I’ve been wondering this for a few months now. In september, when my dad was waking me up for school, instead of normally waking me up, he decided to just fall on top of me backwards. Being that hes…a man of weight…he knew it’d knock the wind out of me, hehe.
Anyways, I was asleep, and I completely remember seing a zombie running at me, from a side view. Here’s a drawn picture of what i mean.
Thing is, once the zombie got to me, my dad hit me. It was as if my mind could tell what was going on outisde my eyelids. I had no knowledge of what he was going to do beforehand.
Hehe, me too, it happened to me.
I was around 6 and my brother went to wake me up, in real life, he was walking very slowly towards my bed.
And I was dreaming that I was in a place near my house where MY BROTHER was walking very slowly towards me like in real life.
He had the same posture in my dream and in real life.
So, the conclusion is, my eyelids were open and I assimilate the content of my real environment into my dream, it’s called concomitant dream.
The brain is always active and aware of what is going on. We may switch off for the night but it doesn’t. This is why pain, doorbells, phones, people falling on you etc., often end up translated in dreams.
Chances are you don’t sleep with your eyes fully closed and you saw him coming, but because you weren’t consciously aware of it you didn’t wake up but your subconscious worked it into your dream.
Same with sound, I sleep with my window open a lot, so occasionally a fly or wasp may come in. Now flies never wake me up no matter how loud it is, but a wasp will wake me up instantly so my brain must be aware enough of the waking world to not only recognise the sound but differentiate it from similar sounds of a fly.
I’ve also noticed that when I’m about to get to a very critical and dramatic part of my sleep, I’m woken by something outside of my bed. Is this bad luck or a programmed thing to occur?
(Example: I was walking around, and some guy said: I will tell you the meaning of life. I say: Great! And he starts with, “The meaning of life…” and I wake up.)
In my experience, dreams are most definitely affected by outside factors. For example, when I fell asleep while watching a TV show, I saw the show in my dream. It was quite different from the WL version, but the characters and setting were the same.
