I had one where I worked at a school and a 6 year old girl named Cadey (pronounced like Katie) would always bring a toy from home and surprise everyone with it. But one day she brought in her parents’ gun and shot a boy. Everyone was shocked except me, because I had a stop sign growing out of my neck and couldn’t afford to see a doctor 🇺🇸 and was so overwhelmed.
Once I had a horrible nightmare in which I was a guy in his 40s and a child predator as well. In the dream I had a red car and was stalking schools looking for teenage girls, offering them a ride.
There were no victims in the dream but woke up so disturbed it took me a whole minute to realize I was, in real life, a woman in her early 20s. It’s by far the most bizarre shit my brain ever dumped on me while asleep. Wtf.
That’s wild.
I have a recurring dream that I have forgotten about something. Something with a dollar value (usually $40,000 for some reason) and I am now just realizing I have to account for this missing thing. I can’t explain really, sometimes it’s work related so I’m concerned I’ll be asked to cover the costs of forgetting this $40,000 item somewhere.
When I wake up it takes me a few minutes for that anxiety/stress to fade out properly. I can’t imagine the strange middle world your brain was in as your brain booted up fully.
I know this one is pretty common, but after I graduated uni I was having recurring dreams for years, where I’d suddenly realise I was enrolled in one extra subject and I’d forgotten to attend any classes, and the exam is tomorrow, and it’s the last subject I need to complete my degree, and if I don’t pass then I won’t graduate.
These were so real, and the panic and anxiety so intense. Every time I had this dream I would wake up convinced I was still enrolled in school, I would log into my school account only to confirm to myself that I have no current class enrolments, and indeed I did graduate already. It would still take me several hours to get that amount of anxiety out of my head.
I was having this dream at least once a month for about 18 months.
I had another one of those a couple nights ago. Was getting ready for bed (in dream) at my parents place and realized it was Thursday and I hadn’t been to school in awhile… Which classes did I miss? When was the exam?
I’m nearly 40, I graduated highschool when I was 17…
Sometimes it’s a university dream though, exactly like yours. I was in a class and then forgot to go most of the semester, and now the exam has to be coming up… And did I have a big workbook to get done?
That anxiety is 4 years fresher… But still. You’d think I’d move on…
I suppose it goes to show just how much pressure, stress, and trauma we put ourselves through for a decent education. It has lasting effects, could even be a form of PTSD for some people.
Holy cow you woke up to anxiety over a $40k debt. That’s not nice. Interesting to see this happens to other people as well, I never heard in person (at least) about others waking up under normal conditions and not fully realising who they were.
Yeah you bet it was messed. I had a mini panic attack thinking the police were after me, that my life was over, that I was going to rot in jail and I felt so disgusted at myself for taking advantage of those girls. All that in under a minute. And then the wave of relief as I realised who I really was.
Yes, I have serious trouble “booting up” in the morning. I have been a vivid dreamer and sleep walker/night terrors since I was barely a teenager. When I wake up in the night I often just live for 10 minutes or so in whatever reality I had been dreaming (lay in bed trying to come to terms with the fact my cat who’s been dead for decades actually is fine and just really really old now) and then go in back to sleep in that reality.
But waking up in the morning can be either jarring or more insidious. I’ve been having lunch before I think “wait. I didn’t win that lottery, so I do still need to go to work Monday… Fuck.”
And to complicate it even more, sometimes I dream of something happening A SECOND TIME. Why is this a problem? Because I don’t remember if the memory in my dream was A) another dream I had earlier, B) a memory created in that dream that night for backstory or C) happened in real life.
Those ones are the worst… I’ve had to ask my partner serious questions like "so I had a dream last night we left our sex toys out and mom found them… But I remembered in my dream she already found them before… But did she in real life or…?
Also if he ever cheats on me “again” in my dreams… That poor man is gonna be in so much trouble…
I don’t envy you. That’s intense! On the bright side, at least you’re getting used to reality shifting drastically and unexpectedly, which I hope makes you resilient. Rejecting reality as if it had been a dream (which also happened to me) is probably worse in the long run.
I do wonder. I’ve never gotten confused the other way like you (dismissing a thing that happened as a dream) but I’m sure psychologists would have lots of notes.