A recent greentext post about an imaginary wife made me think of this.
Have you ever had a dream, where you fell in love with a dream character?
I’ve had at least a couple over the years that I can vaguely remember. The dreams were so vivid, and the feeling of love for this imaginary person was so strong, that I woke up feeling rather heartbroken and a sense of longing.
Anyone else?
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I met, fell in love, got married, bought a house, started a family and grew old together with a woman i met in my dreams. In one night, i lived a lifetime. It was so super realistic that I woke up devastated that it was a dream. It took me weeks to stop thinking about it constantly throughout the day, and even to this day I still think about it occasionally going on 15 years later.
You saw that lamp, didn’t you?
I remember that post. Always made me wonder if that really happened or if it was just good story telling.
I’m so curious now, could someone enlighten me?
It’s a reference to an old Reddit post where somebody had the same situation I did where they met someone yand fell in love and had long and happy life until they started noticing a lamp in their living room that sidn’t look right. Drove them crazy in this dream and eventually forced them to wake up. I’m on mobile and can’t find original post ATM but that’s the jist.
Thank you! That was enough for me to find it I think.
I can definitely relate to this just not as deep of a semi-lucid dream
Reddit was awesome back in the day. So many interesting slices of life.
Correct. The good years. Now it’s just normies en enshittified.
On the flip side, I once had a super vivid dream that my wife started ghosting me, and left me for someone else. Years passed and I was still alone, lost interest in all of my hobbies, had to get rid of our pets, and I caught up with her randomly and she looked like she was much happier and better off, and I was so upset in the dream that I considered suicide. Woke up and was relieved that it was just a dream, but frustrated with my brain for putting me through all of that.
Played Roy at blips and chitz.
Once, in the middle of a long and happy relationship, I had a dream where there was simply no reference to my partner in the dream, background or foreground. My brain went on to invent a person who was lovely in every way. We were equally crazy for each other and it was absolute heaven.
Then my brain went “yeah but you’re with your real life partner so you basically cheated” and I woke up.
Fuckin wiseass brain pullin shit lol
I’ve had a few where i was knowingly cheating on my wife. But there were some weirder ones where the dream lady and my wife would be interchangeable at various points or meld into one super lover.
For a while I had a girlfriend in my dreams, same person every dream, we just did normal things, it was weird as hell, i think she left me tho, haven’t dreamt about her in years.
Dream ghosted.
Well dreams do pull from reality…
Bruh
Yes, those dreams hurt reality so badly. The sense of loss when you wake is pretty aggressive if you already lack a good connection with someone.
Had a dream like that years ago, I still remember it quite well
For me it’s the opposite, it’s like my brain goes “Ah, yes, serotonin, I remember” and stretches the 3 atmos it produced out over the whole day.
Yeah, once or twice.
It’s really disturbing, and I generally dislike them because of the emotional leftovers.
The emotion is real, and the worst part is that it tends to stick around. Most dreams you just forget. But for some reason the one or two of these I’ve experienced it has left a longing and a desire to sort of go back to that dream, the person in it, the level of feeling I got, which of course is impossible. I have a family and love them all, so I don’t know why my brain threw this at me. It’s not like I’m lonely.
I wonder what the psychology and brain chemistry is with that. Why your brain makes up the person, the feelings, and why it sticks around when all the other dreams generally vanish.
You’re just seeing a partner from another slice of the multiverse.
Yeah. But that also means the bad dreams are me suffering somewhere. That’s not so great.
On the plus side, I’m a superhero in at least one and have the power of flight!
I have vivid dreams to the point I’ve had to mourn entire lives that were never even real.
Like Roy from Rick and Morty.
The worst ones are when it was a very fulfilling life and then I have to wake up and accept it never actually happened.
If I may ask, what was an example of a detail of that fulfilling life? And is it not possible to attain in this one?
A life without all the trauma and self harm. A life where I had all the support I needed to actually thrive and make something of myself. Sometimes it’s just a life with a past love where everything turned out okay. Other times a life where I chose a more profitable career because I didn’t need chaos to feel normalcy.
I’m a very broken individual so it’s not really hard for me to dream up a scenario that’s infinitely better than my reality.
That’s part of what hurts so bad waking up and realizing I’m back in my own life.
Yes. My dreams are incredibly vivid and I can get confused between them and memories. Most of my dreams are very mundane but sometimes my brain conjures up the perfect scenario to illict and extreme emotional response. I feel like my brains testing to make sure everything still works cause my life is very stable and boring.
The worst one recently was a dream about a faceless women who I seemed to care deeply about getting in a carcrash and dying in front of me. It felt like I had lost everything and all meaning in life was gone. I had to sit with the feeling for what felt like a lifetime. I don’t know why dreams do this and would be interested if anyone knew why this happens.
There are two main theories about why dreams occur.
(Explained in computing terms)
First is scheduled maintenance.
Your brain essentially runs a defrag when you dream, trimming useless information. Most times, you forget about the dream, but other times you’ll wonder why you recalled that memory from 15 years ago. Your brain needs to inspect the file before sending it to the trash, but you managed to recover it before it got zeroed.
Second is threat model assessment.
Your brain is randomly compiling memories while you dream, scanning for useful information. Sometimes a certain combination will leave a strong impression, which gets cached. These memories are usually bad, and get saved to disk because we’re slow at debugging, but are invested in cracking it. We spend so much time thinking about it, that the bad memory’s directory gets added to $PATH
Sleep is where the multiverses meet, man.
This question is confusing for me and may illustrate brain wiring differences. Whenever I wake up abruptly enough to remember a dream, it’s always a lot closer to AI generated videos than a coherent story like youse are reporting. One difference is that my dreams usually retain coherence for a few ticks/actions in a scene, vs. the average AI video that is constantly mutating.
I have strong ADHD and short term memory issues so that’s probably why.
You guys have all the fun! Most dreams I remember seem to be about fire or spiders
Many times. It has been a fairly common theme. My dreams that I remember tend to be extreme emotional dreams. Either nightmares that I commonly had as a kid. Falling in love which was especially common as a teenager. And yeah, the extreme heartbreak is real. Music, which is connected closely to emotions for me and often manifests as beautiful symphonies that I wish I could immediately write down because damn I could probably make money off that s***. Flying or being under water and not drowning and the weight being lifted and the emotion of freedom tied to those. Etc.
Yes. In a dream, I fell in love with someone I know in real life now. It was psychologically disruptive. In the dream, we’d loved each other for thousands of years. The emotions did not end upon waking and persist to today to some extent.
Yes, once. I was incredibly heartbroken and confused for three days. It sparked me going onto dating apps. Where i found my dream wife.
Not fell in love per se but I had a dream I was getting married and it was clear my partner and I were really in love. There was a sense of happiness I felt that made the dream feel so real. Was sad when I woke up.
First time I ever asked out a girl was after I had a dream like this about her
Absolutely. Has been a hot minute though. In my late teens and early twenties I regularly woke up depressed AF knowing that what I just felt was all just a dream.
Haven’t had this in the last two decades or so, but you never fully forget the feeling of helplessness as you realize that “bliss” actually exists, but it’s perpetually out of your reach.
