this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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I've read recounts of dreams like this before (or perhaps it was iterations of yourself telling it in each case).
And there is the famous Reddit story about the guy to saw the glitching lamp that is very similar.
I too have had this experience myself. When I was around 20, I had a dream where I packed up my stuff and got in my car and moved from my hometown to the nearby larger city. I was living out of my car or staying with friends initially, but after a few months I found a job and started renting my own place. While working part time I started studying for a qualification at the technical college. At that college I met an amazing girl and we started dating. A few months later she moved into my place. I saved enough money to buy a better car, and I sold my old car. I would go driving on the weekends along scenic rural roads. My girlfriend and I got engaged. I got a new job, but it meant we had to move to a different city where we didn't know anyone. We got married, we had two children (a boy and a girl). My wife disappeared one day, without a trace. Nobody ever worked out what happened to her. Just vanished. So I was raising my children as a single parent. We went on a trip back to my hometown to visit my parents. I went into my old room, layed on my old bed and went to sleep. That night I had a dream where I really needed to pee, but couldn't find a toilet. I know how those dreams sometimes end, so I forced myself to wake up, I ran to the bathroom and used the toilet. When I got back to bed I felt weirdly empty. My memories of my kids, of my wife, my job, were fading fast. I couldn't remember their faces. I couldn't remember where I work. It was like a dream. And then I realised it actually was all a dream. I'd lived around 6 years of my life in the dream, but in reality it was just a couple of hours sleep.
For the next week I was trying to disentangle memories of my life that were real from those from the dream. It hasn't had any lasting effects on me. I don't remember much of it anymore, only the parts I recounted above.
Well, everyone on lemmy is just me talking to myself ;)
Any time this comes up, it's always cool how many people have shared a similar experience. It also always makes me wish there was research into how this kind of dream happens, that so many people have experienced it. The fact that so many people do seems to me that there's something about humans, as a species, that makes it possible, beyond just the ability/need to dream in general.