Do you ever have dreams within dreams? The terminology describing this experience is mixed. Some favor 'false awakening' and others 'dream within a dream.' I favor the latter. The former is clinical and meaninglessness, particularly to the human who experiences (read: is made to experience) such. 

I wake—believe that I wake—many nights from a dream, thrashing myself awake from something horrifying beyond description, to find myself transported from one gray, washed-out gallowscape (in)to another. 

I don't know in that moment that the new reality is actually just another layer of nightmare surrounding the previous one. But in the moment immediately thereafter, I most certainly do.

(Though is the new nightmare surrounding? It has that feel. It has the feel of swimming frantically upward from the depths of some bottomless lake. Or is it really within? Is it ascent or descent? Is there direction to this shifting, phasing? There is direction, I am sure, but I do not think that there is yet a word for it.)

I find myself in this new world, but it is rare that I am led to believe that I am actually awake. I 'know' that this new nightmare is just that. And from this immediate realization, there invariably follows a dread that I 'feel' in the very center of my 'body': the unshakeable horror that this process of 'waking,' the movement from one layer of sick and sickening night visions to another, is unending. It doesn't matter in the moment that this has happened many thousands of times before in my life, as I am sure you know that self-insight is almost as a rule muddied, or even totally absent, in the dream lands. I suppose that there are some who are proficient at the skill (or gift) of lucid dreaming, but I have never been such an oneironaut. I do not think I am capable of this. The night has too strong of a grip on me, which is why I both loathe and love the night—and which is why I wish the twilight were eternal.

And so I 'wake' into this subsequent domain of sleep. Eventually, after being subjected to any and every bizarre, black-and-white (and sometimes red, if there be blood and gore), litany of the literal stuff of nightmares, I become aware that I am still asleep in some infinitesimal way. I thrash and must thrash, again. Its power to wake me now, however, is diminished tremendously, and so I am forced to endure whatever I find—or what finds me.