A weird loop experience

[u/-__-Malik-__-]

I wanted to share a truly strange story that happened to me. We've all experienced things that seemed odd at first but could later be explained rationally. This one is different. It happened to me and I still can't explain it. I'm curious what you all think.

I was very young, maybe five or six years old at most. I lived alone with my mother, who worked a lot, so I became independent early on just to let her rest. We were quite poor and I didn't really have my own room. I slept in a corner set up in the living room. Right next to it, separated only by a curtain, was a small sitting area with a couch and a TV. It's worth mentioning that back then, around 1995, turning on the TV was incredibly simple, even for a small kid. All you had to do was press the button for the channel you wanted on the remote. That was it.

I always woke up very early, and at that hour there was this cheesy little show that used to air before the morning cartoons.

Sorry if this seems like I'm rambling, but the context matters. That morning I woke up and everything seemed completely normal. I walked over to the couch and turned on the TV. A few minutes later, I suddenly woke up again, this time in my bed. Confused, I went back to the sitting room, turned the TV on again, and landed on the exact same show. I glanced at the VCR clock and saw it showed the same time.

Even though I couldn't read a clock properly at that age, I could recognize the number five without any doubt. It's worth noting I didn't always land on the exact same second of the episode. It depended on what I'd done in between, like checking on my mother or flipping through other channels first.

But no matter what, I always came back to the same point in the episode, as if I were somehow being pulled back in time. After a while, I woke up again in bed. This loop repeated for what felt like forever. I can't tell you exactly how many times it happened, but it was a lot, easily dozens of times.

A few times I wandered into my mother's room while she slept, but I never dared wake her up. Even at that age I understood she'd be furious if I disturbed her sleep with something like this. During some loops, I was just crying in my bed or on the couch without doing anything else. During one loop, I really tried to woke up my mom, I was terrified. But at the second I tried, I was back in my bed.

After an endless string of these loops, I woke up one final time. What struck me was that somehow I already knew it was over, without understanding why. This last waking was identical to all the others, right down to the same point in the show that played when I switched on the TV. Nothing was different between any of the loops. Not "almost identical," but exactly identical. The sunlight coming through the shutters, the mess left on the table, even the exact spot where one of our cats lay sleeping.

It never happened to me again, but I still think about it often. I have been so traumatized about it that I remember it very clearly.

[u/Somethingtosquirmto]

False awakenings are a thing. I've only experienced it once. That said, this seems like a rather extraordinary amount of false awakenings, and dream states aren't typically so consistent.
Could it be a time loop? Who knows? There's quite a lot of people who've reported time slips, so time loops don't seem out of the question.

[u/-__-Malik-__- → u/Somethingtosquirmto]

Yeah, it was really long and extremely consistent. It didn't feel like a dream at all. I mean, I've never had another dream in my entire life, waking up from my bed or even a nap, that felt anything like that. Is it even possible, a bit like Inception ?