What Does It Mean When You Dream about A Dream?

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How do you feel when you dream about a dream? There are different theories that attempt to define what dreams essentially are; fiction or fact in fiction.

If you’ve hallucinated that you are stuck in a loop, it can be vivid and frightening, and these visions are very common. Scientifically, it’s just the brain waves getting the best of you. But sometimes, it could be that your subconscious is attempting to communicate with you.

Dream about a dream meaning

Dreams are a universal human experience similarly, the nightmare of being unable to escape a loop also has different implications. The night terrors wherein you are unable to escape the loop can imply different meanings. Let’s look at some:

False awakening could be one of the most common explanations for this type of hallucination. A false awakening is a vision where you think that you have woken up but are actually still sleeping. In this case, you may feel like you are stuck in a loop because you keep experiencing the same thing repeatedly. This could be due to stress and anxiety.

Lucid dreaming could be the next possible implication after false awakening. Lucid dreaming is a vision wherein you are aware that you are dreaming. It is also known as a conscious dream. If you are experiencing a false awakening and you become aware that you are actually hallucinating, it’s essentially a lucid dream.

The third possibility is that you might be experiencing sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is a feeling of being conscious but unable to move. This usually occurs just before or after you enter REM sleep. This phenomenon is caused by the body’s natural inclination to prevent itself from acting out your night terrors.

Biological explanations for dreaming about a dream

The patient is conscious and awake but he is paralyzed and cannot move because the muscle atonia associated with REM is persisting into the waking state.

In addition, the patient hallucinates an intruder possibly because many REM dreams are about potential threats and so on. But what about the closely-related false awakening experience?

Presumably, when we falsely believe we have woken up (but are in fact still dreaming), the brain is moving towards the awake state and for some reason thinks it has arrived. If some degree of activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the standard physiological cue that the brain uses to think it is awake, then it seems reasonable to argue that that clue can sometimes be used incorrectly.

But the dream within a dream phenomenon is not only about being fooled that you are awake because there is still full-on dreaming happening. The dream within a dream requires some other explanation than its mere re-description as a partial waking.