I find it fascinating just how much dreams can affect me emotionally, even after I wake up. Logically, I know it’s just a dream and not real, but I can’t stop my self from reacting emotionally as if it were real.
A few nights ago, I had a dream that consisted of three scenes:
I’m at work. An old college friend that I haven’t spoken to in years calls me to tell me she’s decided I’m basically a bad person and doesn’t want to be my friend anymore. She hangs up before I can respond.
I get home from work. My husband has a suitcase packed and tells me he’s leaving me. I keep asking him why, and he keeps saying “I’m just not happy”. Finally he admits that he only married me because I’m bisexual, and he thought we would have threesomes all the time. He’s leaving me because we don’t have enough threesomes. :dubious:
I go to work the next day. My boss tells me they’re cutting back the IT department, and my position is being eliminated. Fortunately they have an opening in telemarketing and I’m going to be doing that from now on. (FYI, I’ve worked in telemarketing before and hated it. I know plenty of telemarketers like it just fine, but for me it’s a nightmare job.)
After I woke up, I was depressed for several hours. I knew it was just a dream, and that none of those awful things were at all likely to happen, but emotionally it felt like it had really happened.
I’ve also done the “dreamed my husband cheated on me and was pissed at him when I woke up” thing. I knew he hadn’t cheated, but I couldn’t stop myself from being angry at him. I ended up saying “I’m sorry, you didn’t do anything wrong, but I need to not be around you for a while”. He was both amused and relieved when I calmed down enough to explain.
I dreamed that my husband died, leaving me alone and inconsolable, and basically dragging myself through my life for weeks after. I woke and found him in the bed next to me, and knew I was just dreaming and that my dream was cruel, to be doing this to me. I sat there, depressed as hell, and very slowly came to realize that I was, in fact, awake, and he hadn’t died, that part had been the dream, and I hadn’t been in mourning for weeks at all.
I found myself torn between the visceral ache that I was still feeling over his “death” and the utter joy that it hadn’t actually happened. I probably spent the whole day wanting to cry and hug him.
Yes, I can be impacted emotionally for more than a day at times when my dream has been particularly disturbing or haunting.
Generally I believe in the power of dreams to alert me to things that I should adjust or resolve emotionally. My dreams can often provide me with context that I haven’t found when awake.
Likewise, I can be made aware of unrealized emotion through my dreams. It can take a while to sort out the meaning as there are often word and visual tricks in my dreams.
I never wanted children and have never been pregnant.
I had a very vivid dream that I was on a cliff overlooking a beach. Halfway down the cliff was a bench with a little girl sitting on it. I went down to here.
Her: I was supposed to be your daughter.
Me: Excuse me?
Her: I was supposed to be your daughter and my father was supposed to be my brother.
I realized there was a man about thirty years old standing behind me who looked exactly like my brother. He said “We were supposed to be your son and daughter. But you didn’t have children, so I was born to someone else, and my sister is my daughter.”
I had a very realistic dream where I won a huge lottery, billions of dollars. The dream dealt with all the fun I was having. When I woke up I was extremely disappointed and stayed that way for days.
I’ve had dreams for the past 16 years since I lost my mother that involve her. They are usually just mundane hanging-out-with-the family dreams with her and my deceased grandparents. We were a very close family.
During the dream it’s not at all dramatic but before I even wake up I realize it’s just a dream, that they’re all dead, and I will wake up sobbing. It’s really hard to shake the feeling of despondent hopelessness once I’m fully awake.
I once had a dream that my husband had done something absolutely horrible and despicable. I didn’t remember what it was then, let alone now, but when I woke up I was incredibly angry with him. Took me half a day to get rid of that feeling. And no, I didn’t act on my anger in the meantime.
I’m sure this is very common, but about a week or so after my mother died I had a very vivid dream about talking with her in my house and being very relieved that everything was all right. Again, it took about a half a day before I realized my good feelings were related to something that was only a dream and I went back to being sad again.
I have lots of dreams about gentlemen that I either know personally or have seen on TV programs or movies lately. They are…vivid… Generally I have a bit of a crush on that gentleman for a few days to a few months afterward. I enjoy those dreams.
I frequently have dreams where my parents abandon me. I mean, not as a little kid, but going off to university or to a new city for a new job. I’m still young and I went through some crippling social anxiety and I’m kind of emotionally dependent on my mom in many ways. Sometimes these dreams involve Mom dying, or me dying, or getting a new sibling and being ignored. Yeah, I have abandonment issues.
I had a dream when I was 12 that I was supposed to win a big lottery. In the dream, there had been an agreement with a higher power before I was born that I was to hit a $20 million lottery jackpot in life. In the dream, I’m at the edge of a forest shouting up to the sky that Og was a Liar and a Cheat as I had not received it and I was demanding from him what I was owed, what he agreed to. The next moment, lightning splinterd the tree closest to me.
I woke up very upset and remained so for the rest of the day.
…who knew Og was such a Thor-loser…?
I’m not sure if this counts as “emotionally” or not, but occasionally I’ll dream I’m smoking. I have never smoked IRL and I really REALLY despise cigarettes and ciggy smoke. The smoking dream usually leave me thinking “huh”? for hours or sometimes the whole day.
I had a dream last nite where I was heart broken by a girl who seems to be familar to me when I woke I was feeling devestated and have been all day just can’t seem to shake the feeling strange
I had a similar dream. I dreamed that I could tear little pieces of cardboard up, pass my hand over them, and they turned into diamonds. I made a lot of money. The dream was so real that when I woke up I was bummed I couldn’t make diamonds.
I dreamed I was comming out of the supermarket and heard a lady screaming. I ran over to see if I could help and she could not speak english but showed me a poisenous snake that had just bit her. I could not calm her down so decided to let the snake bite me and that helped. I motioned for her to follow me and when I went to ask for a ride to the hospital paralysis started setting in and I could not talk. I felt really used and abused after that dream.
Dreamt of something that had happened 30 years earlier and had been extremely upsetting at the time. Affected me so strongly to go through it again that when I woke up, I wasn’t entirely certain that I hadn’t suffered a minor heart attack in the process and had to call in sick to work because I was so physically weakened by the entire thing. Took me half the day to recover physically and it stuck with me emotionally a lot longer.
About once a year I dream that I’m somehow back with my ex-wife. Scares the shit out of me.
I had a dream the other night I was running from bad guys, I’m alwaysrunning from bad guys, and found an attic space to hide in. Before I could climb up they caught me. Well someone was up there already and started to open the attic door and I yelled to warn them. To punish me for yelling, the bad guys BROKE my goddamn hand.
Literally slowly broke my thumb, index, and middle! When he got to my ring finger, he thought I was crying too much and CUT THE FREAKING THING OFF!
I really want someone to record my dreams, well first invent a machine to record dreams, then analyze them. 'Cause I got some doozies…
Awww…next time you’re in there, try to think of it as a chance to just hang out with them again, and be melancholy instead of so sad. I wish I could dream about people I care about, but for some reason that very rarely happens.
I know I’ve woken up and felt what I felt in dreams for a while, but I can’t recall any right off the bat. Except maybe the one where George W. Bush and I had been college sweethearts; he’d been a bad boy <this was before I knew that he HAD been a bad boy, lol> and I’d had to push him away eventually. In the dream, we met up again, as he was heading towards presidential campaigning, and he very sweetly apologized for all the crap he pulled.
Now, I never cared for, and outright disliked, Bush. But after that dream…well, can’t quite look at him the same after having slept with him, lol.
I have always been a lifelong vivid dreamer, and I’ve had lots of dreams that have affected me deeply.
I often wake up from a dream where I’ve been crying, only to find out that I really was crying and my eyes are all puffy and sore.
For a few years of my life I had nothing but vivid, frightening nightmares. A lot involved monsters, but a lot of them involved loved ones dying in terribly painful ways.
So yeah, I can sympathize with you. Just be thankful it doesn’t happen often to you
(FYI, I’ve worked in telemarketing before and hated it. I know plenty of telemarketers like it just fine, but for me it’s a nightmare job.)
