I occasionally have lucid dreams which I become trapped in. I know I need to wake up for something (the first time this happened I was taking a quick nap before a final exam) so I try to wake myself up, but I can't. I am partially aware of what is going on around me in reality (I can hear people talking nearby and such), but I can't distinguish reality from the dream, since everything feels so real.
I'll feel groggy, sit up on the bed or couch and start getting ready for what I need to do, then after a few minutes I close my eyes then open them to find I haven't gotten up at all. I'll slap myself, pinch myself, look around, and everything seems normal, but I'm not sure if I'm awake yet - I go about my business just in case, panicked that I'm going to be late for what I need to do, then 'wake up' again and start all over. This will happen several times before I wake up for real, and when I do wake up I won't be sure if I'm awake or not for a long time. The scary part is that everything looks and feels normal - in most dreams things are out of whack, out of place, clearly not 'right' when I think about it, but when I finally do wake up for real, everything looks exactly like it did in the dream. Everything FEELS real, too, including pinching myself, which is also unusual for a dream. Normally I don't get any physical sensations from dreams.
It's all very disconcerting, and frustrating, and a little scary. Sometimes I wonder if I've slipped into a coma or something. When I finally do wake up, I feel more tired than I did when I went to sleep - drained and dehydrated, like I just climbed a mountain without water or something.
Someone suggested I was having out-of-body experiences, but somehow that sounds rather silly to me. I do have several kinds of synesthesia including the kind where I can feel physically what other people are feeling (or what I perceive them to feel), so that could explain the physical sensation in the dreams. I just don't know why it happens, and I've never met anyone else who had this happen to them.
So... Weren't we talking about headphones?