Dreaming about
waking up

Waking up is the one part of the night everyone remembers, and it's strange to find it happening inside a dream. Dreaming about waking up is most often a false awakening. You get out of bed, brush your teeth, maybe start the coffee, and then wake up for real and realize none of it happened. It's harmless, common, and more likely when your sleep is light or you're anxious about the morning.

But waking up in a dream isn't always about sleep itself. It can point to a realization, something in your life coming into focus. And it can carry emotion straight across the line, as when a dream leaves you waking up in tears. What happened just before you "woke", and how you felt once you did, decide which of these your dream was.

What dreaming about waking up means

The meaning of a waking-up dream starts with a practical question about how you've been sleeping. Then come the more personal readings.

Anxious, light sleep

False awakenings are most common when sleep is shallow and the mind is half alert, before an exam or a flight, with a new baby, or during a stretch of worry. Your brain is so focused on getting up that it starts the morning without you. Our dreams pick up what we're preoccupied with,^[1] and few things preoccupy us like an alarm we're afraid to miss.

A realization on the way

Beyond sleep, waking is one of the oldest pictures for seeing clearly, and English uses it all the time (a wake-up call, waking up to the truth). A dream of waking up can come when you're starting to see something you've avoided, the reality of a job, a relationship or a habit. If the room you woke into felt different from your real one, ask what in your life has quietly changed.

Being stuck between states

Sometimes the dream is about not being fully in one place or the other. Repeated false awakenings, rooms that are almost right and a feeling of never quite surfacing can mirror a period when you feel half present, going through the motions at work or at home.

Dreaming about waking up crying

This is the most searched version, and it's often two things at once, a dream about crying and real tears on waking. Strong emotion in a dream can cross into the body, and a dream of loss, of saying goodbye or of seeing someone who has died can leave your face wet and your chest tight. It usually means the dream touched something you feel deeply but don't often let out by day, and many people find it brings some relief, as if the crying the day didn't allow happened at night. If you wake up in tears often and your mood has been low for weeks, talk to a doctor or someone you trust.

Dreaming about waking up when you're still asleep

This is the false awakening in its plainest form, and some people go through three or four of them before the real alarm. The giveaways are small (a lamp in the wrong place, a switch that won't turn the light on, a clock that changes every time you look), and the post on false awakenings covers why they happen. For people learning to lucid dream, they're a gift, since a false awakening noticed is a lucid dream started. Lucid dreamers treat every awakening as suspect and do a quick reality check each morning, reading a line of text twice or checking a clock, because in a false awakening the words and the numbers usually change. The guide on reality checks explains how.

Dreaming about waking up and not being able to move

Waking, or thinking you've woken, and finding you can't move is sleep paralysis. Your muscles are switched off while you dream. If you surface before they come back on, you're aware but stuck, and the mind often fills the gap with a weight on the chest or a presence by the bed. But it's harmless. It ends by itself, generally sooner than it feels like it will. There are simple things you can do while it's happening, set out in the post on sleep paralysis.

Dreaming about waking up in a different place

Waking up in a strange bedroom, a hotel, your childhood home or someone else's house is about displacement. It tends to come during transitions, a move, a new relationship, a new job, when you're not yet sure where you belong. Waking in a place from your past can mean something in the present has stirred an old feeling. But waking in a place you've never seen is more often about the unfamiliar life you're stepping into.

Dreaming about waking up late

Waking in the dream to find you've slept through the alarm and missed something important is a dream of pressure and responsibility. It's a close relative of being late, and like that dream it often visits people who are rarely late in waking life.

Dreaming about trying to wake up and not being able to

Some people know they're dreaming and try to wake up, by blinking, shouting or forcing their eyes open, and can't. It's unsettling, but you always wake up in the end. Emotionally, it can mirror a situation where you want out and can't find the exit. Practically, it often happens in light sleep, and wiggling a finger or a toe, or simply relaxing and letting the dream play out, tends to bring people back faster than fighting it.

Dreaming about waking up according to Jung and Freud

A false morning gives each man a handle, Jung through what the dream adds and Freud through what it grants.

Jung: the dream that says you're awake

Jung's working rule was that a dream says something your waking mind hasn't said, so it's worth asking what a dream insisting "you're awake" is adding.^[2] A false awakening copies your morning down to the toothbrush, and the only thing it contributes is the mistake. Carried over to this dream (our application), the habit is to look at what you're surest you've already dealt with, a lesson you think you've learned or a situation you think is settled, and check whether that certainty is the part still asleep.

Freud: the wish to be up and still asleep

Applied to false awakenings, Freud's central idea gives you a reading to try: the dream hands over what you want, dressed as something else.^[3] Anyone with an early alarm has two wishes at once, to stay in bed and to have the morning over with, and a false awakening grants both: you get washed, dressed and out the door while your body stays asleep. The props come from the day before, the alarm you set, the flight you're dreading, the baby who woke you at four.

The spiritual meaning of waking up in dreams

Two old texts, one Chinese and one Indian, have something to say about waking out of a dream.

Waking up in the Zhuangzi

The Zhuangzi, a Chinese Taoist classic, has a passage that reads like a description of a false awakening. People who dream of feasting wake up to weep, it says, and people who dream of weeping wake to go hunting, and inside a dream a man may even try to interpret the dream, knowing only on waking that it was one.^[4] The same chapter speaks of a "great awaking" after which we'll know this life was itself a great dream, and tells of Zhuang Zhou waking from a butterfly dream unsure whether he was a man who had dreamed of a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of a man. It's a question about how sure we are that we're awake, not a symbol reading.

Dawn and bad dreams in the Atharvaveda

The Atharvaveda, which holds some of the oldest prayers against bad dreams, has a dawn hymn asking that whatever evil dreaming we feared will "fade away", and asking the gods to carry off both waking and sleeping evil-dreaming.^[5] For anyone who has woken from a bad night and lain there until the light came, morning as the moment a dream gets taken off you is an old idea.

Questions to ask about your waking-up dream

A waking-up dream hides in plain sight, so it helps to go back over the last moments before you surfaced. Try these.

• What happened just before you "woke up"?
• Was the room exactly right, or slightly off?
• How did you feel on waking, in the dream and for real?
• How have you been sleeping lately, and what's on your mind in the mornings?
• Is there something in your life you feel you're only now waking up to?

When you tell Oniri the dream, include the false mornings too, since they're part of the story it reads.