False awakening

A false awakening is a vivid and convincing dream about awakening from sleep, while the dreamer in reality continues to sleep. After a false awakening, subjects often dream they are performing their daily morning routine such as showering or eating breakfast. False awakenings, mainly those in which one dreams that they have awoken from a sleep that featured dreams, take on aspects of a double dream or a dream within a dream. A classic example in fiction is the double false awakening of the protagonist in Gogol's Portrait (1835).

Studies have shown that false awakening is closely related to lucid dreaming that often transforms into one another. The only differentiating feature between them is that the dreamer has a logical understanding of the dream in a lucid dream, while that is not the case in a false awakening.^[1]

Once one realizes they are falsely awakened, they either wake up or start a lucid dream.^[1]

^ ^a ^b Raduga, Michael; Kuyava, Oleg; Sevcenko, Natalia (November 2020). "Is there a relation among REM sleep dissociated phenomena, like lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences, and false awakening?". Medical Hypotheses. 144: 110169. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2020.110169. ISSN 1532-2777. PMID 32795836.

[:1-1] Raduga, Michael; Kuyava, Oleg; Sevcenko, Natalia (November 2020). "Is there a relation among REM sleep dissociated phenomena, like lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, out-of-body experiences, and false awakening?". Medical Hypotheses. 144: 110169. doi:10.1016/j.mehy.2020.110169. ISSN 1532-2777. PMID 32795836.

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