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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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.
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Well dreams do pull from reality…
Bruh
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, once. I was incredibly heartbroken and confused for three days. It sparked me going onto dating apps. Where i found my dream wife.
First time I ever asked out a girl was after I had a dream like this about her
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’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.
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.
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.
Definitely. Not often, but when I had them, they were strong and affected me for the remainder of the day.
Got no time for love in my dreams - I’m busier with tomato fights, becoming a pig, running from a T-Rex, watching aliens to spit on a tree to wilt it down, and killing a person to resurrect an ancient god.
You got the t. rex too huh?
That bastard can eat through anything.
Don’t forget the maze of endless urinals - that somehow brings it all together:-).
I need to add that to my “things to dream with” list.
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.
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.
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? 🤷♂️
