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?

  • durfenstein@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Yes, once. I was incredibly heartbroken and confused for three days. It sparked me going onto dating apps. Where i found my dream wife.

  • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgOP
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      2 months ago

      It really does drive in the reality that love is a fleeting chemical response, eh?

      • Einar@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        “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? 🤷‍♂️

  • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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

    • tacosanonymous@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      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.

  • RBWells@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Yes. Not often, but often I do have people who seem so real and are not me at all. Occasionally yes, such intense emotions too.

  • Richard@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Definitely. Not often, but when I had them, they were strong and affected me for the remainder of the day.

  • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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?

      • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        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.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    You guys have all the fun! Most dreams I remember seem to be about fire or spiders

  • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • maniii@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I had an entire LIFETIME in ONE night. Dream was super realistic, but it was all anime waifus. From earliest childhood memory till old age and that final darkness basically that last moment woke me up with a start. I never imagined that an entire lifetime in one night dream.

    I don’t think I ever had such an experience ever again. It was just one time. Never to happen again so far.

  • theedqueen@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • OldManBOMBIN@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    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.

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Zozano@lemy.lol
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      2 months ago

      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)