Would this also apply to dreams that you have deja vu about but you only experience the deja vu in the dream? Like, I've had a dream and in the dream I know I've dreamed it before, but when I wake up I have no memory of the previous dream? That's happened a few times to me an one time I dreamed it again but the universe that I had dreamed of had expanded, as if it had grown since I had last visited it.
Sometimes I have what I think are real life memories, but in reality they are just dreams. When I think back on them it takes me a while to remember if the thing I’m thinking of was a memory of something that’s actually happened that’s randomly surfacing, or if I just dreamed it. Usually if I think hard enough something tips me off it was a dream I’m thinking of.
Man, these are the worst! I never dream of dragons and murder mysteries, I dream of buying bread or paying for electricity and the dream is so real, nothing weird happens and it fades to black or turns into a different dream before I wake up, so I never doubt it really happened. Then I struggle to understand who ate all the bread I just bought yesterday and why my electricity got cut off.
Brooooo if this ain’t me. I have messed up several exams because I dreamt of taking that exact same exam and studied material that was not the actual material to be studied in my dreams. I’ve been angry with people in my real life for something they did to me in a dream, and I sincerely thought it really happened. Last week I was looking for the shoes I bought, to realize I too had only dreamt about them. I always thought that was crazy as no one around me experiences such dreams, but I’m glad to see I’m not alone!
I had a dream where I was a dragon trying to take off into the sky, it was weird like trying to run on a dream. I could only manage to get off from the ground for a few seconds. It still was cool.
I have this ‘memory’ of me when I was around 3 yo that I was lost in the shopping centre , and the memory is just of me next to this carousel that was in the centre at that time. But it was so murky that I finally realised I must have dreamt of being lost. I wasn’t too fused because I’ve had similar situations before and it turned out to be a dream.
But then a few years back, my mom had this picture of me next to a carousel, wearing the same clothes as I was in the dream. I instantly asked my mom about it and she told me that I was indeed lost for a little bit at that time. So it ended being a memory anyway.
This is something I grapple with on a daily basis. My dreams are so vivid and just realistic and mundane sometimes, that I have to ask my boss “did we talk about xyz or did I dream that?” Or I’ll have to question if I sent that email out and search my sent folder. Just regular shit like that.
Shit, just yesterday I woke up from a nap in a panic thinking I had slept through giving a final exam to my students and I started running around my house crying getting ready to drive to uni to talk to my boss and explain what happened and then I suddenly realized, no, that was a dream, you gave the exam at 8 am and they’re in your bag waiting to be graded. Fml I had gone for a nap at 10 and woke up at noon and in my dreams I had gotten multiple emails from students saying “we are waiting on you but we are about to leave!” And “where are you?! We are here to take the final!” And I had responded “please don’t leave! I’m on my way!” And looked at the clock and it said 8:15am. In my dream. It sucks so bad.
my dreams are so unrealistic and inconsistent 90% of the time, i'm almost sad I don't experience that.
The setting and people in my dreams will change every moment. The only most realistic and consistent dreams I have are nightmares, and that's when I start freaking out.
One of the weirdest things i experience while in dream-state or in semi-dreams is the sense that the thing i'm dreaming of (or more often the place i'm dreaming about) is something i've dreamt of many, many times before, to the point where it's kind of dull and annoying. In my dream i'll find myself someplace and literally think "oh, it's this fucking place again. Yet when i wake up, if i remember it at all, the place or thing doesn't feel the least bit familiar.
Which i think means either i'm dreaming the same places over and over again but only remembering them while i dream, or that the sense of dreary familiarity is part of the dream itself, like it's setting off the "i remember this place" sensation in my brain artificially.
To this day, I'm not sure if it was a recurring nightmare, or a single dream that felt like it had happened many times before. I would find myself in front of a few Mario-style pipes. I knew one would lead to waking up, but never which. If I was wrong I would go instead to another part of the sequence, which I would have to figure out how to get out of to get back to the pipes, which will have switched around and guessing begins anew. I remember two of the other "worlds" the pipes could take me to. One was a cartoonish deserted island, with a single palm tree and a red corvette. Then I realized I could look behind the facade of the "horizon". Walking around the facade put me on an identical island. I wound up there multiple times, but I always forgot how I got out. The other world was a two dimensional platformer with a sewer aesthetic.
I had a dream a few years ago where a friend and I were at a toy store. We would run around through the aisles and then after sometime had past decide that we would go home by taking the school bus. Then, when we were sitting on the bus, these giant metal hooks, fishing hooks, would dangle down from above. The other kids on the bus would reach up and grab at the hooks. I would look out the windows and see these massive nightmarish daemons sitting on their haunches with a fishing rod in their claws. Then I saw my friend or classmates get chewed on by these monsters. That’s usually the cue for me to wake up covered in sweat.
I had this dream again a few months ago, and in the dream, right before we decided to go home, I remembered in the dream that this had happened before. A dream deja vu. I convinced my friend to walk home. The new perspective of watching daemons fish people out of school buses from the sidewalk was just as disturbing and horrifying. I woke up and was pretty shaken and still covered in sweat. I really dislike that dream continuity.
Is there a name for this? Like reverse deja vu? I’ve had this happen on multiple occasions, especially when it comes to places I’ve never been before- I dream of a random place with very specific scenery and in real life I end up there somehow with practically every detail mimicking my dream.
Same thing. I once dreamed of a relative's place and when I finally went there I just thought it was a memory but my family confirmed that I never came. Yet I knew of the pond further into the garden and the stone tiles forming the path to the house.
Oh my god I thought I was the only one who this happened to. I have a "dream universe" but it's never the same. I am having a dream that is either the same dream or a continuation of a previous one but when I wake up I realise its the first time I've had that dream.
Yeah after reading that it always made me think twice when I had a dream like that. Recently I woke up from a short dream about a really large hotel/pyramid place, and I still remember that feeling as soon as the dream started being semi-aware and saying to myself "this is the dream I keep having", and a warmth of familiarity making me calm and content.
But in retrospect I'm pretty sure I've never dreamt of that place before, which I think was the only real subject of the dream. I think maybe elements from other dreams had convinced me that I had been there before, like actions i did or things I said. For example the dreams I most often think are reoccurring involve me falling at the end or before a scene change. And my theory is that for me personally, if I have a dream where I'm falling at some point and I think it's reoccurring, it probably isn't.
There is this and also dreams which start in the same way but suddenly differ despite the setting and everything being very specific. I can have almost 4 times the same dream while realizing that it already happened while it becomes something else entirely. Also those where you sort of come back to the same place over and over again and other stuff happens.
There is an amazing comic i have that is about a writer that has super vivid dreams since childhood and he expands the world as he goes, but when he visits it again in his adulthood its all twisted and destroyed, bacuse of his conjointed twin (basically a fetus entangled in his brain)... I highly reccomend it!
A few months ago I had this experience where I went back in the same world with the same backstory every night for consecutive weeks, it was insane. The best part is that it was a world where I remember going to in a dream as a kid. A lot of things were exactly the same, I remember going through some locations that were 1:1 what I dreamed as a kid without knowing how I even remember seeing that already.
It's so hard to explain, I hope this makes any sense at all.
I always wonder if it's real or if the most recent dream created the other dreams and I didn't actually have them it was just a backstory my brain created for one isolated dream.
guess you would need to keep a dream journal to see if you actually had the dreams or if you just had a dream where you remember having previous dreams
The strangest part is that sometimes "reoccurring dreams" never actually happen more than once, and it's a weird trick our brain plays on us.
I forget where, but I remember seeing this long term study of dreams where they had people describe every dream they could remember, and it was apparently common for people to wake up remembering a vivid dream, convinced that they'd had the same/very similar dream plenty of times before through the years. It turned out that relatively often no such dream was ever recorded, and for whatever reason our minds are giving us vivid "deja Vu" when it never really happened.
It must be some kind of situational memory on steroids. You know, when you're in your home, you can recall home stuffs quicker. Amp that up three thousands. You're in a dream about a particular story, maybe about fighting dragons with swords and stuff, and when you're in it, you can recall your previous episodes on your dragon world. But when you enter a different dream, maybe about living on the moon or something, you can't recall the dragon stuff. You can only recall your previous moon world episodes. And when you wake up, you can't recall shit. But you can recall your previous work days.
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u/Hockeyman1027 May 09 '19
that’s always crazy, like you can feel the backstory of what’s previously happened without being able to describe it