Glimpsing a parallel universe?

My acquaintance (MA) who gets microsleep with REM (MWR – see here) has had many strange experiences. But this latest was the weirdest yet. It was prompted by reading, yet again, when suddenly the scene was completely different. MA was indoors when it happened. MA was suddenly outside next to a brick wall. MA didn’t recognise the place and had no time to look round and see much else. That’s because the MWR  was over in about a second!

MA says the experience was disconcerting. It felt like glimpsing, briefly, a parallel universe. It felt every bit as solid and real as the room where MA started. There was no feeling of travelling. Instead it felt like being at the same place, same time but in a parallel universe. Or maybe it was  same place, different  time, perhaps decades ago. But it always felt like the same place.

MA has never had such a short experience which was so vivid and real. As such it felt shocking. It was so quick that the whole scene must have been in MA’s unconscious already before the MWR started. MWRs are effectively waking dreams. This latest experience suggests that these dreams might be going on in MA’s unconscious when fully awake!

The unconscious part of your brain is always doing things you are not aware of while you're fully conscious. Could one of those things be dreaming, or at least processing old memories which are used to construct dreams, in those who experience MWRs? It might mean that the brain of someone who gets MWRs may effectively be experiencing two 'universes' at once – the real one and a dream one. It seems MA can skip between these universes, albeit unintentionally.   In a sense they really are alternate universes. However it works, there is little doubt that someone who gets MWRs but is unaware of their natural origin might well interpret such experiences as paranormal.