I often wake up at night or early in the morning to go to bathroom, or take water. I found that the best way to go back to sleep after waking up is to think about the dream I just had. It seems like this 'forced' dream continuity is somehow sleep inducing.

What may be happening to you is the same thing: your firs instinct is trying to remember your dream, as you trained yourself through years of dream journaling. It's a learned behaviour. But what happens is, this induces sleep, and you're caught in the loop.

Maybe the trick is to go back to writing down your dreams when you wake up. This activity may keep you from falling back asleep.

Hope this helps.

I stopped journalling because I noticed I was interpolating the missing bits of my memory while writing down the dream. It became more like writing an imaginary story inspired from my dream, then recording my actual dream.

But that said, I definitely think this is good way to force myself out of the loop.

Very interesting ideas in this thread: 1. Remembering the dream you were just having re-induces sleep 2. Writing a dream journal first thing every morning as a means of warming up higher levels of cognition (to help break through the morning haze) 3. Given #1 and #2: if you stop journaling, you might end up with a habit that puts you back to sleep in the mornings.

Gradually dimming the bedroom light with a warm color temperature helps me get tired in the evening, and fading it in to a cold color temperature in the morning helps me wake up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chennai_Snake_Park

That is what I do too. For me, it is the best way to fall sleep right away.

That's it. That's the story. There's nothing wrong with you. Trying to set additional alarms, or worrying about how you used to record your dreams... Not relevant. Your body isn't done resting. Stop interrupting it before its done, and you'll find that 8ish hours of uninterrupted sleep is more restful than the quasi-sleep you're getting now.

That said, it’s important to realize that not everyone needs 8 hours of sleep. Some people are blessed to only need 6, some people are cursed to need 10 or 11 hours. Some people have extreme generic quirks that can go from only needing 4 to needing more than 12 (of course you should talk to a doctor if that’s you). 8 is definitely by far the most common, but it’s not a hard rule.

Probably true, but I value my free time and I want as much of it as possible. That means staying up late. Spending that time sleeping makes me feel like I live to work, and not work to live.

Staying up late enough that it will impact your following day due to curtailed sleeping is just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

As an unrepentant night owl, this fact doesn't make me happy, but that doesn't stop it from being true. If you want the best possible hours, as many as possible, step one is getting enough sleep at the right time, so that you feel your best during the day. As much as we may wish it were different, that's the way it is.

Maybe you could start being grateful about the dreams and let them go, and focus on your body, be grateful you have two legs, you can breath... (find your own things).

Gratitude is not just contemplative bullshit, it can be about action, like OK I'm acknowledge all these good things I have, and I need to fight thermodynamics, taking action or they might go away, like are you grateful you have two legs, take the action of walking and so on, it can be about honoring those things we take for granted but we can lose.

I hope is not too cheesse or sounded crazy.

I know consciously expressing gratitude can be a powerful way to ground yourself and stay positive, but your insight about spurring action to fight thermodynamics is awesome.

Are you having a form of sleep paralysis maybe? This "half awake, half asleep" state is one I know quite well.

Here's a variety of sleep paralysis symptoms I've experienced over the years:

- You're in the "real world", but you feel like you're not really awake

- Limited control over your movements; or extreme difficulty moving your limbs; or you "feel" like you're moving, but you're not quite moving (or not at all; kind of like you're swimming in tar)

- Extreme stress / nervousness, like something's wrong and you can't figure out what; panic even sometimes

- Manifestation of some phobia (spiders, insects, monsters) in your room / around you

- The last few moments, or last situation of your dream keeps repeating, like it's on a loop (you "wake up", think you're awake, and you're still dreaming)

I believe any kind of conscious dream processing is unhealthy. Our dreams is already the results of some kind of processing, so feeding them back as more experiences that need to be analyzed is confusing and tiring for your brain.

You said that you've been doing it since your school days, so perhaps you don't remember, but dreams are made from a different material then regular memories: they are usually very "slippery" and hard to hold on to. I think it's important in this case to go with our default behavior and to forget them as fast as possible. And yes, it means that all lucid dreaming practices are damaging your brain functionality IMO.

To break the loop you're in, I think you need to re-learn how to not mess with dreams. Give yourself the time you need, and if you're tired the best thing to do is to go back to sleep. But avoid doing so while thinking about any dream, or anything that is related to a dream, or even the abstract concept of dreams. When you catch yourself doing do, dismiss the thought with "oh, that isn't important" and then switch the topic to anything else, anything at all. You can follow the line where the wall meets the ceiling, for all your brain cares. The dismiss part is important, don't skip it. It prevents your brain from re-saving the thought. This trick can also be applied to that embarrassing moment your brain keeps popping at random times. Just "not important" wave, and a quick change of subject. Works like a charm.

Good night, sleep well and wake up :)

My claim is that processing a by-product of processing is confusing. It's blurring the line between what's real and what isn't, and to me this is a dysfunction.

I’ll be honest, right now my routine is in rough shape after a bout of depression, but I’m at about 3-4 days a week and slowly building it up. This is a problem that comes and goes for me and focusing on a steady routine always helps.

I also recommend some meditation practice. On my worse days my mind is a mess of thoughts and dreams in the morning and I can’t make sense of the world much less the running shoes next to my bed. The way I get myself out of that is to bringing back my attention to my breath and body as mindfulness. Eventually I have enough awareness I can start to curl my body and prop myself up for a few minutes while I continue to collect myself.

Have you made reality checks? In lucid dreaming the blur between dreams and reality fades fast. Reality checks become non-reliable very fast. One has to make sure to invent constantly reality checks when the old ones stop being reliable.

https://www.amazon.com/Clocky-Rolling-Sleeper-Bed-Room-Run-a...

My savior has been audiobooks. I listen a lot, but put a book I know and love on when I wake up 4x/night with a timer and that helps me focus on something new and not stressful (dreams, “I need to go to sleep” etc) while still being something that my brain is familiar with and can naturally drift away from into sleep.

Works 80% of the time. Been a life saver for me

The solution to many addiction problems (which you suggest this might be) can be to simply be more context-aware. In the heat of a game, of course you want to keep playing the game. But the more you think about your entire life's context, who you are vs. who you want to be, what you need to get done vs. what you're getting done -- the less focus the object of addiction is able to retain.

(Fun related fact -- more than half of drug addictions in the US are simply "outgrown", with no intervention to blame.)

You're lucky. It takes me much practice and cultivation to be able to have that kind of clarity in dream retention.

I ask that people don't talk to me after I wake up, and I keep a journal close, and I work at it, and I'm still able to attain anything like what you're describing only sometimes.

In programming terms, in your sleep, your brain runs a full reference check against all nodes, and the ones that fired the brightest are what you're seeing when you wake up.

Don't let this valuable information go to waste.

Second, while I now use a lamp which ramps up the light before it starts to chime, I used music (instrumental and not to hectic) to wake me up. Music might get you something else to concentrate on while finally waking up.

BTW, both ramping up lights and playing music at "alarm time" looks like a nice side project for a Raspi. Does somebody know about such a solution?

Also, as usual, don't listen to random folks on the internet.

EDIT: My own experience with DMAE is that it made some dream memories hard to distinguish from reality. Did that happen only in a dream? I wasn't so sure sometimes.

Yes, that happens. I have both read about and experienced it. For example if you are thirsty or hungry (in real life), that can be reflected in your dream, in a related but possibly also weird way (sometimes). Like if you have real hunger, you may dream that you are eating something. I either read or think that the brain/mind does this as a compensating/adjusting mechanism, so that sleep can continue. Same for needing to take a leak, although of course that cannot go on for long. And for the weird part, you may dream that you are eating something impossible to eat, like rocks, to take a wild example. After all, not all events in dreams are logical or follow physical laws of real life.

>What's more spooky is that the entire dream preserves it cohesion and nothing feels out of place, even when the events outside (in the real world) are completely random. Like sound of the door closing or someone walking by the bed, all of that integrates seamlessly into the dream.

Yes, that too happens, and is because any crazy/impossible event can happen in a dream, and in the dream it seems normal - i.e. what I said about physical laws above, and also because our physical senses still operate somewhat in dreams, and those sensations can show up as events in the dream.

Well, from within the dream at least.

I remember once dreaming that my grandpa was tickling me with static electricity from his arm hairs (for some reason he had very hairy arms in this dream), and inside the dream that didn't seem weird at all. Then I woke up and realized that a fly was walking on my skin and that was the cause of the tickling sensation.

When you wake up, force yourself out of bed, and immediately go wash your face, then do some pushups or go for a run around the block.

You're in charge of yourself, if you want to wake up, get out of bed and do it. How old are you?

I usually feel pretty good if I don't remember any dream after waking up(Assuming they never happened).

Now that I think more of it, I agree it might be my lack of sleep quality which makes me tired and maybe places/offsets the REM sleep at odd times so I am able to remember the dreams. My circadian rhythm is definitely disturbed as go to sleep around 3:30 to 4:00 AM.

One of my friend has similar problem to yours, sort of like dreaming every night. One of the few thing she find very useful now is to drink a little bit of Alcohol / Red Wine before she sleeps, or do Sports that actually makes you sweat during the day. It seems your mind will spend all the energy on repairing your body then bothering to dream about something.

Probably related, I've struggled with depression nearly my entire adult life. I've learned to cope, drug free, but yea, I'm sure on a neural level my brain just isn't firing at peak levels like a normal person.

Ask to not be disturbed.

Go to sleep.

Sleep until you wake up.

Stay laying down until you fall asleep again.

Your sleep will now be shallow, and it will be easy to drift in and out, and retain a half-conscious state for extended periods.