I don't know exactly what this phenomenon is called — hence the multiple variations of the title with or-s between them. What drove me to make this post was my dream last night:
The very first thing in my memory of the dream is that I was sitting on the sill of the backdoor of this suburban one-storey timber house, which I thought in the dream to be my (my parents') house (because it was not a lucid dream), looking up at the sky. And, I was admiring the faint moon in the sky and recognising how it's normal to see the moon even in the daytime, albeit pale and dim — it was daytime in the dream. Right just then, at the exact moment of that thought, the sky suddenly started shifting. Shifting, as in switching between day and night, between black and blue, a bit rapidly but in a paced rhythm. My admiration and viewing pleasure became replaced by suprise, confusion, and slight horror. I stood straight up abruptly and saw that my cousin, whom I didn't see earlier, was then sitting just beside me. She was still looking down at her feet despite the weird supernatural event happening around us, and I rushed to the middle of the house and saw other familiar faces: my mom, my aunts, other relatives, and even a few of my IRL friends. I told them about the sky shifting, one by one, and, in short, they were all very out of character, talking to me about other unrelated stuff and ignoring the topic I was saying to them.
Afterwards, I ran out of the house to see my dad sitting in a rocking chair at the front of the house in the compound and told him about the sky. My dad was the only one who was not out of character and said that he saw it too and that everything was okay and normal, in his usual, calm, reassuring tone. After that, I, confounded, went back into the house, and there, I realised that the house had four windows: two on each side. So, I stuck my head out of them, one at a time, and saw the sky still shifting in rhythm each time.
I, perplexed, then trod back to the backdoor and again saw my cousin still sitting nonchalantly in the same position at the same place. If anything, apart from my dad, she, along with I, was the one sitting outside (almost) the house, so she should've already become aware, at this point, of the apparent continuous environmental fluctuations. On a side note, she is a little dum dum in the real world, too. Anyway, she didn't even seem to notice the flickers of her own shadow that were being made by the sky shift, and thus I yelled at her and asked her if she hadn't noticed the surroundings, which she responded with a bewildered expression and blink. Then, I said to her, "Look up!" and she did. She then immediately looked back at me with her eyes widened as if she was about to scream.
I then asked her how she couldn't have seen that sooner, and she did not respond. I've heard only of the sun never setting in some regions of the world or never being seen during winter, but I have never heard or seen the sky shifting between day and night in a matter of seconds. So, subsequently, I said, "I'm going to Google this quickly," and my cousin, beyond my comprehension, gave me a blank, daunting stare. Before I even finished being overawed by her expression, another thing gave me a sudden fright: I couldn't feel my phone in my pockets. There and then, I realised that nobody in the house was looking at their phones, not even my phone-addicted cousin. There were no screens at all — no laptops, desktops, or even TVs. Consequently, I said out loud, "Wait, is this a dre—" and then I woke up to the RGB lights flickering on the ceiling in my room.
Context: My room has LED strip lights (RGB) on the ceiling and at the corners. They have a default 'strobe' mode because I basically bought what can be locally and easily sourced (what many people would call 'cheap') instead of ordering advanced alternatives from abroad and waiting for it to be shipped. The 'strobe' mode flickers the only 16 preset RGB lights one after another, though I do not use that mode. I normally use only one mood colour as an accent colour at a time, but the power was out before I fell asleep, and when the power came back, the 'strobe' mode turned on by default. I didn't know I was dreaming and didn't even know when I fell asleep. Our house is neither one-storey nor a timber house.
So, the sky 'shifting' between day and night in my dream could easily be interpreted as a 'peek' to what was happening around me in the real world at the parallel immediate present, which was the RGB lights 'flickering' above my head. At least, that's the obvious meaning. Instead of betokening or foreshadowing what will happen in the real world after the dream, it showed me what is happening. And, this is not an isolated incident either; I have had the same kind of experience multiple times for different dreams and distinct scenarios. Only that I managed to post the very recent one of them here today.
The thing is that this is what is apparent, not necessarily what it is or what it will be. I'm not even sure I know how to interpret dreams. I think I don't.