Now, I know that the title sounds strange but hear me out...

So this entire thing started due to me trying to see if I could practice lucid dreaming in an attempt to increase the frequency of and dream types I can control. Currently, I can only control dreams that venture into the realm of nightmare or even slightly graze it as something about fear makes me come to and realize that I'm dreaming. One would think that somehow triggering a nightmare would be the best way to practice lucid dreaming but it's a surprisingly hard thing to do...

Anyway, for a while I was actively trying to slip into lucid dream states via meditation and the like but came up empty handed. So I stopped.. or tried to. My body and mind refused to give up and still attempted it even when I actively made no such attempt myself. Needless to say I've been beyond tired for about a month now and have been heavily relying on caffeine during my work days.

But the tiredness isn't the weird part.

Twice I've woken up to find myself in a completely different place. I know it is likely a hallucination or my brain still sleeping but something about it unsettles me as I've never dealt with this before. I open my eyes to wake up, I physically open them, and find myself in a different bed and a different room. But when I rub my eyes, again physically, and reopen them the room has again changed to my room. And it isn't just a visual thing. I can hear the sounds of the room. Feel the temperature. Smell the lingering scents in the air.

Now that alone is weird right?

But what makes me come here to ask for assistance is just what I saw.

The first time was simple. Clean. A monastery. Stone work walls and summer sun coming in from an open window behind me. The feel of its heat. The sounds of someone coming up to the room's door and putting a key in the lock and turning. The creak of the door opening. The scent of candle wax and honeysuckles. Then it was gone.

The second time was.. worse. I remember the dream before this one. Not entirely nightmare but not entirely a pleasant dream either. A thing that fluctuated so quickly between the two that I had no time to take control. If I had to describe it as anything it was Hellraiser esk. A woman offering me boundless pleasure leads me into a hell of my own personal making where it would quickly fluctuate between agonizing torture, terror and kink. What I remember is fractured and fragmented (even the morning after I was unable to remember large portions) but I remember waking up to escape it. And waking up in the very place I left. Walls of flesh beating to the beat of an unseen heart. Throbbing, pulsing. The scent of rot and iron. The feel of slime on my fingers and blood dripping down my back. The burn of wounds. The high of just passed pleasure. And then nothing.

Both times I feel as though I woke up and both times I've ended the thing with frantic blinks and eye rubs.

Any ideas as to what these dreams could be or what they could mean? As I do truly believe they are just a type of dream. Perhaps I'm just not waking up fully even though my arms flail and move and I can feel myself rubbing my eyes each time.

This is a type of 'nested dreaming' that relates to the experience of different dimensions of reality. It is one example where dreams cross over into reality, using the unconscious as a liminal state to move through time and space. Think of surfing channels on a television --while in such a sensitive state you may be traveling through many varied locales and not recognize it since typically you only wake once you're back to your 'home' space. Every once in a while, there's bound to be a hiccup whether explainable or random in this way.

Part of my personal work is the study of dreams, the unconscious and this bridge into 'alternates' of reality. I have quite a bit of experience with what you're talking about. Beyond what I have explained already, the closest way to categorize this specific happening to have fuller understanding of it would be an out of body experience - but it is unique in that the scenes you 'wake' to are usually either a.) deeply buried experiences/places you've been exposed to via other bodies or facets of self, b.) intervention from an outside presence that has placed you there for a purpose, or c.) 'glitch' in the matrix..so to speak (the 'random' hiccup.)

If you understand it, you can navigate and make use of it.