-dreams-since-I-became-happy thing.

Anyway: My "being chased" recurring dream always put me back to like nine years old (probably when they started), and in the house I lived in at that time, dragging my brother behind me. Naturally, the rooms were still there, and in the right places, but the yard was different and there were all these secret passageways inside the houses and everything - one of which was accessible from under my brother's bed. Wierd. Eerie. Weerie.

I realized when I was about fifteen that I could experience lucid dreams, and haven't had too many nightmares since then. It's pretty hard to be terrorized when you can call up the powers of any superhero you've ever imagined.

I do recall one from a few weeks ago, as it was particularly vivid and woke me up (no easy task without a cup of coffee), wherein I was a rock star, my wife was my manager, an ex-girlfriend was my wife, and we and various and sundry others shared a bungalow at some posh resort at some stop on my tour. Everyone left so I could prepare for the evening off out at dinner and the theatre, and when I remembered to shut off the back porch light, I walked out back and saw this river of sewage flowing down the hill, past all the other bungalows. There were guys down there trying to clean it all up, and they asked for help, but I had reservations, man! Weeks in advance! I tried to break it to them gently, but they chased me around and through the River O' Shit and over the bungalow's privacy fence, and while I was hanging off the porch railing, trying to heave myself over it (no easy task without superpowers), they started throwing bricks at me. I somehow knew ahead of time the third brick would kill me, so I dodged it artfully, falling to the ground in the process. The fourth brick summarily smashed me in the face, which woke me and (I presume) killed my dream character.

Yeah... analyze that.

[Bozack]

Man, I don't remember my dreams at all. Although over the summer, I was reading St. Augustine's "City of God," because I had a really odd childhood religiously, and I wanted to get this God character sorted once and for all. And I kept having nightmares where I was in hell, having my skin flayed off and being boiled in tar, etc. Which, as you can imagine, was horrifying. BUT. The final straw was, one night, I woke up from those dreams to the alarm on my computer, which randomly plays a song from my iTunes. Imagine waking up from seeing your face being peeled off and realizing it was just a dream (sigh), and then realizing you're listening to Nick Cave's "Death is Not The End."
I actually have really weird music experiences. Like listening to "There's a Light That Never Goes Out", by the Smiths (chorus: "And if a double decker bus, crashes into us, to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die") when finding out an ex-girlfriend died in a car crash with her boyfriend, or singing "Girlfriend in a Coma", by the Smiths (chorus: "Girlfriend in a coma, I know, I know it's serious"), with my girlfriend, who, minutes later, was struck by a car and went into a monthlong coma.
Hah, this randomly became the MOST DEPRESSING POST EVER.

[wombat]

Ugh, maybe I need to avoid contributing to this thread.  Last night I had a brand new combination of my scary dreams where flaming airplane wreckage was falling out of the sky and I couldn't get any of my phones to dial 911.

I'm sure I've read that you can avoid the night terrors/paralysis thing by not sleeping on your back.

I think the contact lens anxiety must be due to being so dependent on them when they are so fragile and complicated.  Seeing, it's so fundamental, you know?

[andalucia]

God this thread turned out incredibly interesting and depressing.

[slink]

I almost always have this while dreaming that I'm falling off a ladder.  It's always within the first five minutes of sleeping, and it's always a ladder.

Yea, I occasionally get it happening where I fall off something, but a lot of the time it's even before I am dreaming. I get it all the time if I am fantastically tired but am stressing slightly (most of the time, since I am a partial insomniac and most nights have to wait til I am falling asleep to actually sleep).
The other thing I remembered, which the contacts reminded me of, is that sometimes I'll be dreaming and physics won't work. I'll try to ride a bike, and this can even happen in daydreaming, but the bike will just fall over constantly. No matter how hard I try to have it remain upright, like it should, it just doesn't work!

I did see a really interesting, and at the time scary program, about sleep paralysis. It was being linked with this thing happening alot in the northern US, where people were waking up, unable to move, and this cloaked figure was coming into the room to kill them. Apparently a lot of people had the same dream while they were half unconscious and paralysed, and since you're on the very edge of consciousness...
But they also talked about the people who go off and kill people in their sleep, without even realised what they've done. They just wake up in a car somewhere covered in blood. And they kill people they wouldn't even want to harm too, because they were unconscious. Needless to say when I was 12 and suffering badly from sleep paralysis and odd dreams, as well as occasionally waking up outside, it concerned me slightly.

Fortunately now my only real sleep problem is tied to the CFS and is that I go through fortnightly bouts of insomnia and narcolepsy. I'll spend ages unable to get to sleep til I pass out, and then I'll spend the odd fortnight where I'm conscious for about 2 hours a day. Which can be a little frustrating.

[CortJstr]

Oh man, I wish I could defeat dreams.  For a few years, I had really atmospheric, vivid dreams that were all set in one sinister and totally imaginary city.  It was pretty great, since it was this entire self-contained, consistant world.  However, now my dreams are just the usual fairly blatant crap.  The symbolism is disappointingly transparent.

You could always buy one of those devices that teaches you to have lucid dreams. They're googles that an houror so after you go to bed they flash dim red lights for like 3 seconds. Supposedly while dreaming you'll see the row of red lights just blink in the middle of the air for no reason. After seeing it a few nights in a row one night you'll suddenly register what the lights are, realize you're dreaming, and be able to take over.

[slink]

After seeing it a few nights in a row one night you'll suddenly register what the lights are, realize you're dreaming, and be able to take over.

Hmmm, but do they work?
I use to be able to lucid dream, and really dug being able to. Was so much fun, but not in a long time, since I went through a phase of never dreaming and lost the ability.

[CortJstr]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,41478,00.html