False awakening

A false awakening is a vivid and convincing dream about awakening from sleep, while the dreamer in reality continues to sleep. After a false awakening, subjects often dream they are performing daily morning rituals such as cooking, cleaning and eating. The experience is sometimes called a double dream or dream within a dream.

Further concepts

Lucidity

A false awakening may occur following an ordinary dream or following a lucid dream (one in which the dreamer has been aware of dreaming). Particularly if the false awakening follows a lucid dream, the false awakening may turn into a "pre-lucid dream",^[1] that is, one in which the dreamer may start to wonder if they are really awake and may or may not come to the correct conclusion. In a study by Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett, 2,000 dreams from 200 subjects were examined and it was found that false awakenings and lucidity were significantly more likely to occur within the same dream or within different dreams of the same night. False awakenings often preceded lucidity as a cue, but they could also follow the realization of lucidity, often losing it in the process.^[2]

Continuum

Another type of false awakening is a continuum. In a continuum, the subject falls asleep in real life, but in the dream following, the brain simulates the subject as though they were still awake. At times the individual can perform actions unknowingly. The movie Nightmare on Elm Street popularized this phenomenon.

Symptoms of a false awakening

Realism and unrealism

Certain aspects of life may be dramatized, or out of place in false awakenings. Things may seem wrong: details, like the painting on a wall, not being able to talk or difficulty reading (purportedly reading in lucid dreams is often difficult or impossible,^[3]) or, oddly, normal types of foods gone missing. In some experiences, the subject's senses are heightened, or changed.

Repetition

Because the mind still dreams after a false awakening, there may be more than one false awakening in a single dream. Subjects may dream they wake up, eat breakfast, brush their teeth, and so on; suddenly awake again in bed (still in a dream), begin morning rituals again, awaken again, and so forth. The philosopher Bertrand Russell claimed to have experienced "about a hundred" false awakenings in succession while coming around from a general anesthetic.^[4]

Types of false awakening

Celia Green suggested a distinction should be made between two types of false awakening:^[1]

Type 1

Type 1 is the more common, in which the dreamer seems to wake up, but not necessarily in realistic surroundings, that is, not in their own bedroom. A pre-lucid dream may ensue. More commonly, dreamers will believe they have awakened, and then either wake up for real in their own bed or "fall back asleep" in the dream.

A common false awakening is a "late for work" scenario. A person may "wake up" in a typical room, with most things looking normal, and realize he or she overslept and missed the start time at work or school. Clocks, if found in the dream, will show time indicating that fact. The resulting panic is often strong enough to jar the person awake for real (much like from a nightmare). A sense of relief almost always comes from realizing that no oversleeping actually took place.

Type 2

The type 2 false awakening seems to be considerably less common. Green characterized it as follows:

the subject appears to wake up in a realistic manner, but to an atmosphere of suspense.[...] His surroundings may at first appear normal, and he may gradually become aware of something uncanny in the atmosphere, and perhaps of unwonted sounds and movements. Or he may "awake" immediately to a "stressed" and "stormy" atmosphere. In either case, the end result would appear to be characterized by feelings of suspense, excitement or apprehension.^[5]

Charles McCreery^[6] drew attention to the similarity between this description and the description by the German psychopathologist Karl Jaspers (1923) of the so-called "primary delusionary experience" (a general feeling that precedes more specific delusory belief). Jaspers wrote:

Patients feel uncanny and that there is something suspicious afoot. Everything gets a new meaning. The environment is somehow different—not to a gross degree—perception is unaltered in itself but there is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light.[...] Something seems in the air which the patient cannot account for, a distrustful, uncomfortable, uncanny tension invades him.^[7]

McCreery suggests this phenomenological similarity is not coincidental, and results from the idea that both phenomena, the Type 2 false awakening and the primary delusionary experience, are phenomena of sleep.^[8] He suggests that the primary delusionary experience, like other phenomena of psychosis such as hallucinations and secondary or specific delusions, represents an intrusion into waking consciousness of processes associated with stage 1 sleep. It is suggested that the reason for these intrusions is that the psychotic subject is in a state of hyper-arousal, a state that can lead to what Ian Oswald called "micro-sleeps"^[9] in waking life.

Subjects may also experience sleep paralysis.

In popular culture

False awakenings are sometimes used as a device in literature, and especially films, to increase "shock" effects by inducing a feel of calm in the viewer following something disturbing.

A twist at the end of the horror film Dead of Night (1945) is an early example of a re-occurring false awaking.

Another example, the viewer is led to believe that the subject has awoken from a nightmare or dream, only for some element of the nightmare to reappear suddenly and cause a "second" or "true" awakening. This technique was used in the film An American Werewolf in London.

The film Waking Life deals with dreaming, lucid dreaming and false awakening.

The film Vanilla Sky begins with the main character having a Type 2 false awakening, achieved cinematically with spectacular "empty city" effects.

The Twilight Zone episode "Shadow Play" involved a man having a dream in which he is sentenced to die, with the various roles (judge, jury foreman, attorney, fellow inmates, etc.) being played by people from his past. At the moment he is executed, the dream re-starts, with the characters shuffled. The episode was part of the original series, and re-made as part of the 1985–89 revival.

In the first volume of Neil Gaiman's graphic novel Sandman, the newly freed Morpheus, lord of Dreams, punishes his captor, Alexander Burgess, with endless false awakening nightmares.

In Joan Baez's The Dream Song, the lyrics discuss a dream-within-a-dream resulting from her apparent awakening. The lyrics end "When I really woke I was frozen in between; I didn't know who I was, it was a dream inside a dream; It's all a dream."

In the film Inception the dream-within-a-dream and the false awakening are central to the plot.

The opening of the film Star Trek: First Contact shows Captain Picard seeming to awake from a nightmare flashback to his time on a Borg ship, washing his face, then gasping in horror as a Borg implant erupts from it--at which point he is awakened in reality by a beeping computer.

The Rugrats episode "In The Dreamtime" features Chuckie experiencing a false awakening.

The Jimmy Neutron episode "Sleepless in Retroville" features many false awakenings at the end, where different characters constantly wake up from each other's dreams.

The plot of the South Park episode "City on the Edge of Forever" is revealed to be a dream within a dream for Stan Marsh; he undergoes a false awakening as Cartman within his own dream.

In the Phineas and Ferb episode "Phineas and Ferb get busted" Perry experienced a false awakening of the boys being busted.

See also

• Dream
• Dream argument
• Déjà vu
• Hallucinations in the sane
• Hypnagogia
• Inception
• Lucid dreaming
• Nightmare
• Simulated reality
• Sleep paralysis
• Waking Life

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Green, C. (1968). Lucid Dreams. London: Hamish Hamilton.
2. ^ Barrett, Deirdre. Flying dreams, false awakenings, and lucidity: An empirical study of their relationship. Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams. Vol 1(2) p. 129–134, Jun 1991.
3. ^ see Green, C., and McCreery, C. (1994). Lucid Dreaming: the Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep. London: Routledge, Ch. 10, for a discussion of this topic
4. ^ Russell, B. (1948). Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. London: Allen and Unwin.
5. ^ Green, C. (1968). Lucid Dreams. London: Hamish Hamilton, p. 121.
6. ^ McCreery, C. (1997). "Hallucinations and arousability: pointers to a theory of psychosis". In Claridge, G. (ed.): Schizotypy, Implications for Illness and Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7. ^ Jaspers, K. (1923). General Psychopathology (translated by J. Hoenig and M.W. Hamilton). Manchester: Manchester University Press (first published in Germany, 1923, as Allgemeine Psychopathologie), p. 98.
8. ^ McCreery, C. (2008). [1] "Dreams and psychosis: a new look at an old hypothesis."] Psychological Paper No. 2008-1. Oxford: Oxford Forum.
9. ^ Oswald, I. (1962). Sleeping and Waking: physiology and psychology. Amsterdam: Elsevier.