Dream Within a Dream: False Awakenings Explained

Most dreams fall apart the moment you wake up, because the room around you is so plainly real that the dream can't compete with it. A dream within a dream takes that certainty away, because the waking up is part of the dream. You open your eyes in your own bed, maybe get up and start the day, and then wake up again in the same bed. It's eerie the first time, and far more ordinary than it feels. Here's what is happening in your brain when it happens, why some nights bring one after another, and a test to run the next time you're not sure you're awake.

What is a dream within a dream?#

A dream within a dream is a dream in which you seem to wake up, or seem to finish a dream, while you're still asleep. Most of the time it's what sleep researchers call a false awakening: you dream that you've woken up in your own bed, and nothing tells you otherwise until you wake up for real. The rarer version is a dream nested inside another one, where at some point you think "that was only a dream" about the part you've just lived, and carry on dreaming. The phrase is older than sleep science (Edgar Allan Poe used it as the title of a poem in 1849^[1]), and Christopher Nolan's Inception stacked dreams inside dreams for a whole film.

What happens inside a false awakening is usually dull, and that's exactly why it convinces you. When 90 people who often have lucid dreams described their false awakenings, the same scenes kept coming back.^[2] They woke up normally, started their day, or wandered around the room they were sleeping in. You brush your teeth and make coffee, maybe check your messages. Then the alarm goes off, and you have to do it all again.

Not every false awakening is as calm as a morning coffee, and some come with the sense that something in the room is wrong. It can be a feeling of dread or of a presence by the bed, or the feeling of floating out of your body. Early sleep researchers split false awakenings into two kinds, the neutral type 1 and this ominous type 2,^[3] and type 2 is the one people remember and look up the next morning.

What does it mean when you dream within a dream?#

Is it a sign that something's wrong, or a message you're supposed to decode? Usually it's neither, and the honest answer is that a false awakening says less about you than most dream sites suggest. A false awakening is mostly your morning routine replayed, and a replay of brushing your teeth doesn't carry a hidden message. What can be worth a thought is the timing. A false awakening before an exam or an early flight tells you what was on your mind as you fell asleep, which you probably knew already.

The nested kind is where interpretation has more to work with. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (borrowing from a colleague) argued that whatever a dream places inside a "dream within the dream" is something you wish hadn't happened.^[4] It's as if the dream were saying "never mind, that wasn't real". It's a theory, and nobody has put it to the test, but it's a fair question to ask of your own dream: which part were you relieved to find was only a dream? You can take it further with Freud's way of reading dreams or with Oniri's dream meaning feature, which reads a dream alongside the rest of your journal. And if you're wondering why we dream at all, why we dream lays out the main ideas, none of them settled.

Why a false awakening feels so real#

A false awakening is believable because the setting is right. Most dreams drop you somewhere new, but a false awakening puts you in the bed you fell asleep in, with your own room around you, so there's nothing to question. Your brain, meanwhile, is dreaming. When doctors at a Paris sleep clinic happened to record two false awakenings, the brain waves looked close to those of ordinary REM sleep, the stage where most vivid dreams happen and where we spend about a quarter of the night. They concluded that the experience came from a dreaming brain, not an awake one.^[5]

One of those two sleepers was a 22-year-old woman with narcolepsy who had false awakenings often, and she described a typical one to the doctors. She got up, ate breakfast, washed her hair, packed her bag, went down to the street and took her bus.

That one wrong detail is often the only clue you get. In a false awakening you can move and think and make plans, but you don't question where you are, and that's the one thing a lucid dream has and a false awakening doesn't. The clue she noticed, the time, also happens to be the easiest one to check. If you want the background on the sleep stage itself, what REM sleep is explains how it works and when it happens in the night.

How common are false awakenings?#

Good numbers are hard to come by, because we only know we've had a false awakening once it's over, and nobody can record one on demand. Researchers once stopped nearly 1,000 people in the streets of Moscow and asked them about four experiences at the edge of sleep (false awakenings, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis and the feeling of leaving your body). Of those, 88% had had at least one, and 43% said they had one of them often.^[6] Most of us, in other words, have spent time near this border. How often people had them went along with how long they slept and how many dreams they remembered.

Myznik Egor, Unsplash

Among people who practise lucid dreaming, false awakenings are routine. Of the 90 lucid dreamers asked about their false awakenings, 79% had had one in the past month and 46% in the past week. So if you've had several this year, you're in good company, and nothing about it says your sleep is broken.

What causes false awakenings?#

False awakenings come most on the nights when your mind is set on waking up. A sleep lab is the extreme case, since you're wired up, watched, and told when the night will end. A Montreal lab collected 528 dreams from 343 sleepers, and more than a third of them brought the lab into the story. The most common way they did it was a false awakening.^[7] People dreamed that the experiment was over and they could go home, or that they'd failed to sleep at all. One dreamed they were awake and waiting for the end of the study, and glued one of their electrodes back on.

You don't need electrodes for it, but the same thing happens at home when something is waiting for you in the morning, like an early flight, a job interview or a baby who might wake up. False awakenings often come when you're expecting something stressful, and the likely reason is that you never fully let go into sleep, so part of you keeps checking whether it's time. Timing matters as well. In the Montreal lab, dreams about the lab were most frequent in REM sleep and in morning naps. And since our REM periods get longer towards the end of the night, it's no surprise that so many people have false awakenings close to the alarm, in a lie-in or in a nap.

Lucid dreaming practice seems to bring them on too. If you've started training for lucid dreams, expect more false awakenings, because the two travel together, as the next section shows.

False awakening, sleep paralysis or lucid dream?#

These three get mixed up because they all happen at the border between REM sleep and waking, and one can turn into another. The Paris team compared them on a few plain questions, and the answers sort them out quickly.

In sleep paralysis you're awake in a body that's still asleep, and the guide to stopping sleep paralysis covers what to do about it. A false awakening is the reverse, with a body that moves freely and a mind that's still dreaming. And a lucid dream is a dream you know is a dream (what lucid dreams are explains the rest). Seeing faces or hearing voices in the seconds after you wake is something else again, covered in hypnagogic hallucinations.

The three also run into each other, sometimes within the same few minutes of sleep. One of the sleepers in the Paris study went from sleep paralysis straight into a false awakening. And among lucid dreamers, 62% said their false awakenings regularly turned into lucid dreams, or the other way round.^[8] That link is what makes a false awakening useful, but it's also part of why some nights bring more than one.

Why do I keep having dreams within dreams?#

A false awakening loop is when you wake from one false awakening into another, sometimes several times in a row, each time a little more sure that this time it's real. It's a frightening thing to go through, partly because the people in the dream (a partner, a parent) may happily confirm that you're awake. So can you get stuck in one? No. Each new waking is still part of the same stretch of REM sleep, and the loop ends the way every dream ends, when you wake up for real or sink into deeper sleep.

Loops that keep coming back are worth treating like single false awakenings, since the likely triggers are the same (stress, broken sleep and a mind set on the alarm). A calmer evening and a fixed wake-up time are the place to start, and they never hurt. If you'd still like a way out from the inside, can you get stuck in a lucid dream has a few ways to wake yourself up.

Ranga, Unsplash

False awakenings aren't dangerous on their own, however strange they feel. But if they come with heavy sleepiness in the daytime, falling asleep without meaning to, or sleep paralysis most nights, mention them to a doctor. Dreams that start the moment you nod off can be a sign of narcolepsy. And if the type 2 kind keeps waking you up frightened, treat it like any recurring nightmare, with the method in how to have fewer nightmares.

A test for the next time you wake up#

Lucid dreamers have a habit that changes how false awakenings end. Three in four of the lucid dreamers asked said they checked whether they were dreaming during a false awakening, and the ones who did turned them into lucid dreams more often than the ones who didn't. You don't need to want lucid dreams to borrow the habit, since it also tells you within a few seconds whether the morning you're in is the real one. Here is the routine, in the order to run it.

1. Before you get out of bed, ask yourself if you're really awake, and mean it. Do it every morning, even when the answer is obviously yes, because a check you only run when something feels off is one you'll never think of in a dream.
2. Look at a clock or your phone, look away, and look again, or read a line of text twice. Dreams are bad with numbers (dream characters get simple sums wrong), and the time can be what gives a false awakening away, as it did on that bus.
3. Flip a light switch. A lamp that won't turn on is one of the small details that can be off in a false awakening, along with odd shadows and doors that lead somewhere they shouldn't.
4. If anything fails, you're dreaming, and you can either wake yourself up or stay and enjoy it (Oniri's lucid dreaming training can help you have more of those moments). If everything holds, you're awake.

And when you are awake, write down the dream you just came out of before you do anything else, including the morning you only dreamed you'd started. It's a strange one to read back a week later in your dream journal, and the false awakenings you've written down are the ones you're most likely to recognise next time, from the inside.