Dreams and memories. An odd experience

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is an odd one and I’m hoping someone else here can share similar experiences.

I very rarely remember my dreams, but I have been doing so quite a bit recently.

The odd thing is that within these dreams I’ve been remembering things.

By that I mean that the me in the dream remembers things. Dream me will be driving along a road and the layout will remind me of another road and I’ll recall the events of that earlier day for instance.

But those memories don’t belong to the real me. They’re memories of things that happened to dream me only and never happened to me.

And then when I wake up I remember both the dream and the memories that I remembered within the dream.

But due to some sort of half awake filing issue the memories get tagged as mine. Somehow those memories feel like they belong to the real me and not the me in the dream.

Which is confusing. I have all these detailed memories of events and places. And they feel like familiar, fond memories. Clearly things I’ve remembered many times before. Not dim and distant memories being dredged from the back.

So they feel very familiar yet also foreign, as I have no direct connection to them. The connection is via dream me and he’s been filed correctly in the dream section of my brain and is fading fast as dreams do. Leaving a disconcerting disconnection.

For the record I am a little stressed at the moment due to a house sale which might be contributing to this. I don’t drink or do drugs before anyone offers them as causation.

I know memory can be strange and I’m aware of false memory syndrome, which this is almost related to.

But has anyone else ever experienced this? Does the you in dreams ever recall events that have happened previously to dream you? And if so, do those memories ever get tagged as belonging to the real you? Or should I see a psychiatrist ASAP?

2

The worst nightmare I ever had was that my uncle (to whom I’m very close) had died. The “now” of the dream didn’t involve the death itself at all: In the dream, I was just walking over a bridge (a real bridge, that’s on the real path from my mom’s house to the church where my uncle’s funeral will presumably eventually be held). And as I was walking over that bridge, I was sad that my uncle had just died.

Someday, my uncle will die. And when it happens, the little vignette in that dream will probably play out, more or less exactly like it did in the dream. But it hasn’t yet.

3

The worst nightmare I ever had was that my uncle (to whom I’m very close) had died. The “now” of the dream didn’t involve the death itself at all: In the dream, I was just walking over a bridge (a real bridge, that’s on the real path from my mom’s house to the church where my uncle’s funeral will presumably eventually be held). And as I was walking over that bridge, I was sad that my uncle had just died.

Someday, my uncle will die. And when it happens, the little vignette in that dream will probably play out, more or less exactly like it did in the dream. But it hasn’t yet.

4

I suggest you write you dreams in a journal when you wake up.
This helps me by categorizing my thoughts, dreams and memories. It soothes my my head to know the entries in my dream journal are where they should be.
I think you may be experiencing more lucid dreams. Those can be very upsetting. I get a calm feeling from writing. Somedays it’s stream of consciousness, other days more organized.
It does help.

5

I once had a very vivid dream of working at a Food Lion supermarket, and for the next two days I was convinced that I had actually done so for several years. I had worked at a Marsh supermarket for several years, but never Food Lion.

6

Yes, this happens to me all the time and has for as long as I can remember. It’s like an entire dreamworld neighborhood and dreamlife.

7

Yeah, I often re-visit places I’ve dreamed about before. Doesn’t bother me. I usually enjoy my dreams. They have a interior consistency which is like either watching a movie or participating in one.

8

There are food shops in my dreams with culinary delights better than I can find in real life, but when I wake up, I can never remember what they were.

9

You might be interested in this account told by someone on Reddit:

He suffered a head injury and laid unconscious on the sidewalk for some time. During that brief time, he dreamt that he was now living 10 years - which *felt *like ten years - in a different life, a life so real that he did not know that it was a dream. In his dream, he got married, had kids, etc. At the end, he was suddenly jolted back into his injured state in real life, lying on the sidewalk - and then afterwards, he spent three real-life years terribly grieving the loss of his imaginary wife and children.

10

I have had very specific locations that I revisit repeatedly in my dreams ever since I was a very young child. Sometimes years will go by between visits.

The first that I can remember was a strange world that you got to if you kept following the real creek that I played in as a child. I dreamed of it regularly for years, and then it disappeared, but I have had one or two dreams of it in recent years.

More recently I’ve had dreams involving two different beach resort locations. One has a giant, multi-story hotel and a straight, narrow beach that leads into the Pacific Ocean (I know because I’ve dreamed the sun setting there). The other has a lower, two story white wooden hotel and a beach with rocky cliffs and a lot of curves and hidden coves. There are numerous events that have happened to me in my dreams at each of these locations, and when I revisit, I can remember the earlier events. It’s like a T.V. series, or maybe a set of movies with sequels. It’s always interesting to wake up and think, hey, I was back at that resort again last night.

11

You might enjoy the film Mulholland Drive.

12

Thanks for the answers, it’s good to know that it’s not that unusual. So it’s probably not a tumor!

13

OP, I do this all the time. I call them dreamscapes. Someone upthread mentioned familiar neighborhoods and such. That’s me too; I have entire story arcs that come and go. Sometimes I revisit old places. Most of the time things change when I return, which makes sense really. All my dreams seem to involve elements of life I do love: Camping, exploring, archeology, trains, vintage stuff, etc.

Oh, and no matter which dream neighborhood I’m in, my truck gets stolen about every third night. No idea what that’s about.

14

The weirdest dreams I’ve had are those where I dreamed that I woke up.

So I wake up, get out bed as usual, start doing my normal morning routine… but after a while something seems strange… the wall is the wrong color, or there’s a different view out of the window, or I can’t see myself in the mirror. I realize that I’m still asleep and dreaming. I can feel that I’m really still lying in bed half asleep. I haven’t gotten up at all.

Okay, so now I’d better open my eyes and really get up, instead of going back to sleep!

So I make an effort, sit up, get out of bed, and start my morning again. Then… again, after a while something seems wrong. I haven’t woken up at all, I’m still in bed dreaming that I’ve woken up.

On one occasion it took four tries before I really woke up. At least, I hope I did…

15

I’ve had quite a few of those - where I am going ‘back to work’ at a job I used to have (and havent had in > 25 years, although I did enjoy the job then and wouldn’t actually mind it if the right opportunity was there) - sometimes I have a hard time reminding myself that those things ‘never happened’.

16

Weirdest one for me is one that is at least a little related to the OP.

I had a dream that I’d killed someone and buried them in my back garden. Pretty horrible, this was at a time when a specific soap storyline in the UK was coinciding with the Fred West murders so no great surprise where the inspiration came from and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in that, so far so mundane.

The really weird thing was that, although this was *not *a recurring dream (neither before nor after, my wife and I always share our strange and salacious dreams so she would remember), the dream *implanted *in my head the impression that it had been a recurring dream. i.e. I came away from it with a memory of this traumatic dream happening to me, stretching back years, but I’d never actually had it before! My dream invented the fact that I’d been terrorised for years…that seems unnecessarily vindictive to me.

Brains are weird.

17

I once had a dream that I had a fourth child (in so-called real life, I have three).

I was having one of those fixed-forever-in-a-parent’s-soul moments with this child, a boy of about 4 or 5 years old, with him sitting next to me on a couch and reading a book to me surprisingly well above his “grade level” (this is an echo of something my second child had done as well, a daughter).

He was so excited to read to me, and I was so proud. I wanted to call to my wife to say “come see/hear what our son can do!..” And suddenly, I blanked on his name. Our son, whats-his-name? Who?

At first it just felt like one of those brain fart moments, as I ran through the names of my three older children in rapid succession, who were there in the room/in the background of the dream as well. OK, this is not A, not B, not C… So… So?

His name felt like it was just at the edge of my memory, on the tip of my tongue. I mean, he’s my son, right? How can I not remember his name?

And then the idea formed in my head, as if a wordless edict: if you don’t say his name, he will not exist.

Then began the slow, growing awareness that I was in a lucid dream of sorts. But the feeling persisted: Just say his name, the name you know is his, and this will be real.

I frantically started grasping at random boy’s names that we’d considered for our other children, but none of them fit. You know you didn’t use a recycled or backup name for him… His name… What is this boy’s name?

I started gasping for breath, clutching at my chest. My dream-son stopped reading in alarm and concern. He put the book down and hugged me, calling for Mom. My peripheral vision told me his siblings had started to come over from the corners of the room as my vision grew dim…

And I opened my eyes awake in a terribly sad panic.

His name. Why couldn’t I just remember his name?

18

That’s so weird, robardin, because this is part of a email I sent my real brother a few years ago:

19

*One who wakes up from a dream thinks, ‘It is like this, and not like that which I saw in the dream.’

After death too, one thinks, ‘It is like this, and not like that which I saw before death.’

The dream may be brief, and the life may be long, but the experience of the moment is the same in both.

Just as in one lifetime one experiences hundreds of dreams, so until one attains enlightenment, one experiences hundreds of lifetimes.

— Yoga Vasistha VI.2:161
*