# False dream of having killed someone **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [June 16, 2015, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694 "2015-06-16T19:11:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Cartoonacy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/848f3c/32.png) [@Cartoonacy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartoonacy)\ **Post date:** [June 18, 2015, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/21 "2015-06-18T22:24:10Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > Do they call that ‘jamais vu’? Jamais vu is when something or someone who is familiar to you seems strange or unfamiliar; it’s the opposite of deja vu, a feeling of familiarity regarding a person or place that you’ve never encountered before. I’m not sure if that applies to your dream or not. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2015, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/22 "2015-06-19T12:16:08Z")
Disturbing dream last night - though not of having murdered someone. In this dream I was scheduled to get married that day, only I couldn’t remember the bride’s name or what she looked like (oddly, this didn’t seem to disturb other members of the wedding party). Then her name came to me - Gehenna. :eek: It was good to wake up. ---
**Author:** ![muldoonthief](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/muldoonthief/32/3188_2.png) [@muldoonthief](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muldoonthief)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2015, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/23 "2015-06-19T12:56:16Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > There’s no rhyme or reason - last week it was Johnny Cash, and today it was a random guy from 6th grade who I actually Googled to make sure he was still out there. Why on Earth would you kill Johnny Cash? ---
**Author:** ![El\_Kabong](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/el_kabong/32/496_2.png) [@El\_Kabong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Kabong)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2015, 1:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/24 "2015-06-19T13:16:29Z")
> [@muldoonthief](#): > > Why on Earth would you kill Johnny Cash? Just to watch him die? I’ve only had this sort of dream once that I can recall, but I’m still distraught over having taken out JFK, decades later. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [June 19, 2015, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/25 "2015-06-19T22:08:38Z")
Absolutely - I addressed this once[in another thread.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18388674&postcount=26) > [@](#): > > In my adolescence I once had a dream that was intensely realistic. In it I had accidently killed a playmate and buried his body and he was never found. It was so real to me that I could never be sure whether it was true or not in the fugue state of coming out of dreams. It vaguely haunted me for years and I had subsequently often had dreams that my crime would be discovered. > > Finally when I was in my teens and had one of these dreams I simply logically thought it through afterwards and realized this was nonsense and I had never killed anyone and I never had the dreams again. > > Sometimes memory can weave together things that actually did not occur but in the distance of time we would stake our lives that it a happened just the way we remember it in our heads. A lot of innocent people went to prison in several court cases because juries believed the accusers recovered memories no matter how absurd the context was. > > If you’re dealing with a memory that triggered by some external stimulus suddenly pops to the fore and seems utterly, vividly real after the distance of decades you have to be careful. I think of myself as a very rational person but there were times that dream gave me pause. ---
**Author:** ![Jamicat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c67d28/32.png) [@Jamicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jamicat)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2015, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/26 "2015-06-21T01:30:46Z")
Yes. More of a dream within a dream. I woke up a little leary about it all. Its a pretense to the book I was drafting called, “Repression”. About a world renound therapist that uses repressed memory techniques to pry into serial killers heads to find clues and such, only to find that he himself was repressing a very dark secret. Wish I had the time to sit and write it. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![delphica](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e9a140/32.png) [@delphica](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/delphica)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2015, 1:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/27 "2015-06-21T01:59:21Z")
Ugh, I had a dream like this ONCE, and it was very traumatic. I had the dream when I was about 35, and in the dream, I was a teenager. It wasn’t that I had killed a person, it was that my friends and I had witnessed a murder/body dump in a park, and didn’t do anything to intervene, try to get assistance, or report it after the fact. In the dream, I was telling myself that it would be completely dangerous for a teenage girl to try to stop a murder in progress … but I knew the real reason was that I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing and didn’t want to get in trouble for it; we had sneaked into a club when we were underage and had been drinking, and then continued to drink in the park. It was also one of those dreams where all the elements were extremely believable - the location was a real area that I was familiar with, the people with me were actually friends I might have been with as a teen, nobody involved with the murder was a celebrity, and yes, we DID drink underage a lot, in places we weren’t supposed to be. It was so vivid and awful that for a few hours after I woke up, I seriously wondered if it was some kind of repressed memory that had suddenly come back to me, and _for real contemplated calling the police_, to say something like “hey, I just had this dream, let me tell you about it in case any of the details match up with an unsolved murder in your files from 15 years ago.” I wonder if the police ever do get calls like that. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2015, 1:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/28 "2015-06-21T13:09:57Z")
> [@muldoonthief](#): > > Why on Earth would you kill Johnny Cash? In these dreams, the means and motive are always unintentional, vague, and unimportant. The critical thing I recall feeling is that it happened and I felt so sure about having hidden it thoroughly and repressing the memory, at least until something puts it at risk of being discovered. I guess that’s what makes this dream harder to shake than most. The suspension of logic in dreams enables us to dream things that feel very real but are easily dismissed later, like having 3 testicles or Led Zeppelin being elected president. But when the experience is of your own thoughts and memory being deeply flawed and repressed… well, that happens to people all the time. When your brain tells you “hi, I’m broken”, then logic demands that you go back and double check everything. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2015, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/29 "2015-06-21T13:13:28Z")
I have had this dream many many times: I am in high school, and three of my friends and I kill a classmate and bury his body. We make a pact to never tell anyone about it. Many years later the body is dug up and a full-scale investigation commences. The detectives have some evidence that we did it, but not enough to arrest us. Every now and then I’ll get a visit from a detective. He asks me questions, and I simply deny everything. But as the years go on, it’s apparent they’re getting closer and closer to solving it… I then wake up. I ask myself, “Did I really kill someone back in high school, and bury their body?” I then realize it’s all a dream. What a relief. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2015, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/30 "2015-06-21T13:20:36Z")
> [@HMS\_Irruncible](#): > > The critical thing I recall feeling is that it happened and I felt so sure about having hidden it thoroughly and repressing the memory In my case, the dream feels so “real” that - even when I am fully awake (like right now) - I sometimes wonder if it really did happen, and that I have suppressed the memory. But then logic and rationality kick in, and I breath a sigh of relief. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![kittenblue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ba8739/32.png) [@kittenblue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kittenblue)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 2:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/31 "2015-06-22T02:53:57Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > I have a version of that dream frequently and it is terrifying. My dreams aren’t about the murders themselves. There isn’t even an identifiable victim or victims that correspond to a real person. I just know that I killed someone for some reason, buried them well, and now it is likely that people are going to discover them (usually because of new construction). I spend the whole dream trying to dig up the bodies without getting caught and then trying to find a place to rebury them where they will never be found. I keep being reminded that the statute of limitations never expires for murder so I may have to keep repeating the same thing indefinitely. > > The only good thing about that dream is when I wake up and realize that I have never, in fact, murdered anyone. I have the exact same dream. Usually someone is going to put a pool in, and I realize they will Find The Body. ---
**Author:** ![Kyrie\_Eleison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kyrie_eleison/32/7682_2.png) [@Kyrie\_Eleison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kyrie_Eleison)\ **Post date:** [June 22, 2015, 6:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694/32 "2015-06-22T06:43:59Z")
> [@CairoCarol](#): > > Yes. Fortunately it is rare; maybe once or twice a decade. For me, I am not sure who the victims are or why I killed them, but I know that I did, and the grief and remorse are almost unbearable. It is always a relief to wake up and know that actually I didn’t kill anyone. My experience is just like this, but more frequently – more like once a year. Also, there’s a twist. In my dream, I know that I don’t know who the victim is because I’m repressing my memory of the incident, and trying to live my life as if it had never happened. So when I wake up, there’s no relief – just a sort of lingering, nagging dread that it really happened, even though I can’t remember it while awake. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/false-dream-of-having-killed-someone/722694.md?page=1)