I cannot say for sure how closely these bad experiences I have are related to lucid dreaming, but I did not have them before I had ever experienced lucid dreaming. I think they happen to me when I have not been keeping lucid dreaming in mind and been getting out of practice and have dreams in which I experience very mild and very inconsistent lucidity.
The center of these terrible dreams is false awakenings. I will have them OVER and OVER and feel trapped in my own mind/sleeping body. I am dreaming, but I don’t realize it. I think that I am awake and am paralyzed in my own bed. I can look around the room just a little bit, see my blanket around me, my own body in the bed, but I have huge blind-spots in my visions. Then, when I try to get out of bed, I can feel things in my room that I am touching, but it’s like I have left my body, including my eyes, in the bed, frozen. Although I can feel myself out of the bed, I can only see the same wall at my bedside and I am torn between two places at once. The part of me that has left the bed struggles to leave my room for the rest of the house, hardly able to move and with out any vision!
Eventually, I find myself suddenly snapped back to my bed, existing only there, still frozen, still hardly able to see, struggling to even turn over in my blankets. I will try to roll myself out of the bed, feel the carpet, feel the things in my room, but still a part of my existence is trapped in my blankets.
I do this over and over again, feeling tortured and trapped. I try to scream for help from the other members of my house hold. “If only someone would come to my room and shake me awake, I could be free of this!” I think. They are unable to hear my screaming because it is only in my own head. I try banging on the walls, but they don’t hear or are unsympathetic (this is unlike my IRL household members as I currently live with my mother who will do anything for my comfort).
I have been having these for several years now, probably during times of stress, but I haven’t kept very good track because even though they are torturous experiences as they happen, like all dreams they are easy to forget once I am ACTUALLY, fully awake.
I forget them so easily that even when I do wake up, I might not care a bit about the terrible experience I have been having and let myself fall back asleep and maybe even into the same terrible cycle again.
Has this happened to anyone else? Any recommendation how to avoid them?
All I can think to do is practice the habits I need to achieve full lucidity and to create dream signs for these situations so I can say to myself “this is a dream, do not stress, use your mind to go someplace else, do not try to physically fight the circumstances.” I have tried using my phone which is in the bed with me, but that is not good for a dream sign since cell phones either don’t work or are very confusing for me in all me dreams (I think this is the case for many people) and so instead of saying “Oh, my phone is not as it should be, this is a dream.” I get caught up in struggling to make it work, to read text messages or send a message or to contact someone I feel I desperately need to reach. I also have a digital clock in my bed, but anyone who has seen that one movie (Waking Life?) knows can be used as a dream sign/trigger, but mostly it confuses me. So many times I have thought I should write on my hand “You are awake,” but I don’t do it. Maybe just a typed message taped at my bedside that would be missing or unreadable in any dream would work. “You are awake.”