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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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.
It really does drive in the reality that love is a fleeting chemical response, eh?
“Falling in love” and “love” are quite different from each other.
That said, yeah, the feeling can be quite fleeting. Being a chemical response doesn’t make it less intense or even less meaningful, though. Sadly? Fortunately? 🤷♂️
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.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever fallen in love with a completely imaginary dream person, but I did dream about my ex once years and years after we broke up. I don’t remember what I dreamed about exactly, but I do remember waking from it. The happiness fading as the realization set in that it was all a dream – I was by myself in bed and none of it had been real. I’m usually pretty good at dealing with solitude, but that moment… that was the most intense loneliness I think I’ve ever felt.
You guys have all the fun! Most dreams I remember seem to be about fire or spiders
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.
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. 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.
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.
I had a dream that I was driving a horse cart down a dusty gravel road, and riding next to me was the greatest love I’d ever felt - she was a rotund Native American woman.
Was it Jana Schmieding? Because honestly, same.
I had to look her up; she’s very similar looking, but the girl in my dream was a little smaller in all proportions, and didn’t look so happy.
How do you have the name of a “rotund Native American woman” just hot in the holster?
She’s funny, and was in Reservation Dogs.
No.
Yes, and then I wrote a thousand-word-long poem about it.
Yes and I hate it. I’ve struggled a lot with loss, and my dreams always used to remind me of this. I would wake up from wonderful dreams sobbing because it was a version of life that was just on display. At this point in time though, I have pretty much curbed the commonality of me dreaming.
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Yes, once. I was incredibly heartbroken and confused for three days. It sparked me going onto dating apps. Where i found my dream wife.
Definitely. Not often, but when I had them, they were strong and affected me for the remainder of the day.
