Learning How to Turn a False Awakening to Your Advantage

Everyone should know what false awakening is. If you do not, then you’ve obviously never experienced the gut-wrenching confusion that can come from not knowing whether you are asleep or dreaming. False awakening presents itself in such a way that there have been great thinkers throughout the ages who began to wonder if it were possible for people to go through their whole lives dreaming and not even know it. Questions of what separated reality from dreams began to crop up and then, at some point between that and the theory of alternate dimensions, the fear abated.

The popular consensus was that, if a person’s whole life was nothing more than a dream, then eventually they would have to wake up from it, which could reasonably be considered a form of death.

Do you see? Even less than a paragraph into the article and the implications behind a false awakening dream have already became more philosophical than scientific. But that’s only one aspect of a false awakening. False awakening can be both much deeper and much simpler than that.

It’s one of the best scare tactics in films and television shows today. The audience will believe that the character on the screen is awake and once that belief is established, then the real fun starts. Authors of books do the same thing. They’ll set you up to believe that the scene you’re reading about is actually happening, when only a few paragraphs later you realize that the character in question has not even woken up yet.

What’s the point of these little jaunts into dreaming?

What both directors and writers are working for is that they want to put the actor or story character in a situation that could, but does not, happen in that character’s everyday life. It’s to give the audience a glimpse of what might have been without bringing harm to the storyline. In some cases, these dreams that act so much like reality actually help the characters grow and become stronger as they learn about themselves and their situations through the dreams that their creator forces them to have.

Coincidentally enough, you can take those same concepts and apply them to yourself. When you experience a false awakening, there are a couple of signs that you should look for that will be able to tell you what type of false awakening you’re dealing with.

The most common type of false awakening is type 1. This is your garden variety dream in which the dreamer has the sensation of ‘waking up’ when in fact they never did. Realism in these dreams is not what’s important. In fact, the settings can actually be pretty wild. No matter what’s going on around them, however, the dreamer is always under the impression that they are awake and that what they’re experiencing is the real deal.

Usually a dreamer will dream that they are going to sleep. At that point, false awakening dreams can either stop or continue unabated until the dreamer wakes up or realizes that they are still dreaming. The reason why type 1 false awakenings are so common is because this type of dreaming happens to be a latent form of lucid dreaming.

When it comes to something like lucid dreaming, a person can practice for years without ever getting the hang of becoming ‘conscious’ while still in the middle of a dream. Lucid dreaming has been used as a form of mental and physical therapy, as a form of recreation, and even as a source of meditation. Lucid dreaming is popular because the possibilities are endless for someone with the ability to control their dreams. What many people do not realize is that type 1 false awakening is often their first step into becoming a lucid dreamer on a regular basis.

Maybe, with a bit more understanding into an otherwise mysterious form of dreaming, people will soon have more control not only over their dreams but over who they are as well.