My Strangest Dream Experiences

I’m not even sure these should be called a dream experiences because they actually occurred when I had been wide awake for a hour or so after a night’s sleep.

On at least three mornings, all several years ago, these things happened. For the sake of the scientific record I must state that on each occasion my wife and I had sex just before the “dream” episode; I wouldn’t mention that except that may be significant, for I never had such an episode on duller mornings.

The first episode was the most overwhelming. As I lay in bed around 8:30 a.m. gathering strength to dress for work I began to have a feeling which words cannot describe adequately. It was as if I were beginning to remember an extremely realistic and powerful dream without quite remembering what had happened in it. The dream world expanded and grew. A strange, disoriented feeling came over me. The dream world began to overwhelm the real world of the bedroom and the sunny windows. It was as if I had earlier been in a world which was much more real than the one in which I lay, and as I began to remember it, it overwhelmed everything else.

The key is that the dream world somehow overflowed its bounds and swamped the “real” world. The overpowering dream world was much more vivid than my physical surroundings had ever been, so that I actually felt – with alarm – that what I had thought was the real world was not the real world, and that a more real world was rising up to take over, making my ordinary surroundings seem unreal. And yet the content of any dream remained tantalizingly just beyond my reach. I could sense faces, voices, colors, but only as teasing hints; I was like a person with amnesia grasping at fleeting clues about his life.

My head was swimming as I tried to get emotional control of myself. When I had dressed and gone to my car, I realized that the thing was not fading away. I was like someone who had been plucked from the past (the dream) and thrust into an unfamiliar future.

I felt uncertain that I was following the simple route from home to the interstate highway, after which I had to drive fifteen miles to Daytona Beach and five further miles to my office. As I began the drive through west Daytona I found that intersections and turns I had negotiated hundreds of times now were unfamiliar and confusing. “Do I turn here? Is it further down? And then which direction?” I felt my way hesitantly past traffic lights and streets that may or may not have taken me to work.

I was quite frightened by now, and I pulled into a walk-in medical clinic. The doctor who examined me studied my eyes with a bright light, checked my heart and blood pressure, and said he could find nothing wrong. He had suspected a stroke, or ministroke, but could find no sign of one. He told me I had probably just suffered from panic because of some mistake on the road.

After that rest I was calmer, and I did find my way to work. As I walked through the court building to my office I felt somewhat as if I were floating rather than walking – I don’t mean literally floating, but with some such sensation affecting my consciousness and body.

Only after I’d sat at my desk for awhile with a glass of cold water did the mighty flood of the dream world begin to subside. My sense of disorientation and unreality gradually faded, and the world of bookshelves and fluorescent light fixtures and computers regained the upper hand. The dream world continued to recede, and within another hour I was feeling what passes for normal.

The same thing happened on at least two other widely separated mornings, but each time it was a little less extreme.

Sometimes after that I felt the flood rising and became lightheaded and concerned, but I fought against it, got out of bed immediately, splashed cold water in my face, and got through without an extreme episode. I began making sure that I had some breakfast before any physical exertion, thinking that perhaps low blood sugar had been a factor.

For whatever reason, nothing like those episodes has happened to me for several years except for a mild version which passes in a matter of seconds. Even so, the extreme experiences were so strange and disorienting – though at the same time fascinating and tantalizing – that even a hint of them is enough to start emotional red lights flashing.

The unavoidable consequence of those episodes is that I feel, based on personal experience, that there is another reality superior to this reality. I wish I could say something more insightful, but that’s it.