London, Ontario, F 27

Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night, sort of. I wake up and leave my room, but it's hard to speak and hard to walk, and the blankets are scrunched up around my face. My reflexes are very slow, and the air is kind of thick and murky. Stuff, like the tv or the lights don't work, or there are strange people in my house. It is usually then that I realize that I'm only sort of awake, and actually mostly sleeping, and the reason that the blankets stick to my face is because my real life body is still paralysed in sleep and I'm just dreaming banal lucid dreams. When I realize that I'm dreaming, I usually try to experiment, and fly out the window, or levitate to the ceiling, or have some sort of sensory experience in the dream--maybe sexy times, but just as often, I'll choose to have an olfactory dream or a taste dream with decadent dream foods. This will be fun, until I lose focus, at which point the dream often gets kind of nightmarish and weird. So I'll try to wake myself up again, which usually results in several false wakings--foggy, cloudy, heavy body again. Sometimes I'll try slapping myself in the face or yelling at myself to wake up, and this too is ineffective, since it's just my dream hand slapping a dream face, or my dream voice yelling. Occasionally, I can make my real body speak, but it requires a lot of effort. I am convinced that it works. This gets very frustrating, and annoying, and occasionally scary. I worry about being stuck in this awkward space forever. If I give up, and try to sleep in the dreaming world, I will wake my real body. I rarely remember this trick when I'm dreaming, however.