False Awakening: What is it about, and what can you do?
Hello! I hope you are enjoying the week. How do you feel about yourselves? If you have self-esteem at an optimal level, you can see how everything will flow much more in your life, so do not let this go by. This week, we will talk about dreams, or rather, an aspect that sometimes occurs called false awakening. After four and a half years of blogging, although there are entries that mention false awakenings, there was still no exclusive entry for this topic. Therefore, this is going to be the topic of this week. (By the way, today the shadow of Mercury Retrograde begins.)
I am sure that many of you have had a false awakening at some time since they are widespread. I’m sure that when you were little, you dreamed that you were going to school, and maybe something happened to you, and you woke up with a scare. This phenomenon happens a lot, and everyone has ever experienced it. However, if you start to investigate your dreams, you will find that you will have more. Best of all, you can use them to profit and enhance your dream adventures, and I’m going to explain them to you.
I want to comment first of all that false awakening is not the same as sleep paralysis. Although with both you can get a good scare, they are different states of consciousness. In this blog, we have also talked a lot about sleep paralysis to find much information.
Dreaming that you wake up in your bed is the typical false awakening.
There is not much secret with this topic, and what I have told you, surely you have all had false awakenings at some time. If you start to be aware of your dreams, such as writing them down, you will find that you start to have more false awakenings. This does not mean that they are more frequent, but that you have a better memory of your dreams, and you begin to realize the nature of your own dreams. Although there are many dreams, I want to tell you that false awakening is not a type of dream, but simply one more dream.
Here I explain a typical one for me:
After a few moments of silence, still listening to the echo of the sounds that were part of my previous dream, I open my eyes. I am used to staying in a relaxed state, breathing deeply, so my awakenings are very gentle. The bed move gently, so I assumed my wife was waking up too. I could feel a lot of tranquility, even more peace than normal. The room was silent. There were no sounds from outside.
Little by little, I was getting up in bed, feeling very rested, and wanting to start the day. I could feel my body totally free of aches and pains, and it felt great. Getting used to questioning reality, I decided to look at my hands to make sure that I was awake. It was way too blurry around. However, I was turning lucid already since I could see that I had missing fingers on my hands, and the ones I had were deformed.
At this point, I rechecked my hands as well as the gravity, as I began to realize completely that I was still sleeping and dreaming. Here, as I am already lucid, I decide to go out and enjoy a small night flight until I wake up and write everything down.
As you can see, until almost the end, it didn’t seem like a dream either.
It is the grace of the false awakening. It will almost perfectly mimic a normal and ordinary waking. If you start observing your dreams, you will realize that your dream room is the same or practically the same as your room in real life. Things like, for example, an item of clothing that you leave on a chair could reflect on your false awakening and make you believe even more that you are awake.
Do not be fooled by the false awakening as they will accompany you.
False awakenings can easily fool you. In fact, a false awakening is the vast majority of the time, the same as an ordinary awakening. We have all had false awakenings at some point in our life. When you “wake up falsely,” you will see that everything is the same as in reality. Maybe you even hear your alarm clock and turn it off and everything. However, even if everything seems the same, you may realize that not everything is normal. For this, you have to get used to observing. I recommend that you get used to checking that you are awake every time you find yourself in bed. Although a false awakening is almost like a normal awakening, there will always be some detail to tell you that you are in a dream.
If you are not interested in dreams, you may have fewer false awakenings or ignore them. However, if you have to wake up at a specific time, you have experienced a typical dream such as “dreaming that you wake up and you are late,” for example. But in principle, if there is no pressure on waking up, you will have less frequently false awakenings. However, if you already began to explore dreams, you will dream that you wake up. For example, as I have explained in this lucid dream guide, writing down your dreams is super important. Just by wanting to write down your dreams, you are already putting more pressure on your consciousness, and you are going to have many false awakenings.
A bridge to Lucid Dreams.
If you start listening to your dreams, you are going to start recording dreams. It is common, especially at the beginning, to dream that you wake up and feel very happy because you had a magnificent dream. You start to write it in your dream journal, and when you visit the bathroom. The next thing, you notice yourself in bed, in your pitch black, and the pillow under your head. Perhaps you are super happy because you have written down the dream, while at that very moment, you realize that you have never written down the dream. You have only dreamed you did. This is the typical false awakening.
This phenomenon can be a great help to have more lucid dreams. For example, I am going to give you another situation. As you dream of, perhaps, a fantasy, and suddenly you begin to hear a strange noise. Little by little, your room appears to you. You feel very lazy to have to start the day, but you have no choice, and you put your feet on the ground. As you walk to the bathroom, you realize that you can see in the dark. Also, the bathroom light doesn’t work, and you feel like there’s less gravity. You do a reality check and realize that you have six fingers, and therefore still dreaming. Completely lucid! This will give you a lot of happiness because you have the freedom to be in a dream when a few moments ago you were preparing to go to work.
Sleep paralysis and false awakening: They are not the same!
I realize that some sources of information are confusing both. In English, I have found some, although very few. However, in Spanish, I have found enough sources saying they are the same when they are not. In this post, you can read more about sleep paralysis, and you will see that this is a state of mind awake sane asleep. A false awakening occurs during a dream, that is, sleeping and in the REM phase. There is nothing to fear from false awakening. It is not scary. However, it can be the beginning of nightmares or lucid dreams. Besides, a false awakening can be devastating for recalling a prior dream. You can forget the dream because you dreamt that you had written it down.
A pricey false awakening.
Or also, this little story from a book by Stephen LaBerge, author, and oneironaut, where a false awakening cost a lot for a friend of his. In summary:
A family was taking a long road trip. And in the middle of the afternoon, they stopped for a snack. As the night grew, the girl fell asleep. After a while, the girl told her parents that she had fallen asleep and had dreamed of the numbers for the local drawing of a few thousand dollars. The girl told her mother the numbers, and a little later, they arrived home. Her parents put her to bed, and they all went to sleep. In the morning, the girl saw the numbers in a newspaper and began to jump very happily because they had won.
The parents did not understand what was happening until the girl explained everything. Her parents told her that after having the snack, she fell asleep shortly after getting back to the car, and she never woke up until they almost got home. She never told her parents the numbers… All thanks to a fake awakening!
What can we get out of false awakenings?
Now the question is to get the most out of false awakenings, and I’m going to give you some quick tips. This post is already quite long:
- Get used to doing reality checks every time you see each other in bed.
- If you focus on dreams, you are going to have more false awakenings; count on them.
- You will have a much better chance of becoming lucid as a result of a false awakening.
- If you wanted to write down the previous dream, do your best to wake up. Continuing with this new lucid dream will endanger the memory of the previous ones.
- If you have a string of false awakenings, stay in bed and do nothing and let it pass for a while. If you notice that you wake up, keep doing nothing for a while. This will stop the chain.
- If you want to explore this new lucid dream, make sure to stabilize the dream to prolong its duration and quality. You will also avoid false awakenings subsequently.
A false day.
Sometimes it can happen that as a result of false awakening, you have a very long dream. In this dream, you start the day routinely. You even go to your workplace to realize that you are waking up again. This is not very pleasant, although rare, it happens! But if you know false awakenings, and above all, you get used to doing reality checks, something like this will not happen to you.
And that’s all. A false awakening is a fascinating topic, and as you can see, it can be a bridge to having more lucid dreams. However, you always have to take into account its peculiarities, so it does not fool you! Next week will be the first week of June, so we have the monthly forecast. I’m sure it will help you a lot, but all this in a week! I will tell you next week. I am pretty sure you are going to enjoy the read! See you next Wednesday!
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I invite you to check earlier posts: fourth year, third year, second year, first year.
Love & Light,
Lots of blessings and abundance your way! (Home)
