Fell asleep listening to a podcast -- continued to hear it in my dream!

A few days ago I was lying on my bed, eyes closed, listening to a podcast from the loudspeaker of my phone that was placed on my bedside table. It was morning but I was a bit tired from watching the Oscars (in my timezone I had to wake up at 3 am for that) so I figured I'd fall asleep to the show. That indeed happened but only when there was something like 5-10 minutes left of the ~1 hour podcast. However, this is when things got really strange: I was dreaming, but I could also still hear the podcast loud and clear!

In my dream I walked around my apartment, and all the time there was the podcast playing pretty loud. I could not find the source of the voice, it seemed like the voice was everywhere evenly. Furthermore, in my dream some people came over to visit and I wondered if they could not hear the same voice -- but if you suspect you're hearing voices in your head, you don't immediately go and ask others if they, too, can hear them... I figured the voice could be coming from my phone, but trying to shut it down did not work. At this point I started to feel a bit panicky and actually woke up as the podcast also happened to end. I rewinded the show to see whether I had imagined listening to it, but no, it was all there, exactly as I had heard in my dream!

So my question is: what the heck was that??? I know how your alarm clock sound can be incorporated into your dream right before you wake up etc, but that's normal. In my case it seems that my brain fell asleep except for the part that's responsible for hearing, which was wide awake. Has anyone else had anything like this ever happen?

Background: I don't have any sleeping (or other) disorders. We have a baby, so my wife suggested we've become sensitive to voices during our sleep, but I don't know about that. In general she wakes up to the baby during the night and in the morning I'm like "Oh he slept well tonight!" and she's like "No...". But anyway, there was nobody else home at the time of this experience. I had slept really well before waking up to watch the Oscars, even if that was only like 4-5 hours. Also, in general, if possible I like to sleep in the morning, not in the evening.

PS. I found the DreamViews forum when reading "The effect of external stimuli on dreams, as assessed using Q-methodology" by Anthony Bloxham and Simon Durrant. (Sorry, it seems I'm not allowed to post links.) It's interesting, but nothing as strong as what I experienced.

Yes, certainly real-world audio can be heard while in-dream.

I've had a number of cases of this, in fact one of my experiments earlier was of using "audio prompts" from the real world with random numbers in it, and then comparing that with the ones in-dream, and they did indeed match, multiple times. (they were 4-digit numbers)

I've also played music playlists before on shuffle, entered a dream, and then woke up and confirmed that the previous song had been the one I heard in-dream.

Same thing for names, as my random-number experiment also had it say a random name before the number.

I'm currently using this "audio pass-through" to induce lucidity by having it use ld keywords (currently, the phrase is "Remember lucid dream.") Last night I had it play every 3 minutes while dreaming, and I heard it loud and clear at least a half-dozen times, all the while with me walking around going about my business in-dream. Sometimes the audio wakes me up (which is actually the main intention of my technique), but other times it doesn't even destabilize it (which is neat also).

Thanks Venryx, that's good information! I wonder how long could one keep dreaming a dream like this? I had it going for a few minutes, but could you, say, listen to something in your sleep consciously for an hour, or more? Isn't it an age-old student joke that you'd record your text book and then play back while you sleep and magically learn it that way? :) So that could actually be possible. Also, I wonder what are the contributing factors in reaching a state like this immediately when you fall asleep? And also if a sleep like this recovers your body as much as a normal sleep does?

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Originally Posted by ZeroOne

Thanks Venryx, that's good information! I wonder how long could one keep dreaming a dream like this? I had it going for a few minutes, but could you, say, listen to something in your sleep consciously for an hour, or more? Isn't it an age-old student joke that you'd record your text book and then play back while you sleep and magically learn it that way? :) So that could actually be possible. Also, I wonder what are the contributing factors in reaching a state like this immediately when you fall asleep? And also if a sleep like this recovers your body as much as a normal sleep does?

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Yes, those are interesting questions. Ripe for experimentation! (one of the reasons I love lucid dreaming -- there is so many questions and areas of potentials that we haven't explored yet!)

I've had that happen to me on a few occasions, such as once years ago when I had a dream (a LD) where I believe I could hear the TV that was playing in waking life at the time. I didn't have the opportunity to verify whether what I heard in the dream corresponded directly to what was actually said, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

On the other hand, sometimes I've found sounds getting incorporated into my dreams in distorted ways that don't match the originals. There has been more than one occasion where I would wake from a dream and hear the sound I was hearing in the dream somehow transform into a completely different sound I happened to be hearing in waking life. This can be a bit amusing, such as the sound of someone screaming “Nooooooo…!” turning into the sound of an airplane flying by outside.

I've even had cases of things I saw with my eyes leaking over into a dream. I suspect that occasionally toward the end of a dream my eyes will open a moment or two before I wake up. I will sometimes suddenly begin seeing my waking-life room during the dream, though the odd thing is that I often can't immediately interpret what I'm seeing until I fully wake up (it may seem to be an indecipherable mess of light and color, or I might even think I'm seeing something else altogether); then, I'll finally recognize what I'm actually looking at once I've completed the process of waking up. The weirdest case of all was once when a nonlucid dream ended by literally transitioning from the dream imagery to the waking-life imagery from my eyes just like a cross-fade in a movie or TV broadcast.

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Originally Posted by Travis E.

I've even had cases of things I saw with my eyes leaking over into a dream. I suspect that occasionally toward the end of a dream my eyes will open a moment or two before I wake up. I will sometimes suddenly begin seeing my waking-life room during the dream, though the odd thing is that I often can't immediately interpret what I'm seeing until I fully wake up (it may seem to be an indecipherable mess of light and color, or I might even think I'm seeing something else altogether); then, I'll finally recognize what I'm actually looking at once I've completed the process of waking up. The weirdest case of all was once when a nonlucid dream ended by literally transitioning from the dream imagery to the waking-life imagery from my eyes just like a cross-fade in a movie or TV broadcast.

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I've had the same experience! And came to the same conclusion, that I must be opening my eyes (at least partially) before I actually wake up, which allows for the bizarre experience of the dream just fading into the real world. (or rather, it "stabilizing" and losing dream-world objects, but not actually changing in the overall bedroom background)

And same thing with the "can't immediately interpret what I'm seeing" until fully waking up. That's super strange, because the colors and shapes are all the same, but I interpret it wildly differently -- for example, one time I was looking into a room with walls as I woke up, but then once I woke up, without any change in vision, I realized that in fact it was just a little pocket of air in my blanket lit by the sun coming through. It makes you wonder how much of dream memories involves those "misinterpretations" of more primitive sights and sounds. (oh, and same thing with unusual dream sounds transitioning into an everyday real-world sound)