In Your Dreams, Baby

I was dreaming that I was sleeping (so, you can imagine, this was a pretty realistic dream).

Something in the real world was trying to get me to wake up, and usually this tends to be manifested in something that makes no sense in the dream world, thus actually waking one up.

Say, you're dreaming of farm animals and one of the pigs looks at you, and says, "Wake up, you pig", you would think that that was a little too surprisingly poetic, which then contrasts with the mediocrity of the cows and the goats, which in turn wakes you up. And for the rest of the day you look at pork with suspicion, but milk suddenly seems warm and comforting.

But when you're dreaming that you're dreaming, an alarm clock, say, can be dreamt as, well, an alarm clock. So I tried to wake up. In my dreams, that is. The thing is - so I figure anyway - if an external influence is affecting your sleeping form, then your dream state has to remanifest itself in the physical world. Meaning, basically, that since I was too tired to actually get up, I couldn't wake up, even in my dreams, baby yeah.

Which resulted in a rather tense moment when I felt I was paralyzed. Somehow the scene changed to getting up and rushing for a bus with a friend, and in the dream I related to this friend how nightmarish it was to have felt that I was paralyzed. At which point the second alarm clock in the real world went off, which my real ears were now finding a little difficult to ignore.

Here in the dream there was that moment of self-consciousness when you know you're in a dream and you're about to wake up.

And my friend, in this dream, looked at me and said, "You think you had it bad when you thought you were paralyzed. Dang it man, I'm not even real. How do you think that feels?"