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 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.
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.
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
I had an entire LIFETIME in ONE night. Dream was super realistic, but it was all anime waifus. From earliest childhood memory till old age and that final darkness basically that last moment woke me up with a start. I never imagined that an entire lifetime in one night dream.
I don’t think I ever had such an experience ever again. It was just one time. Never to happen again so far.
What if this lifetime is also a dream.
Like inception.
Dreams are weird man. Just choose to be calm and carry on. Dont do the inception stuff :-D
Yes, and then I wrote a thousand-word-long poem about it.
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. 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 (unrecoverable).
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 (saved to RAM). These memories are usually bad, and get saved to disk because we’re slow at debugging, but are invested in fixing it to avoid a kernel panic (blue screen). We spend so much time thinking about it, that the bad memory’s directory gets added to $PATH(bookmarked)
Sleep is where the multiverses meet, man.
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!
This is one of my most common dreams now. When I was younger it was wild sex dreams. Now it’s literally just meeting my dream woman and it goes smoothly.
Oh yeah often. But there’s a decent proportion of my dreams where I’m not me; just some sort of fictional my brain made up for that night.
And about 80% of the time, if there’s romance in a dream, it’s not me. My brain has trouble fathoming a romantic story with me in it and I can’t fault it for it.
Yes. Not often, but often I do have people who seem so real and are not me at all. Occasionally yes, such intense emotions too.
I always have dreams about cheating on my GF, with my GF. It is like if I had a different GF in my dream and cheater on her with my current one. Even after 7 years together.
Yes, once. I was incredibly heartbroken and confused for three days. It sparked me going onto dating apps. Where i found my dream wife.
For a little while.
Yep. In fact, I wrote a song about such a thing.
