moonlit-tulip:

There’s this failure mode that my dreams occasionally fall into.

A dream starts out as an ordinary interesting dream wherein things are happening. At some point, something forces me half-awake; the two most common culprits are either having slept for long enough that I’m out of sleep debt, or getting overheated by a fever in the middle of the night, but it’s occasionally prompted by other things too. Instead of waking up the rest of the way, though, I keep on dreaming while half-awake, just with much less brainpower behind the dream’s creative processes.

At that point, a handful of major ideas and images from the dream up to that point get tossed together and looped: instead of things happening, I just get repeated scenes of those same few ideas and images, over and over with no interesting variation whatsoever. Eventually, subjectively after a pretty long time (but not necessarily really after so long, since that sort of half-awake state massively skews my perception of time), the experience becomes sufficiently unpleasantly boring that I muster the motivation to force myself more fully awake in order to avoid continuing to experience it, at which point it ends (as long as I don’t try to go back to sleep too soon afterwards, in which case it sometimes resumes).

Is this a thing that other people have any experience with? I don’t recall having ever heard someone else describe anything along these lines, but it’s an interesting (if somewhat unpleasant) brain-state that I’d be curious to learn about others’ experiences with if they do exist.

>>the two most common culprits are either having slept for long enough that I’m out of sleep debt, or getting overheated by a fever in the middle of the night<<

These two culprits have different results for me, neither of which are your result.

Half-awake and *not* feverish: pretty much like a normal dream except also aware of [the external-world senses that don’t require moving] (proprioception and sound definitely work, smell probably *would* work but I don’t think I’ve been in a position to try it). Lucid, because the above is an extremely obvious indicator of dreaming. *Not* sleep-paralysed, but if you move the dream ends. (This often leads to absent-mindedly adjusting position and then going “wait, no, dammit, I wanted to see what happens next”. On the bright side, if I *want* it to end I can easily arrange that.)

Half-awake and feverish: only sometimes lucid, since even an extremely obvious indicator of dreaming is not always enough when you’re delirious. Tossing and turning is not enough to end it, and even getting up to go to the bathroom will often just put it on hold. Has been known to cause voices instead of full worlds [link].

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