That still happens to me.
I’ve had dreams where I did a full day at the office: small talk with coworkers, annoying problems, meetings, the works. Alarm goes off, I wake up as if I hadn’t slept, and it’s time for real work. That whole day feels like a double shift.
At least you learned how to play the flute.
Wake up ptz you’re still in a dream
When I was younger, I went through a phase of purposely inducing myself into lucid dream states. It ended when I got caught in a loop of exactly this and was never sure I was actually waking up. It was actually terrifying
Or did it end…?
Though in all seriousness, this is nothing like my experience of lucid dreaming where I was highly aware it was a dream, it felt more like collaborating with my imagination “now I can fly” and my dreaming mind would make that happen “suddenly I can’t fly” and I’m plummeting to earth, it was all very obviously a dream to me, though still thoroughly enjoyable.
I have been trying to lucid dream for quite a while. It takes quite a bit of preparation, but some techniques do work. But I ALWAYS get stuck at actually shaping the dreams into what I want. I realize I’m in a dream, but the environment is frozen as I found it. “And then what?”
It’s a balancing act. Push it too hard, and the dream collapses. Don’t push enough, and you relax back into true sleep again.
Try and tweak 1 thing at a time. You’ll also need to roll with the narrative. It’s like improv, saying no is dangerous, it can leave the other party with nowhere to go. Always agree with their premise, bit add your own spin to it.
As for techniques, I’ve found dream checks to be most effective. You need to do it regularly, while away. This will make you also do it in a dream. Mine is to check my back pocket for “hammerspace” type capabilities. I will never have an AK47, or a giant mallet in my back pocket. When I pull one out, I know I’m dreaming. It also makes nightmares a non issue.
When I did it, keeping a dream journal helped a lot, so i could work out when i was in a dream. Often when I did work it out, either the dream would end, or change without my direction or I’d wake up.
Eventually you learn to… I don’t really know how to phrase it but like, not disturb your unconscious narrating brain, and instead just sort of insert small changes.
You can imagine it a bit like improv acting or a DM in an RPG session. It says: you’re in school without your pants on and you say “and then a dinosaur comes in the room” and your narrative brain sort of goes with it, and rolls that into the story somehow.
I eventually stopped doing it, it’s a lot less magic than people like to make out in my opinion, it’s much more like telling yourself a story in your sleep, and it being very visually and emotionally believable. It was fun though. The last time I did it, I kept trying to get my narrative brain to say that I died, it was interesting seeing how ridiculous it would get to avoid having that happen. (E.g. “then I get shot” “ok, the bullet turns out to be jelly and splats on your face”, “it’s acid jelly”, “ok, a bucket of soapy water drops on you and flushes all the acid off of you”, “the bucket is full of sharks”, etc…) funny, but really just imagining stuff in your sleep.
Yeah, I do journal indeed! I usually get into a lucid state by noticing something “wrong” with the environment (the first ever time it was my wristwatch - I noticed it was digital and not analog like in the real world). And often the things that would go wrong were repeated from dream to dream.
I always love that chainsaw joke.
