When we sleep and suddenly wake up with jolt ,why do we always dream of tripping over a stick etc?

Answer 1

The other way around. The sensation is very common. Your body when fully relaxed feels weightless. This you (your body) know(s) from falling, then you also are almost weightless like. The shock is that of your body telling you you are falling. Your brain pictures you are tripping or falling and there is the dream. And you wake up.

In space astronauts have this problem every night. It for years was a major problem among them. They actually use an inflatable bed to squeeze them so they don't have the falling sensation.

Answer 2

When in 4th stage sleep, the brain enters the 'REM' type of sleep (Not referring to the band: Rapid Eye Movement, named after the physical sideeffect of this level of slumber) and operates out of real time. When you 'spontaneously' wake up, you've been thinking about that stick in real time for about 3-5 minutes, possibly longer. The 'jolt' is your shift from subconscious thought feeding your mind imagery at super-slow speed to real time impulses from eyesight and audio.

Listen to music one night when sleeping, of course, and notice a different effect: your dream will stop with a jolt, but you'll hear the song you're listening to and not miss a beat, yet still feel the jolt.

Answer 3

I don't, maybe a dream of tripping and then I wake up with a jolt.

Answer 4

Because our minds are in a mini coma type thing- everything is in it's own world and the brain believes it is awake- that way it responds to the outside world and unfortunately uses it's reflex and makes you jolt. In other words, if your woken up by a loud noise- your brain sends signals to your body telling it to respond with a jolt. It's a slight defect in our body because in our fast moving society, there is no need for it.

Answer 5

Because you're body is mimicking the response to whatever you did in your dream, and these things are violent enough to wake you. Just last night I woke with I jolt because I dreamed that I touched an electric fence. My body knew that touching an electric fence would make me spaz, so it mimicked that response. You body mimics other things (salivating when dreaming of eating cake, or similar) but generally these things do not wake you because they are not jarring.

Answer 6

it has been said the reason we wake up with a jolt throws back to our primitive selves ,when we used to sleep in trees or on ledges so as to stop us falling out or of the ledge we would cat nap, this being the jolting reflex .i have not made this up this a studied fact by naturalists .

Answer 7

In your dreams, ( I say this because you say always,) tripping over something means a small obstacle you keep coming across. To you it is something you keep ignoring, but then, TRIP, there it is again!

You need to recognize this problem, and get it out of the way, or realize you need to stop following that path.

Answer 8

We are probably trying to match what is happening to us physciologically with some sort of tripping or falling or manner of having the wind knocked out of us.

There are specific events in sleep apnea, windpipe erosion, esophageal ulcer and other ailments that will cause someone to wake up choking in the middle of the night. when we do this, we often will exit our sleeping state with a "matching" nightmare image.

Answer 9

I never dreamed of tripping. I usually dream of falling off of a building and landing hard.

Answer 10

That has happened to me but what I remember about my dreams differs. I have awakened at the point I was about to crash in a car, another time when I was about to fall. It seems like I wake when I'm about to experience trauma in my dream.