Forgetting what's real

[Cognisant]

I woke up this morning surprised that I had two functioning eyes, not that anything has happened to them, I had merely dreamt that I had an accident, my right eye was buggered beyond repair me the dream was so convincing that when I woke I practically reached for an eyepatch on my bedside table (because I haven't bought a glass eye yet).

In of itself that's not such a concern, what really concerns me is the idea that it might not be my only false memory, which brings into question my whole purview of reality.

Anything like this happen to you?

 

[Fukyo]

It happens to me often. Takes a couple seconds to realize I was dreaming. I don't give it much thought unless I'm having an episode of sleep paralysis which is very unpleasant.

 

[pjoa09]

Yes, I wake up sometimes super excited to play with my new toy only to double check and realize it was a dream.

When shit in real life gets really bad then I wonder if it's just a nightmare and I am asleep.

 

[Cognisant]

Yes, I wake up sometimes super excited to play with my new toy only to double check and realize it was a dream.

Oh I know that feeling.

When shit in real life gets really bad then I wonder if it's just a nightmare and I am asleep.

I've had nightmares like that, in which I realise it's a nightmare and the more I try to wake myself up the more power it gives the nightmare, or the disjointed nature of the dream has me thinking I can travel through time or teleport by willing myself to where I want to be and I'll be desperately trying to do either of those things to save somebody or escape the consequences of my in-dream actions.

 

[Cognisant]

On a tangent, I had another dream recently in which I escaped a locked cell by slashing the interrogators's carotid, he passed out almost immediately from the pressure drop, the guard opened the door as I walked up to it, raised his gun at me and I motioned to the interrogator and said "keep pressure on it or he'll die" and walked out as he rushed in, I had no doubt the interrogator would die but it would keep the guard tied up for a while. The second guard I caught by surprise, twisted his arm and put the blade to his throat, walked him to the security door (could only be opened from outside) and said to third guard behind it "we live in an uncertain world, if you open that door I might escape and if I escape I might be recaptured but of one thing we can be certain, if you do not open that door before I count to three he will die, one, two-" he opens the door. I then stabbed the hostage guard's carotid, pushed him into the other and said again "keep pressure on it or he'll die", this one was a bit smarter, he pulled a pistol on me, "you can hold me here while he bleeds out or you can use both hands to save his life, your choice" for a moment I thought I'd miscalculated, then he holstered it and I walked away.

Wish I could remember the rest of it.

 

[Cognisant]

http://amultiverse.com/
June 12th 2013

 

[The Gopher]

Oh yes, this is scary bad for me however; I don’t just wake up and realise it takes me ages sometimes.... When I was young I dreamt of a game similar to wacky wheels but very different. For years I was sure this game existed. (About 10 years) I even searched abandon ware forums and such to find it. Turns out it was all a dream...



Another example was I dreamt of an entire life with a friend. I woke up went about my normal life and a year later I had the same dream. I only then realised my friend (who I obviously never visited) never existed.



I have the normal ones as well. Although I wasn’t sure if this was a short dream or simply a hallucination however I dreamt of my room with only one slight change. There was a giant spider by my face. The either dream or hallucination lasted only as long as it took me to reach the door.

 

[TimeAsylums]

Even once I've recognized that I'm dreaming (during a dream) and it becomes a lucid dream, I wake up and wonder if that was actually reality. Some tribes in Africa don't distinguish from their dreams and reality...etc.

btw you should start keeping a dream journal, I started two weeks ago, ****ing amazing.

I always wonder if the realness of our dreams is thanks to our Si...and then wonder if Se-doms feel like that daily.

 

[Cognisant]

I have the normal ones as well. Although I wasn’t sure if this was a short dream or simply a hallucination however I dreamt of my room with only one slight change. There was a giant spider by my face. The either dream or hallucination lasted only as long as it took me to reach the door.

Not too long ago I had a dream in which I was freaked out by spiders, little packs of them, like four or five all climbing over each other, the narrative was that these spiders were like wolves, hunting in packs to bring down larger prey, which made exterminating them all the more important because as they grow in number the prey they can take down is larger...

 

[Vrecknidj]

This happens to me from time to time. My wife's experiences (she's INFP, high functioning Autistic, and exceptionally creative) with dreams are far weirder. She'll have dreams that are pretty much the equivalent of a series of books. She'll wake up having lived others' lives, basically. Sometimes it'll take her hours to explain everything that occurred in the dream, and the detail (the relationships between individuals, including tangential "characters" in her dream, etc.) are vivid and incredible. Other times, she'll have a dream consisting of a single sentence. Or a face. Or something equally bizarre. Sometimes she'll wake up entirely thrown off balance emotionally as she's just awakened from having lived a different life for what felt like months or years.

For me, it's usually something more like what the original post stated. I'll sometimes wake up having had experienced something that felt very real, but which isn't true of me.

Usually, I just wake up tired.

 

[ℜεмїηїs¢εη¢ε]

Another example was I dreamt of an entire life with a friend. I woke up went about my normal life and a year later I had the same dream. I only then realised my friend (who I obviously never visited) never existed.

An entire life? Did the dream actually feel that long? It's difficult for me to imagine such a thing...

 

[Pyropyro]

An entire life? Did the dream actually feel that long? It's difficult for me to imagine such a thing...

Actually it might be plausible. Our minds have a nice ability to "fill in the gaps" of memories and it is more unrestrained in the dream world. Suspension of disbelief is really powerful in the dream world. It's actually a short dream but we perceive it as long as entire lifetimes.

I think it could be compared to training montages in movies. We see the hero doing different exercises clumsily while his old master looks disappointingly. After a few more scenes we could see our hero doing these things effortlessly doing the routines while the master nods approvingly.

For us we feel that months of training has passed but only around 5 minutes (or shorter) of film actually ran.

 

[Pyropyro]

I woke up this morning surprised that I had two functioning eyes, not that anything has happened to them, I had merely dreamt that I had an accident, my right eye was buggered beyond repair me the dream was so convincing that when I woke I practically reached for an eyepatch on my bedside table (because I haven't bought a glass eye yet).

In of itself that's not such a concern, what really concerns me is the idea that it might not be my only false memory, which brings into question my whole purview of reality.

Anything like this happen to you?

Well lots of times. I can think of two off the top of my head:
1. I was an English Major and I somehow messed up one of our projects and have to make an impromptu one in front of my professor. I woke up scrambling for my "books" only to realize that I already graduated on a Science course and that it happened years ago...

2. I was recently married to a girl but sadly we have to part ways since I have to go to a journey of some sort. She even bade me goodbye while wearing her wedding dress... I woke up pining for my lost love only to realize that said girl was a high school acquaintance that I didn't even noticed before.

 

[Pyropyro]

On a tangent, I had another dream recently in which I escaped a locked cell by slashing the interrogators's carotid, he passed out almost immediately from the pressure drop, the guard opened the door as I walked up to it, raised his gun at me and I motioned to the interrogator and said "keep pressure on it or he'll die" and walked out as he rushed in, I had no doubt the interrogator would die but it would keep the guard tied up for a while. The second guard I caught by surprise, twisted his arm and put the blade to his throat, walked him to the security door (could only be opened from outside) and said to third guard behind it "we live in an uncertain world, if you open that door I might escape and if I escape I might be recaptured but of one thing we can be certain, if you do not open that door before I count to three he will die, one, two-" he opens the door. I then stabbed the hostage guard's carotid, pushed him into the other and said again "keep pressure on it or he'll die", this one was a bit smarter, he pulled a pistol on me, "you can hold me here while he bleeds out or you can use both hands to save his life, your choice" for a moment I thought I'd miscalculated, then he holstered it and I walked away.

Wish I could remember the rest of it.

That's pretty badass I need more of these dreams.

 

[The Gopher]

An entire life? Did the dream actually feel that long? It's difficult for me to imagine such a thing...

Actually it might be plausible. Our minds have a nice ability to "fill in the gaps" of memories and it is more unrestrained in the dream world. Suspension of disbelief is really powerful in the dream world. It's actually a short dream but we perceive it as long as entire lifetimes.

I think it could be compared to training montages in movies. We see the hero doing different exercises clumsily while his old master looks disappointingly. After a few more scenes we could see our hero doing these things effortlessly doing the routines while the master nods approvingly.

For us we feel that months of training has passed but only around 5 minutes (or shorter) of film actually ran.

What he said. It was more a few years but they were doing relatively the same type of thing anyway so..

 

[ℜεмїηїs¢εη¢ε]

What he said. It was more a few years but they were doing relatively the same type of thing anyway so..

Alright. I suppose it's better that it was that way. I might have gone insane if the dream was actually that long.

 

[TimeAsylums]

losing touch with reality

y

 

[Pizzabeak]

Everything/nothing is real.

 

[Dormouse]

Isn't dreaming entire lifetimes normal? I'm rarely myself in my dreams.

Spoiler

Incidentally, last night I had an AWFUL one, was some retarded belle married to this eunuch baby mafia prick. He killed kittens. It involved a lot of stairwells.

Anyways, the bulk of life and how we understand ourselves is pretty much fictional. One cloud of delusion isn't that different from the next.

Starts a dream journal every month
Forgets about it within 3 days

Those dreams that involve completely separate characters are more isolated from reality than those where I'm myself, though. I don't consider them any less real, quite, but they're less intrusive once I wake up. Hazy parallel universes.

Dreams that overlap come in a few flavours:

1. Body Horror This usually involves losing teeth or growing. Although, once I got hit by a shrink ray. I was really sad that hadn't actually happened, I love the idea of life being an obstacle course. Otherwise they're awful, though potentially serve the purpose of viciously encouraging dental hygiene and starvation?

2. Comfort Usually involve hugs, really real feeling hugs. From people I miss or will never see again. You'd think these would be sadness-tainted, but somehow the warmth bleeds very tangibly into life. Another riff would be the few where I act out the resolution of some stressful problem. It's fake, but the resulting relief lasts through awakeness.

3. Metaphors involving spiders

 

[Variform]

An entire life? Did the dream actually feel that long? It's difficult for me to imagine such a thing...

It is my favorite episode in Start Trek: TNG. Season 5x25 'The Inner Light'. Picard gets targeted by some probe. He wakes up as a different man on a world he doesn't know. He lives a complete lifetime there and learns to accept that all he ever experienced before is gone. But he lies on the bridge of the ship for some time, measured in minutes.

To live a complete life in 20 minutes and wake up...to me that...I don't know or understand why, makes me very emotional.

 

[Void]

idk about dreams, but I often catch myself rereading conversations because I am not sure if I imagined someone invited me or that they actually invited me. Sometimes I second guess myself while I'm on my way too. I never imagine it though, and never have.

 

[AngelOne]

Many of my dreams are about me living a life in another time. I end up living through days/weeks/months as this other "me". I often wake up from these dreams feeling a bit lost and wanting to get back to that world, and I find myself questioning which is real: the dream, or the waking world. It can be unsettling but also awesome.

 

[wilsonwatsonc]

For me it's not just dreams. I have false memories all the time. I really worry sometimes that I'm not in touch with reality enough to be a healthy, normal person. I imagine conversations that go on in my head, just for the hell of it, and then forget that they didn't actually happen. I mention it to other people and they act like I'm losing my mind.

But at the core of it, if I really think about something, I know what is and isn't reality. Not because of how "real" it feels as a memory, but rather that I remember what actually happened, if that makes sense. I just keep track of things, thinking "this is a memory" and "this is not a memory," because otherwise they feel equally real in my mind.

The same goes for dreams. They're just as vivid as my memories, I just use the logic of physics to keep myself straight.