Originally Posted by Frownland

Probably sleep paralysis tbh. Or it could be related to the fact that after waking up and going back to sleep, it primes your brain for more intense dreams than usual, and that could have led to you not realizing that you were dreaming.

When I was young I lived in a trailer in Yosemite where someone had died years back. One night I saw a shadowy figure in the kitchen when I went to the bathroom and did a double take to find no one there with my parents and sister in bed, but I could hear footsteps. Our neighbours got robbed the next day. Funnily enough I didn't put two and two together until years later and spent a long time thinking that the house was haunted.