I recently had a dream that an alien invasion happened while i was in a building with my brother and we tried to escape but right as soon as the aliens are about to get us it all restarts and im back in the building right before the invasion happens so this time i know its going to happen so i get a head start and run out of the building and try to find a safe place. i make it much further the second time but then they get me and it restarts again. from what i can remember it restarted 3 or 4 times before i woke up. It was one of the most intense dreams i have ever had. Does anyone know what this could possibly mean? has anyone had something similar happen?
I’ve had dreams like this which I dreamt several times over weeks, sometimes years (childhood nightmares mainly) or which restarted at a certain point of the plot. All of them had this same chasing-theme like yours. I think that dreams like this are actually a sort of survival training, a safe way to try out what would be the best to do in this-and-this scenario.
Time and interdimensional travel dreams are my favorite. I have had a few of theme, but I do not generally believe they mean anything in particular, unless they are manifesting something I am experiencing in waking life. In these cases, the plot of the dream may parallel, sometimes vaguely, a waking life issue or challenge. I will see if I can dig up any examples. 
Uhmmm… never had such dreams but I’d love to.
Does it feel like rehearsing a dream?
I’ve had dreams like that. Like someone said above, mine have been mostly nightmare related, in which case i think it adds to the fear of the dream making it seem endless.
The most recent one happened a few months ago. It started out as a normal dream where I was riding in a car with three friends. On the way to where we’re going there was a police check point. So we stopped and got out of the car and were standing there waiting while the police checked the car. While standing there I started to get a weird feeling, like when you know something bad is about to happen. Just then I looked to my right just in time to see a cop inject one of my friends with something as she came up from behind. My friend went out like a light. I turned the other way, to get my other two friends attention, but for one of the two it was too late. He had been put down. I grabbed the wrist of my remaining friend and began to run, but it was too late we were quickly surrounded. After a short fight i was also injected, As i began to pass out I woke myself up, or so i thought.
I began to go about my day normally. Until the women cop appeared, but she wasn’t dressed as a cop this time. I tried to get away but she got me again with the needle. Like the last time I woke up back in bed after i passed out. By this time i began to wonder if i was still dreaming. I was very real but before i could find something to prove that it was just a dream she was after me again. It was kinda like running from the Agents in the Matrix. She’d just come outta no where. This happened four more times, kinda like Groundhog Day.
Till the last time. By then the dream was lucid enough that I called her out and forced her to appear as soon as I got up from the bed. She was very angry that ruined the dream. It was like a game for her to hunt me. She then turned into this ganglelly monster with long skinny appendages and needles for fingertips. She grab a hold of my arm and injected me with all five fingers. However thanks to the lucidity of the dream i did the same to her and caused a feedback loop. Killing her with her own poison. Then I woke up just like before.
The dream was very real. Real and detailed enough in fact that I was awake for 15min before I finally decided I was awake for real.
I’ve had both LD’s and NLD’s with that, and like to interpret it as that you have a very advanced problem-solving mentality 
Think of it. Even with your guard down, your mind is automatically mulls over the possibilities, feeding it back into a kind of simulation of the issue that you’re dealing with.
More pessimistically, it might also be a kind of mini-recurring dream where you’re actually stuck not being able to fix something no matter what you do otherwise, and that’s why it repeats.
Do you happen to play a lot of video games? That may be why it happened because a lot of video games have re-spawning or you can save and re-load the save if you fail at your objective. Maybe, if you do play a decent amount of them then they are transferring over into your dreams.
I wish I could see a timetravel dream.ND or LD it doesn’t matter.Some mobile device or a TARDIS will do the trick
i rkn a real alien evasion would be awesome:)
I thought an invasion would be awesome too until that dream happened.
No im not much of a gamer.
Throughout the entire dream i had my little brother with me and when it would restart he wouldn’t remember anything. It was like my goal was to protect him.