Voices

I woke up in the night, stayed up for a while, and tried to go back to sleep, facing the opposite way. I suddenly found myself in sleep paralysis, which I would only ever had after waking up as opposed to going to sleep. There was a rushing or screeching sound which got persistently louder and louder. It occurred to me that you are supposed to try rolling out of your body when that happens. It did not make anything happen, but there was this weird feeling where, even though I could not see or move, I could get a feeling as if I was actually moving around, like the proprioception of it. By that time the sound had stopped and I eventually broke the paralysis, and got to sleep. Then I woke up again, left the room and wandered off, and then saw a bright laminated red card lying around, with letters on it that constantly switched but I knew to say 'WAKE UP'. I realised that I would had a false awakening, and was surprised because it actually felt real, unlike the passive way most non-lucid dreams are. So I just woke up. I got up, tried to turn on the lights, but found that the switch did not work, so I found a lamp and turned that on, and it did work. I realised that the lights did not work because I was still asleep. I was worried that anything could jump out of the shadows at any moment, because it was a dream. Either in this dream or a later one (it was a chain of false awakenings) I tried to exert some control, standing in the bathroom and trying to make a big streak of lightning in the air I think it was. It did not work, but it did help my faith in the solidity of the dream. Unfortunately I did not think to try spinning, passive control or just leaving the house. I was just happy that it felt real, mostly. One thing that I probably should have done but did not occur to me was to look in the mirror. Still, when I actually did wake up I knew straight away, somehow. There was a fragment from this night where I remember someone doing a monologue about how they preferred cows to people and a few mental impressions of villages, but not so much from it. I think the false awakenings were from disturbed sleep. Maybe having read about all the things that had happened influenced my experiences, although I did not really believe, except in the abstract, things like shifting text or lights not working or auditory hallucinations that were not just incoherent whispering, until I would actually lived them.