Freaky dream

[slycat]

The first thing that's freaky about it is that it happened while on the train to work. I can't recall ever dreaming on the train before, it's rare I sleep that deeply.

Basically before falling asleep, I noticed the guy in front of my get a pack of tissues from his bag, retrieve a tissue and put the pack back in his bag. The relevance for noteing this will come later. Then some unknown time after departing our final stop before London, I was asleep.

I dreamt I was in the very same seat in the very same train and so I subconsciously thought it was reality. I noticed the guy in front of me had dropped his pack of tissues on the floor and apparantly hadn't realised. I saw them on the floor, and then the next moment they were in my hand. I then started willing myself to tap the guy in front of me to hand the tissues back to him but found it hard to do so. I struggled and struggled and sometime around now, I awoke.

I couldn't move my arms because I had fallen asleep with them folded but just as I awoke my left arm was beginning to stretch out. Gathering my bearings on waking I retracted my arm before I did anything and suddenly felt self-conscious that people would be looking at me and so looked around. One person was looking at me but I didn't think I was doing anything silly.

Looking around, it appeared that I was just arriving at London but I was left feeling rather unsettled. It was like my conscious thought was breaking into my dream... I guess that's like what Lucid Dreaming is about. I wondered if it was essentially like sleep walking maybe making me quite worred about being unable to control my body while unconscious...

Comments

[timato.livejournal.com]

I get that sometimes, i get woken up by jolts of my body, legs or arms. I always look around in case people have seen me.

[kimbalion.livejournal.com]

I've experienced very similar stuff, mostly when sleeping on planes or trains. It can even go as far as blurting something out moments before waking up, which can be particularly embarrassing if you're stuck on a plane for the next 8 hours with whoever you just freaked out.
At a guess, I'd say it had something to do with differing sleep levels; on a train, you're only likely to enter into light (slow-wave) sleep rather than REM (fast-wave) sleep. Various chemical processes take place in your brain during both phases, one of which I believe involves the secretion of hormones responsible for keeping you from moving around during your doze. Presumably, light or interrupted sleep doesn't allow for this stage to take place fully, hence our increased likelihood of being able to move around.
The opposite situation is called sleep paralysis, and occurs when said hormone isn't broken down by your body before you wake up. Presumably somnambulancy(?), or sleep walking, is the result of the failure to produce this hormone during REM sleep.

[gerald_duck]

I very seldom fall asleep other than when intending to go to sleep for the night. Sometimes not even then. )-8

However, I get both phenomena similar to what you're describing and lucid dreams, and they're not the same thing.

In a lucid dream, while still asleep, you become aware that you are dreaming and are able to consciously manipulate your dream without "breaking" it. This is enormous fun if you've got the nerve to indulge your fantasies that way. (-8

Just once, I dreamed that I was having a lucid dream. Then the dream became lucid, and I was aware that I was dreaming that I was aware that I was having a dream. I chose to dream that I was choosing to dream about something else, just to see what would happen - I woke up, which was a shame.

What you're describing is real life getting blurred with a dream, without your being aware that's happening. Bits of your environment end up in the dream, and you start saying or doing things within the context of the dream.

The former is a very common problem. On the majority of occasions when I'm dreaming as the alarm clock goes off, the alarm gets incorporated into the dream somehow.

I've had that latter problem, and it's a total pain. People find it hard to believe just how coherent I can be while still asleep and dreaming. Merely getting a complete, sensible and complex answer to a question doesn't mean I'm awake, or answering with respect to the real world - many of my boyfriends have found this out to their cost...

[budlite.livejournal.com]

Just once, I dreamed that I was having a lucid dream.

I had that once. It was a bit crap because I've never had an actual lucid dream, to speak of...

[a-skunk.livejournal.com]

I've had many instances in dreams where I thought I might be dreaming but determined that I was not when in fact I really was. I even tried reading something in a dream which you are not supposed to be able to do. I felt I could read in that dream so I concluded that it must not be a dream... much to my dissapointment when I actually woke up. My roommate in my freshman year in college would have dreams where he would have to wake up and get out of bed, but then he woke up and realized it was only a dream and he had to make all the effort to get up again. But sometimes this was also a dream! Eventually he would have to get up for real, but not until putting the effort of getting up early into several dreams. Man, now that's annoying!

[gerald_duck]

Look at it philosophically. You may feel like you've put the effort into getting up several times, but at least you haven't really!