Personal Account: Dreaming With Eyes Open

Usually I don’t talk about my personal experiences on my blog and instead just present the information I found although sometimes I make exceptions. This time I’m making an exception because I never tried to look into the experience and gain any kind of knowledge from it. It’s just a weird thing that happened to me once. Still I know a lot of people are trying to figure out exactly what dreams are and spiritually what happens to a person when they dream, and this unique experience of mine involving dreams might offer these people some extra insight into the nature of dreams.

This happened several years back and it happened because of a drug. I got very sick with a flu around Christmas time and went up to the local Quick Care and got a doctor to prescribe me some things to make me feel better. I had a very bad reaction to one of the drugs which caused my pulse rate and blood pressure to skyrocket and eventually ended up giving me severe anxiety attacks. About a day after the anxiety attacks started I realized what was going on and went to a family practice that was recommended to me and saw a nurse practitioner who I got into a fight with. The information supplied by the manufacturer of one of the drugs I was taking listed everything I was suffering from as a possible, albeit rare, side-effect of their drug. The nurse practitioner had told me that this was impossible since rare side-effects never actually occur and only show up on trails because they are so large. It was her opinion that I was suffering from very high blood pressure and needed to immediately undergo extensive testing and be put on a proper treatment, and that the anxiety attacks, which I was now suffering from about one every ten minutes, were a psychological problem that coincidentally started shortly after I started taking the medication that listed it as a side-effect and that I needed to take a recommendation to see a psychiatrist and be medicated for it. There were other symptoms too such as lethargy, restlessness, and insomnia.

I couldn’t bring this up but to the nurse practitioner but I’m also a magician and that means I don’t have anxiety attacks unless they’re caused by some external source that catches me off guard, in this case the prescription drug which caused me a lot of physical problems. Of course I stopped taking the medication prior to my prescription running out, against the advice of the nurse practitioner I might add, and made an appeal to Venus for help. She directed me to seek Saturn, who I then appealed to and who balanced me out. Saturn brought my heart rate down a little bit and gave me a complete reprieve from the anxiety attacks until the rest of the drug was flushed out of my system, which took about another day.

My dreams have always been in full color and hyper-vivid. I can feel pain in dreams, and I’ve been shot, stabbed, and beaten senseless with baseball bats, and it feels just like it does in real life and never wakes me up. I can also feel less extreme things like my feet hitting the floor as I walk or the warmth of someone’s body seeping through the cloth of my shirt which is pressed against my skin when they put their hand on my chest, or the cold air biting at my face as I walk through snow. I also have a full sense of smell and taste.

While I was taking this drug my dreams changed dramatically. I wouldn’t sleep for very long, maybe an hour or two here and there. When I did dream my dreams were no where near as vivid as normal, and I was usually only able to see and hear, not touch, taste, or smell. My dreams were also not black and white, but they had gotten very dark. What I saw was mostly shades of black with some dark grays thrown in, and very rarely I’d see a dark shade of a different color. To me it seemed as if my dreams had a lower realm connection. They also didn’t seem very restful or pleasant, and without my normal super-vivid dreams I seemed to be deteriorating metaphysically and psychologically (beyond the anxiety attacks). I’m fairly certain I need my dreams and I need them to be what they are or I’m going to lose a lot of power and sanity, and probably my ability to function within society too.

Things really got interesting after I talked to Saturn and started flushing the drug out of my system as the effects became less and less. At the point where the drug was nearly completely out of my system I started to relax and laid myself down to sleep. It was night time and I fell asleep with my light on, which I normally do. Also the layout of my bedroom has a wall to the left of my bed, the tv to the right, my feet are pointing towards a big window, and on the opposite side my head points at the bedroom door. I had fallen asleep with my head sideways on my pillow facing to the right but pushed downward so my eyes would be pointing towards the window.

I don’t know what I was dreaming about, but I had one of those boo moments. You know, when something in your dream goes boo at you and you have a rush of adrenaline that wakes you up. As you wake up you instantly jump up, open your eyes wide and gasp before you realize it was just a dream. In my case I opened my eyes wide and gasped. I never jumped up because I never actually woke up. I screwed up waking up and managed to get my eyes open without waking up my body or mind.

Firstly it was weird. When I first opened my eyes my brain didn’t automatically correct for the way my head was turned. I was looking at the window and it literally looked like my entire room was sideways, like I was watching my room on a tv screen which had been turned on its side. This went on for what seemed like many minutes, and then my vision corrected itself.

I had sleep paralysis and could not move at all. I couldn’t even seem to manage the small movements I can usually make in sleep paralysis or while astrally projecting, but this might be because my concentration was focused elsewhere. I was also still dreaming, although I was entirely lucid. If I concentrated hard enough I could make the dreams stop, but if I didn’t images would start appearing around me, sort of like visual hallucinations, although the window and all the things in my room that I could see were always still visible behind the images. It was sort of like my bedroom was a background to these dream images. The dream images would also sort of draw me into them, mentally, when they would start, and I would lose more and more focus and they’d become more and more intense until I would finally get myself straight again and manage to fight them off.

I really don’t like sleep paralysis and wasn’t at all comfortable in this new situation and more than anything just wanted to wake up. I kept trying different things but nothing seemed to work, and in order to keep trying things I had to retain my focus and not let the dream images take over. At one point I tried to astrally project out of the whole situation until morning. I managed to pop out my astral body a bit and let it feel around, but I couldn’t shift away from my open eyes and all I could ever see was what was right in front of them. So instead of being stuck between two worlds, or two states being, I managed to get myself stuck between three.

Eventually I heard a woman’s voice talking from behind me. I thought this was someone that I was living with at the time who was awake and talking on the phone in the hallway. I had this idea that my bedroom door was open and they were walking back and forth in the hallway, however my bedroom door was closed and locked like it always is, and this was at like four in the morning and no one was walking outside my room talking on the phone. As this was happening I kept hoping this person would come into my room and do something to wake me up.

Then a strange girl walked into my room right in front of my field of vision (I’m pretty sure this is a familiar spirit I know, but I can’t be sure as she sometimes takes on different forms). She looked over to her left and said, “hang on a second I have to take care of something,” (for some reason I got the impression she was talking to a bat, but I didn’t see one). She then said something to me and I can’t remember what it is right now, but I knew it years ago and it seems like I should remember it. It was probably something like time to get up now. Then she punched me in the chest, and that woke me right up. No girl, no bat, bedroom door was closed and locked, but the window and everything around it was just like what I had been staring at for what seemed like forever.

I never really made anything out of this experience, besides the fact that it was a weird thing that happened because of a drug I took, but the way that dreams worked when my eyes were open were interesting. I wasn’t in a separate dream realm and I hadn’t astrally projected, at least at first (but eventually I did proving my astral body was right there too), and yet I still had dreams appearing before me. Make of it what you will, but it’s a somewhat unique case study. I also have never met anyone else who has dreamed with their eyes open before, but I told this story to someone who said they had a friend that did this once.