Really fucking weird "dream"
Warning: this is a long rambling self-absorbed post and doesn't really say much that would be valuable to anyone. Please don't post "tl;dr" or "hey I just wasted 10 minutes reading that that I can't get back". I'm warning you now that it's probably going to be too long, and probably going to be 10 minutes you can't get back.
I mostly just want to write it down before I forget it, so only read through it if you're really bored.
I'm inadvertantly running a sleep deprivation experiment on myself. Between 7am on Teusday morning and now I've slept a total of 5.5 hours (3 between Teusday and Wednesday, 2 between yesterday and today, and .5 a few minutes ago.
I've been consuming large quantities of caffeine, but that only kept me up until about 45 minutes ago. I remember sitting at my computer, and don't remember getting into my bed, but I must have done so because I was sleeping there.
I must have instantly fallen into REM sleep and stayed there the whole time because I only slept for about half an hour, but it felt like several hours, and I had three distinct dreams. Even now I still feel the effects of the caffeine I've been taking all day, so I it was a highly caffeinated sleep I had.
The third and last dream I had was really weird. First of all, it was very vivid. The most vivid dream I've ever had (in a sense it felt more real than real life). So anyway, in my dream, the first thing that happens is I wake up and get out of bed (but only in my dream) and on my way up I bump into the radiator next to my bed (which doesn't really exist--the radiator is across the room). It busted open where I bumped into it and water started pouring out of it and flooding the floor of my whole room (which of course a radiator wouldn't do), and extending out to the rest of the apartment floor. Since my computer tower lives on the floor, I figured I should first get it onto a table, and then think about the busted radiator and how to stop the water.
While I'm heading to go pick it up, I realize that I hadn't full gotten out of the blankets that were on my bed; one was wrapped around my feet, getting increasingly wet as the water level in the room was rising, and it was pulling my back by some sort of drag force. I kept tripping and falling and stretching trying to reach my computer (which was across the room). I started stretching my arms out (as in they were actually getting longer) to try to reach my computer, but the blankets were at this point pulling me backwards so I never reached it.
Then while this is happening I hear my friends in the living room trying to figure out what to do about the water, and one of them says quite loudly "we should save the kids first" (none of them have kids and no kids live in my apartment).
Now up until this point this was just kind of regular dream stuff except really vivid and for the most part realistically complying to the rules of physics (with some exceptions noted above), way more-so than a normal dream.
But here's where it starts getting weirder.
You know how sometimes you think to yourself (in waking life), "It's strange how in dreams I can't tell it's not real unless I question it, and frequently don't even question if it is, and when I do question it it becomes very obvious to me very quickly that I am in dreamworld; but in real life, I don't even have to question if it's real. I just know it is real before a question could have time to come to mind."
Well anyway here I was, dreaming, and I was in that state of mind above, where I know it's real. This is unlike any other dream I've ever had in my life (and no, it wasn't anything like lucid dreaming; I've got a lot of experience in lucid dreaming and it wasn't that). If you don't understand what I meant in the last paragraph, you won't understand why this became so incredibly bizarre after this. It's like what happened after that was as real as real life or even more real. The closest thing I could compare it to is a psychadelic trip.
Anyway, so back to my dream (which was my reality at that point)... After I hear my friends in the other room start saying they should save the kids first, I start thinking to myself "they're right--forgot my computer tower, I need to go save these kids". But then I hear an ex-girlfriend from like 6 years ago, inside my head, tell me that it's okay, really I should save the computer tower. At this point I find myself lying on my bed again (don't remember actually lying back down though), water level ever increasing at over a foot now, and thinking to myself it's definitely too late to save the tower, it's already half submerged in water.
Then I forget about the tower, and figure "hey, since my ex-girlfriend is in my head, I may as well take this opportunity to catch up". So I start talking to her. But then a third person enters my head, some french woman who I don't know, and starts saying things that are really freaking me out. I can't remember much now, but she was clearly intentionally trying to scare the shit out of me. The fact that she was in my head just made it that much worse.
Then, as if my sense of self hadn't deteriorated too much I already, I felt the rest of it start to slip away. I literally lost my "selfness" (the only time I'd ever experienced something like that before was on salvia). The weird thing is, shortly after, to fill in the void was this french woman, not me. And as an "I" came back into existence, I felt much more like her than my usual self at that point. Now, I still heard the real me talking to my ex-girlfriend (but I didn't identify the real me as the "real me"--I considered it an intruder I needed to defeat, and I didn't identify my ex-girlfriend as such either, but rather as the ex-girlfriend of this intruder). As you can tell, things were getting really confusing and bizarre, compounded by the fact that this was more real-feeling than any dream.
Now here's the kicker. At about this point, I start to wake up. Now, in real life I was lying on my bed in a different position that I was in my dream. I was still in sleep-paralysis, but somewhat aware that I was waking up (which was weird, because you never expect to wake up from reality to a different equally vivid reality). My eyes open and my audio and visual sensory perception systems were capturing facts about the external world. All other sensory perception systems (including tactile), and my mental represntations of the phyical world were capturing info from my dreams. So my senses and representatal systems were offering conflicting data.
Add to all this that my sense of self was still in the same state it was before I started waking up, and only slowly started to revert. At this point I was pretty sure I was probably schizophrenic, or had accidentally taken some pyschadelic drugs, or something like that.
But this weird superposition of impossible physical extent, conflicting sensory data, and bizarre ego-switching only lasted a few more moments when all of the sudden I snapped back to normal, fully woke up, and the sleep paralysis went away.
That was about 15 minutes ago when I started writing this post.
I'm sure this has something to do with being very sleep deprived and sleeping with lots of caffeine coursing through my blood. But maybe I'm also just going insane.
To top it all off, right as I was about to submit this, I accidentally knocked over a glass of water next to me keyboard, and it spilled right onto my computer tower. Granted, I just got a towel and dried it up, and my computer's fine, but still...divination anyone? Maybe I should go find some kids to save from something.
