Crazy Nightmare

A couple of days agoI had the wildest dreaming experience ever. I slept okay the night before, but I woke up too early and couldn't get back to sleep, so I was tired that morning. I took a power nap at lunch like I often do. I usually sleep very lightly, and can wake myself up at any time. This day I laid down, and immediately started having really intense dreams. They were all in color, with a lot of music. I was in a mall at one point, and the Muzak was really loud. The themes of the different "scenes" in the dreams were lots of loud sounds, music, and really obnoxious people. Several times I ran into someone I didn't know who would come up to me and start poking me in the chest, and wouldn't stop. I had to scream at several people to leave me alone. At one point I was in a school, and we were just coming back from a break in the class. There were about a dozen severely retarded and/or crazy people milling about in the hallway, annoying people. One really creepy guy followed me back into the classroom, and I had to scream at him to leave me alone.

This is where it gets crazy. I had been hearing the music all along. I thought "I'm dreaming. I must be really hearing music, and I'm just transferring it to my dream". After a while, I realized that the music had woken me up, and I started to think of turning it down so I could sleep better. I got up and went over to the stereo to turn the music down, and realized that I wasn't in my room! I was in somebody else's room, and there was some construction going on in an adjacent room. There were some guys in there laying down some flooring-- they had come in and turned on the stereo. I went in there to talk to them. I explained to one guy who looked like he was in charge that I wasn't supposed to be there. I explained that to me it is June 15th, and I'm supposed to be napping in Antarctica. I don't remember what he said, but one of the flooring guys started poking me in the chest and being really rude to me. So I left. I was really freaking out now, because I was in someone else's body, far away, and I had no way to get back. I struggled and strained to wake up, but I couldn't. I tried standing up on the bed, which I knew would wake me up. Turned out I was just standing on the bed in my dream.

I started to get really worried that something had happened. Maybe I had died in my sleep, and that's why I couldn't wake up. Ususally if I'm having a lucid dream all I have to do is think about my breathing, or the pressure of the pillow on my head, and I'll wake up. I don't know how long it actually was, but it felt like I was in a panic, trying to wake up for about ten minutes. I had no way to get back into my body. Finally, something shifted and I was able to wake up, completely freaked out.

There is a very loud air handler vent in my room, pointed right at my bed. Evidently I had gotten so submerged in the white noise that I couldn't hear it anymore, and couldn't get back to reality. I think that was why there was so much music in the dreams. The last song I heard before I woke up was by Queen (it sounded like from the vocals), but I've never heard it before. I was hearing it, loud and clear, in stereo. Crazy.

After waking up, I had to go back to work. A wild coincidence after having an intense, disturbing dream with loud sounds-- on my way back to work via the Crairmaster, I was (I thought) all alone in the building, about halfway down the ramp. The fire alarm went off, with a claxon right next to my head. I jumped about two feet in the air!

What a crazy day.