As in the dream you had while sleeping.
Mine had me seeing the sky distort and turn into some sort of dimensional rift. I remember seeing black goo falling from the sky and seeing a large, sandstone ceiling cover everything. Just beyond the reach of clouds I saw a rocky ceiling with square holes in them that lead into the darkness of space. Then, after getting lost in an ancient pyramid, the sky then turned into planets phasing into one another. Like textures in a video game overlapping one another. I saw lights in the sky flying around like fireflies and hearing a voice saying “You’re quarantined on this planet. You may not leave but we can.”
I remember a bunch over the years that I can still close my eyes and replay, so this is a harder question than it may seem on the surface.
The actual most unforgettable is a recurring nightmare that I’m not willing to talk about because fuck that.
But number two was a doozie. Heh.
Back in high school, I had one of those bonkers dreams that fucked me up bad for a while.
In the dream, I met a girl, fell in love, had kids and grandkids, grew old together. And I’m not talking about just those events and nothing else. There were entire days taking place, from waking up to going to bed in the dream. Entire birthday parties, vacations together, sitting on swings and swinging while holding hands and watching the kids play.
I lived an entire fucking life in a dream.
And I woke up from that still a fucking kid. And I immediately started crying because my family were gone, my dream family. I lost them just as sure as if they’d died. It was both beautiful and horrifying.
It fucked me up. Not that I wasn’t already pretty damn fucked up, what with PTSD already kicking my ass at that age. But that dream was brutal. Well, waking up from it was, the dream itself was amazing.
I’ve told the story of this many times online because retelling it tends to take the sting out of it a little more each time.
Not that I haven’t had a great deal of joy in real life, I have. And I’m happier with my wife and kid now than I ever was in the dream, plus it’s real. But that dream has sometimes made it difficult to be fully present in a relationship in the past. It was one of those things where knowing that the person I was with wasn’t the right one made it easier to end things before they went bad. But the fact that I would have to constantly compare reality to the dream meant that I could never be certain how much was a genuine incompatibility and how much was holding reality up to the lens of a dream.
But the older I got, the less that factored into things. Now, it’s more of a pleasant memory than a bad one. The dream has lost its sting from being only a dream, and reality is better in terms of having a fulfilling and real partner.
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.