It feels so real, doesn’t it? There you are, with your eyes open, not only seeing someone but also feeling an intense sense of their presence, so you know you’re not dreaming – or are you?
Now, already I feel you protesting because you know for sure that you were awake. After all, as soon as those people go away, you get up and walk around, and either start your day or get something to drink before going back to bed. You’re awake, and getting up to start your day or to have a drink is proof of that. Yet still I’m going to suggest that you were, in fact, dreaming. Puzzled? This is what commonly happens:
When you’re asleep and dreaming, your eyes are closed and your brain processes the sensations of your dream in exactly the same way as your brain processes the sensations of your waking life when you are awake. When you are awake, light rays from the things you are looking at travel through your eye, down the optic nerve to the part of your brain that processes visual information. Your brain then decodes that incoming information and decides what you see. (The brain doesn’t give you an accurate picture of the thing you are looking at. It compares it to the kinds of things you’ve looked at before, filters it according to your emotional experiences and beliefs, edits it accordingly, and then decides what picture to create. This is why we can all look at the same thing and see it in different ways. This is why one person can see a plane, another a bird, another a cloud, another a flying saucer, when they’re all looking at the same thing. Your brain is trying to be helpful to you. The bottom line is what you see is not necessarily what you are looking at! Add this up across all the incoming information your brain is decoding – sound, touch, smell and so on – and you can understand why our waking lives are really an illusion.)
Oh, and by the way, if you find it difficult to believe that your brain makes its own decision about what you’re seeing, consider this: Your eye works a bit like an old film camera. Think back to school days when you looked at diagrams of how a camera or eye works. The lens turns all the images upside down. In an old film camera, the scenes you photograph are recorded upside down on the film at the back of the camera. It’s the same with your eye – everything you are looking at is ‘seen’ upside down in your brain, but your brain knows, from your first few days of life, that this doesn’t make sense with what you hear and touch, so it makes an editing decision and ‘tells’ you to see things the other way up. Now you know why the camera doesn’t lie. So what does that say about the brain?
What’s all this got to do with your experience of being awoken by people staring at you? (And why, I wonder, did you post your experience to a dream forum if you were sure you weren’t dreaming?)
When you’re dreaming, all the information your brain is processing is experienced as if it is actually happening. This is the result of your brain doing its editing job. It doesn’t distinguish between dreaming and waking so it reports everything as if it is actually happening. (This is where it gets really interesting, because the same can be said about the brain’s decision-making while you’re awake. What if there’s a third, or a fourth reality, and the one you call your waking life is just another level of dreaming, with each dream reality packed inside another, like a pack of Russian dolls? After all, we already know from the way the brain edits what you’re seeing while you’re awake that you’re actually living an illusion. When will you wake up from the illusion, and will you wake up to the illusion of your current reality [and change it] or will you wake up into another reality? But let’s get back to those people staring at you …)
If you wake up suddenly, or you’re frightened awake by a dream, it can sometimes happen that you’re partly awake and partly dreaming. You feel like you’re awake, but some part of your brain is still going through the last few seconds of processing a dream. This state is known as the hypnopompic state. What happens next is that your eyes are open, so you’re looking at your bedroom (or wherever you’re sleeping), so images from your bedroom travel through your eyes, down the optic nerves, to your brain. What does your brain do with these images? It adds them to the images of your fast-fading dream and makes an editing decision. It decides that your dream is taking place against the backdrop of your bedroom – because that is a sensible, best-fit decision to make. So there you are, awake, unaware that a part of your brain is still dreaming, and you see your dream acting out in front of your eyes. Yes, it’s real, because your brain tells you it is, and who are you to argue with that? You believe everything else your brain edits and informs you about every second of the day, don’t you?
This is why the people ‘go away’ as soon as you realise they are there. They don’t go anywhere really. It’s just that your brain finishes dreaming. The dream ends, the people disappear, just as any dream scenario disappears when the dream ends.
Are you disappointed? What you have experienced on a number of occasions is relatively common for many people. It’s known as a hypnopompic hallucination. It’s a natural and normal result of waking up while a dream is still playing its last moments.
Everyone who has experienced this (including me) reports on the strong feeling of presence. It’s not just that we feel someone is present, it’s that there’s a heightened sense of presence. This fits with dreaming, where all the senses are heightened.
And it’s not necessarily confined to seeing a person (or thing, or scenario) and sensing its presence, personality or intent. If you are being touched in the dream, you will sense this, in the hypnopompic state, as being touched while you are awake. The same applies to the other senses, including speech, music, taste, smell and so on.
The most common hypnopompic hallucination involves seeing a person either standing by the bed, standing over you, or hovering above you. This fits perfectly with the physiology of what is happening here. When you wake up, you’re either looking up, to your side, or close by, so that’s where your dreaming brain ‘decides’ you see the person you are dreaming about.
Since fear often wakes us up prematurely, the presence is often frightening – perhaps a grim reaper, a grim rapist, an intruder, a witch, a faceless fearsome being, or an alien – and so we see the very dream figure that frightened us awake. But it’s still a dream.
In your case, you say you are scared but the figures do not seem to be there for that purpose. So presumably you are scared because you don’t understand what’s happening, or because you think they’re there in the room with you. Hopefully what you have read so far will assure you that you need not be scared.
The next interesting thing, knowing your experience is the end part of a dream, is to look for an element of interpretation. You don’t recall what happened in the dream prior to waking, so we only have a dream fragment to consider.
Everyone in a dream represents something about the dreamer, so these people represent something about you. I’ve given you a dialogue as a dream alchemy practice to help you to interpret what each person represents about you.
More often than not, the dream figures you see when you are suddenly jolted awake represent parts of yourself (beliefs, emotions, experiences) that you have disowned or tried to distance from yourself. They come back to haunt you in dreams, seemingly standing to one side, or felt as a presence that seems too close for comfort and yet separate and scary. These are common signs that you are dreaming about parts of yourself that you can’t really escape, that come back to haunt you, that seem too close for comfort – that you are trying to separate from and yet seem connected to. In these cases, dream interpretation and dream alchemy practices can help you to identify what you have disowned and decide whether it is something you need to bring back on board and integrate or whether it is something you need to confront, deal with and let go.
Some people will read this and feel that it applies in most cases but not in theirs. While it is possible to connect with various entities in a psychic way, I do urge you to note that if the figure ‘goes away’ or fades within moments, it is a hypnopompic hallucination – a dream, and, as such, it can be interpreted to deliver intensely insightful information about yourself and your life. Don’t miss the opportunity to gain this insight.
Consult me confidentially about your dream.
