Let me preface this by saying, I vivid lucid dream often. I know I am dreaming, decide what I will say and do, can wake myself up, as well as put myself back into the same dream after falling asleep again, etc. But this morning… this morning was different….
I had woken up after only 5 hours of sleep and was lying in my bed trying to get a few more hours of shuteye.
As I began drifting off to sleep:
It started off with a tunnel sound. This weird sound that I can only describe as a combination of when your going through a tunnel in the mountains when your ears are about to pop or having a migraine. I felt it in the front of my face, the force of it. After about 3 seconds it would transfer to my ears, I’d hear it for a second and then they would ring like tenitis for 2 seconds. Then it would stop for maybe 5 seconds and start again. On repeat. After about 6 times, I thought, “oh this is weird… why is this happening? This usually doesn’t happen in my dream or awake state. Am I dreaming?” So, I woke myself up, looked around, “yepp, I was falling asleep. Huh, that’s odd but whatever, I’m tired. Happy I’m about to get more rest.”
I lie my head back on my pillow and the tunneling quickly starts again. Maybe 6-9 more times until I’m in my dreamstate.
“Waking up” in my dream:
I’m lying in bed in the exact same position in my room. Everything is identical to real life. I stretched my leg towards the center of the bed like I usually do. I feel something hard in the bed under the covers. “What the f is that?”, I think. So I start pulling it out from under the covers… a snow scraper for the car windows. “My boyfriend must’ve bought this, but why would we need it and why the hell is it in the bed? Ah, he mustv’e thrown it on the bed after coming back from the store and just forgot, whatever”, I think. I turn to go back to sleep and realise the four boxes of painting supplies I had left on the counter were on the bed. “How petty of him” I think “He literally put it on the bed because I didn’t clean it up lastnight?!” I throw the snow scraper into the hallway through the bedroom door. It breaks into pieces.
When I notice somethings off:
Still in bed with one eye open, I look at the snow scraper sitting in pieces in the hallway..it wasn’t alone. Along with it was an old maraca I had as a child and another children’s toy. Me and my boyfriend don’t have a child, nor a maraca. “Okay, I’m dreaming. Weird for me to wake up in the exact position I had fallen asleep in, but that wouldn’t be a first. Whatever, boring dream. I’m going back to bed” (aka about to fall asleep in my dream and switch to a new dream)…nope.
“I shouldn’t be able to do this”:
I turn to fall asleep and notice there is a menu board, like the one you would see sitting outside a shop, with a black background and menu items written on it in neon green marker. It is sitting between the doorway that leads to the hallway and my closet door. “Wait! I can read this! Like, I can see all the letters and they make sense, not like I just ‘know’ or ‘sense’ what it says… I can actually read this!” I start reading the board. “Wait! Why can I read this? I shouldn’t be able to read in my dreams”, I think. I squint with my one open eye. The words get fuzzy for a second but then come back. I close both eyes and reopen the other one (I still feel tired in my dream, and I’m hoping to go “back to bed” soon).
“Is it trying to show me a parallel universe with another child?”:
Now, there’s a TV where the menu board sat. An old-style tv from my childhood. It’s showing me a picture of me (as a child) with family, a picture I remember fondly. Then it flashes and displays another picture…same as the picture before but with an extra child about my age. Then, it flashes again and a new picture appears. Just like the first, it was a childhood picture I remembered fondly. Again, the picture that follows is the same as the one before it, but with another child. This happens for about 5 pictures until “my mother” walks in. I put “my mother” in quotes because she looks exactly like my mother 20 years ago but has a significantly more calming and lighthearted ora, like that of my grandmother. Deciding that this woman could definitely not be my dark cloud of a mother, I greet her according to her vibe “Hi, grandma”. She looks at me and says “Oh, I forgot something” and walks out. Back to the tv I look…
“The sister I literally never had”:
Still, with one eye open, I watch this tv as it displays pictures I know – first how I remember them and then with a child added. My eye is getting tired, I switch to my other eye. A girl, about my age now, frozen midwalk at the foot of my bed. She’s wearing an old white nightcap over her head and eyes. She’s 2 feet from walking directly into a wall… frozen in motion. Two seconds is enough to read this situation…“nope!” I switch eyes again, hoping that the change will bring me back to what I was doing before I switched eyes and saw her. It did… but I couldn’t help it…I couldn’t control my eyes. Call it morbid curiousity, but something in me was curious to find out if she was the extra in the photos. I switch back.
“Come join us!”:
I see the girl again, still standing there frozen and looking like she’d walk into the wall if you ‘unpaused’ her. “Yeah idk what I was thinking, bad idea. Both eyes, close now. Time to wake up”, I think. The girl, directly in front of me now, clearly frozen no longer, speaks. “Hey, what are you doing? Come on! Come join us, let’s go!” She says in the cheery voice you would expect a sister about your age to talk to you. She grabs me by the arms. I feel her hands touch my skin and my body start to lift off the bed. “I just saw this girl fn frozen walking to nothing. No way in hell am I about to let her just guide me somewhere,” I think. My eyes still closed, I can feel my body floating off the bed now and I’m waiting for my feet to touch the ground. In my head I’m screaming, but in this place my mouth is only open about an inch, half plagued by the paralysis of fear. I say “no. babe?! babe?!” Calling out for my boyfriend because I’m starting to worry.. I still I haven’t woken up. “Babe?!” I wake up.
Awake again, really:
I look at the time… about 40 minutes had passed. Never do my dreams align timewise like this. I call my sister, tell her what happened and she says “You didn’t go with them, did you? Why did you say hi? You never say ‘hi’…they take it as an invitation. Next time this happens, just act like you can’t read, like you aren’t aware. I’m so happy you got out.”