Maintaining awareness and continuity while transitioning from awake to asleep
I just texted this to a friend and thought it would be interesting to put out here and see if anyone had any similar experiences. Please forgive the format. It’s easier if I just copy/paste my texts.
Ok you know when you close your eyes to go to sleep at some point while you are still awake but before you’re actually dreaming you’ll kinda see things in your mind’s eye but you recognize that you are simply viewing that from a third party perspective almost like viewing something on a screen?
And then when you finally fall asleep and start dreaming you aren’t actually aware of the moment you fall asleep and the dreams themselves usually are not a direct continuation of the thing you are thinking of before falling asleep?
For example if I want to dream about flying and I imagine myself flying before my dream, it is unlikely to continue into a dream of you flying because your mind kinda takes over and does what it wants.
Well a couple nights ago, I wake up in the middle of the night briefly go to the bathroom then as I’m falling back asleep, I start having these visions of this landscape out in nature. Obviously when you’re just thinking about it you don’t really see it in great detail and you know that you are the awareness that is viewing it rather than being immersed in it.
Well that time, I remember going from thinking about it and picturing it to being fully immersed in it with no loss in continuity. I was aware of the exact moment I started dreaming and it was a direct continuation of what I was thinking about before I fell asleep.
And I was lucid in the dream, able to control my movements. I remember going from it seeming fuzzy and vague in my mind as I just pictured it to essentially being transported into the world I created in my mind, experiencing it in first person. Fully immersed and in high detail like it was real.
Imagine going from watching something on tv to being fully transported into the exact scene you are watching and able to interact with all the objects and people there. That’s essentially what happened. I remember the exact moment things were fuzzy and vague in my mind and watching them change from that to high fidelity reality in real time over the period of a few seconds.
The interesting part about this all is that I have always had this strange fear of maintaining awareness while going into a dream. I don’t know why that has always scared me. It’s like a fear of being aware that I am conscious in a dream world while my real body lay unconscious and paralyzed somewhere else. Like I’m aware that my awareness is not with my real body.