I rarely ever dream, and when I do, it’s usually freaky. This time I had a nested dream (dream within a dream) that is too trippy not to share. According to The Sleep Foundation, false awakenings are typically realistic. Enjoy this mind trip and let me know how realistic this scenario sounds.
In real life, I had to get up super early that day to work from home a bit (joys of working in IT). After work was done, I tried to fall back asleep before commuting to the office, but I didn’t succeed. Naturally, I started getting sleepy right as my alarm rang, and that’s when reality blended with dreamscape.
I woke up to get ready for work and heard noise outside. Curiously, I looked out the window at my dead-end suburban street. I didn’t find it weird at all that someone had just released a small horse from a horse trailer. It clopped down the street, mane dancing in the wind. There are no ranches near the suburbs, but you don’t question things like that in dreams.
There was a lot of activity on my street. Most noticeble of such was a huge crane transporting a dolphin and two sharks. They were strapped and dangling in the air way higher than my house was tall and there were sharks swimming on my street, which was now flooded, only deep enough for sharks to move freely in. Of course, those people were on my street to usher the sharks away from my flooded street. It all made sense now. I was thankful for their service, but I was bummed because if my street was flooded with sharks, then I couldn’t get to work. What a shame.
Oh, no. If my street is flooded with sharks, then I can’t get to work.
I tried texting my boss that I couldn’t get to work, but I couldn’t find the texting app on my phone, I kept hitting the wrong button.
And then I woke up and had a moment of doubt. Did that really happen or did I dream of sharks swimming in my street? I got up to check.
There were no sharks visible, but my street flowed like a white-water river. Stranded emergency workers fought against the current. An explosion took out a chunk of my street and killed at least one of them while another barely escaped the violent water. My house is on top of a hill with a highway down below. This highway was now flooded and violent like an ocean. We must have had a tsunami or some extinction-level event.
I looked down at that apocalyptic scene from my quiet and dry room and thought, “Yeah, I can’t get to work. Let me text my boss.”
Yet again, I kept hitting the wrong buttons and accidentally texted Karen (legit name of my ex-coworker whom I hadn’t thought of in years) who replied with, “Approved.” And then added, “Wait, who’s Josh?” I must have texted from Josh’s account. Gosh, darn it. I don’t even know any Josh, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I couldn’t get the message out to my boss.
I woke up for the third time, and surely enough, I had overslept, and it took me a few seconds to confirm that this was for real. But even then, I didn’t feel fully awake yet, or maybe I didn’t trust it, so I texted my boss that I was going to be late.
And then I knew that this time I was truly awake—not because my narrow dead-end street was dry and shark-free, but because the text messaging worked as designed.
Was this nested dream realistic?
It didn’t feel realistic to me and the false awakening only made the dream even crazier, but it was definitely influenced by my real life, namely needing to wake up to go to work.
Combined with what I’ve learned from my recent lucid dream, I now know how to recognize that I’m dreaming: technology doesn’t work in dreams, so if you’re having problems using simple things, you’re not really awake.
If technology doesn’t seem to work as expected, you might not be awake.
Is it fun to experience a false awakening?
Not while you’re experiencing it (which can be frustrating or even scary), but later it’s pretty trippy to describe it back to people.
Let me know in the comments if you’ve ever experienced a false awakening or a dream within a dream.
