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.
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.