No shit. I think I posted here about one I had several months back in another thread where I “woke up” 3-4 times (can’t remember) and bad shit happened that was weird enough for me to know I was dreaming each time. I was still in bed when I realized I was still dreaming until the 4th or 5th time when I was convinced I had really woken up, went downstairs and found my electric guitar (Washburn N4) was broken but then I realized I was STILL dreaming because I had changed the lower pickups to Evolution ones which have a distinctive yellow color that everyone said made the guitar look awful because the body is some kind woodgrain color with an incompatible hue and FINALLY woke up. Maybe some fucking Inception shit was going on lol.
There are times when I realize I’m dreaming and spend time contemplating whether I should wake myself up or do the “spinning” thing I read about that changes the dream and makes you unaware that you’re dreaming again, which works around 50% of the time, or wake myself up and end up with sleep paralysis, which happens 50% of the time and I’d have to REALLY relax my mind to go back to sleep in a non-lucid state which happens about 10% of the time LMAO,
This doesn’t happen often, though. Normally only when I have a lot of mental and physical stress due to work although I don’t sleep much naturally in the first place. During periods like these, the main triggers are stuff like doing too much work that requires a lot of mental effort or physical stuff with lots of CNS straining going on like heavy squatting too close to my normal bedtime. It’s why I do not workout at least 6 hours before I sleep and I’d rather skip a heavy back or leg day if I can’t make it to the gym in time.
Sometimes it’s because I drink a lot of alcohol and become sober before going to sleep. Others are when I try to sleep at my normal bedtime after I’ve been sleep deprived for a few days doing stuff several hours after my bedtime. I estimate these will trigger it around 20% of the time.
When this shit happens, it becomes a choice on whether to spend most of my sleep drifting back and forth between full or semi-lucidity wake up feeling really tired by using the first option OR not being able to fall asleep again for at least an hour for the 2nd option if either one fails.
What’s interesting is that I first got sleep paralysis in the bootcamp lol. It was scary as hell WHILE it happened because although I’ve never “seen” anything odd till today, I HEAR weird stuff and get a feeling like someone is choking me or sitting on my chest, I remember I tried to sleep, fell into a dream state and went lucid for a while which immediately caused me to wake up and I realized I couldn’t move. I started HEARING weird stuff like bells ringing that got louder and louder and it felt like someone was sitting on my chest.
But I just brushed it off when I woke up because I don’t believe in supernatural stuff.
It’s funny how the mind can fuck with even people without mental illnesses. I have been one out of several recruits who experienced mass hallucinations when we were trekking through the jungle at night. Because only the person right at the front was allowed to use a torchlight and we were told to walk only in single file for reasons I can’t remember because this was over 2 decades ago, half of us could only see shit around us because of the moonlight.
We were in an area where a massive bloodbath happened during WW2 when the Japanese attacked. The trees and plants and stuff started looking like silhouettes of Japanese soldiers with bayonets and shit just standing there until you got close enough to recognize it was a fucking tree branch or something.
Local folklore that everyone of us knew and were warned from young was that if you see or smell anything supernatural, DO NOT TELL ANYONE until you’re in a safe place or the supernatural entity will either attack or attach itself to you so no one said anything while we were walking.
I was bloody fascinated by how clearly and detailed I could see these shapes and how it works like when you look at clouds when I saw them because, again, I do not believe in the supernatural.
If anything really exists, I would have fucking encountered it already since there was an even bigger bloodbath in the place where I previously lived and you probably couldn’t walk out of your home without stepping on ANY part of the ground where someone had been killed during WW2 and I visited every single allegedly fucking haunted place which even the NEWS reported about there from unused hospitals to cemeteries and saw and felt NOTHING although every one else whom I was with SWORE they did but unlike what happened in the jungle, nothing they “saw” or “heard” was the same.
When we reached base camp, all the guys finally started asking if anyone else had seen ghosts of Japanese soldiers no one wanted to even entertain the suggestion that was a simple case of fatigue since we had been walking for around 12 hours in full battle order which weighs around 30lbs which resulted in mass hallucinations since this area was famous for the aforementioned bloodbath.
Some fuckers even decided to burn offerings to “thank” the “Japanese spirits” for letting use pass unharmed which started a stupid argument since the people the Japanese had slaughtered were locals who volunteered to fight because the Brits didn’t have enough troops at the time.
The brain works in funny ways lol.