The other night I had an odd dream that I couldn't wake up out of. It was actually pretty frightening. I can't remember every detail of it now but I'll try and explain exactly what went down.

There was a magician who could manipulate environments and every time he did it would send people deeper into their consciousness. After one of his shows he was being chased and I was accompanying him to help his escape. We ran into a stairwell and he thought he could manipulate the staircase to make it seem as though the people were higher up and we were at the bottom already. He said as long as there was a doorway out of the staircase away from the people chasing him that we wouldn't be trapped deeper in our consciousness. So as he began to manipulate the staircase he made a mistake in the layout. All of a sudden we were trapped in a box like room with a staircase that went nowhere. When he realized his mistake a terror came over his face. He realized that we were trapped and he couldn't do anything to change the environment because he could only send us one level into our consciousness and we'd have to find a door back to reality. When I saw the terror on his face all of a sudden I realized I was dreaming. Everything became lucid. I began to freak out in my dream and I was yelling at myself to wake up but I couldn't.

After a little while of this the magician sees the outline of a door on the floor of the white-walled room we're in and we escape through it to find that we're now in Bhutan outside a Buddhist Monastary on a mountain top with a little stream flowing through. I begin to think that I can finally wake up but I still can't and it becomes apparent that I've had a "false awakening". Suddenly, coyotes start to chase me and I have acrobatic skills that allow me to escape them as I jump to the roof of the monastery. The magician is nowhere to be found at this point, but instead I realize that there are other people around who are trying to find a way out of this dream. We can't get into the temple because it's locked so I begin to walk in the river and see a door through a mini-waterfall. I walk through it and wake up to the sound of my sister yelling at my dog for something. I have the choice to wake up fully out of my dream, but for some reason I'm concerned about the people left behind in the dream, so I close my eyes and I'm back at the river. I see one of the women in the dream running up to me and saying, "We have to go through the door. It's going to close and we'll be stuck here. Don't worry about the others. Get out." But I can't. So I run around the monastery a few times and can't find anyone. I make my way back to the door frustrated and I wake up a few hours later than I did the first time.

Really odd dream. Every time I woke up, I made the choice to go back into the dream so I'm sure I wasn't suffering from sleep paralysis, which this would be the first time if I actually was. The dream was so lucid and I'm just shocked at the link between reality and the dream. For anyone who knows anything about dreams, what can you make of this? I'd be really interested to know.