system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: why do I always wake up from a dream immediately before I suffer some kind of fatal physical harm (ex. someone shoots me, stabs me, hits me etc.)

Intentional human (or humanoid)-on-human harm.  I've read the threads about falling off of cliffs and so forth but I'm not really talking about that. I've been attacked in dreams from everything ranging from a gun to a rolling pin and I always wake up right before contact, with the in-dream implication being it would be fatal.  I thought it was just me but friends say it happens to them too.
gpt
It's because your brain is reacting to the fear of the situation. It's like "Oh! Bad situation. Done!" so you wake up. Your mind doesn't want to go through that, and you've never experienced it, so you also don't know how to react. :)