Could be an inccubus. Did you feel a force against your chest. Do you feel like your being watched? How do you know it wasn't just a dream? In traditional Stories, s Inccubi (male) or succubi (female) is a demon Who came upon people who were sleeping and tried to seduce them usually through sexual Means.
In my experience, dreams are a way to explore your anxieties and thoughts when you are in a different state of conciousness and your brain produces different brain waves with these activities. Really only you can decide what meaning it has for you, since you hold the key to its mystery--which is your life and your personal self and identity as the context that your experience lies in. Call it what you will, but no matter if it was an incubus, your brain reiterating some concept it has perceived when you were in another state of mind, there is a reason to why you experienced it.
For instance, my dreams usually never have people with coherent or recognizable faces, and rather, the dream never even focuses on the face, but the feeling of the person instead. For me, that is literally my identity still trying to explain itself even when I'm asleep.
Or when I had experiened the old Art Trope of The Grim Reaper and the Maiden, where the reaper whispers to the maiden, "Live now, for I am coming," which speaks to my anxiety and how a part of me is slightly hypochondriac and thinks of my own mortality in terms of how I should actually do something worth it in life, with another argument of mine to just not care and to just let live and go along as the years pass by.
These concepts of Incubi, or tropes and allusions, or symbols and other things such as details like that or the other thing can only really be explained by yourself since you experienced it. Everyone else has different schemas and different ways of perceiving it and providing information that makes most sense or most use of in their life.
I also don't know where I saw this claim at--either on a documentary or a published research journal-- but it states how people who have violent dreams such as these and experience scenarios that do threaten their life and so on, have a reason for it in terms of how the brain is essentially preparing for a real life attack. To your brain, and when you encode such a thing into your memory, that experience is still as real as if it happened when you were awake. Since we only exist due to our ability to survive, this seems to make sense.
Or like the others have said in this thread, you could be suffering from outside influences that bother and harass you, so make a way to destroy or block that.
I hope you have better dreams or find peace within yourself ^u^
