Trouble separating dreams from reality

Is this a normal thing? It’s been happening for the last couple of years, but recently I’ve noticed it happening more often. I have a dream in which, for example I have a conversation with someone I know, but don't remember it the morning as a dream….and then at some point days later I remember the dream as an actual event which I believe really happen. I’ve often confronted people for things they never actually said or did – sometimes I find out/work out whole days lodged in my memory which never happened at all. At first I thought it was quite interesting but now I’m starting to wonder just how much of my life really did happen….Its like i'm losing my grip on reality...
Does anyone have any insights on this?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I am a little confused as to why this has been moved to the parapsychology board. I am not talking about a paranormal activity...at most it could be a psychological disorder. Does that not belong in 'human science' ?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

i have had those feelings where a certain incident i have thought or "dreamt off" happens in future, but i think its only a twisted form of Deja VU. nothing serious....


Rick

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

This should really be in Human Science, I guess however the concern is that anything dream related usually spirals into something parapsychological.

I can't really give you any tips to distinguish reality from fiction, I did have something occur to me which was similar however instead of interacting with people normally, I was interacting with people across a multiplayer game environment (the characters would speak with speech bubbles). Luckily for me my interaction with people across the internet allowed me to disassociate my conversations.

What I can say however is perhaps you should try taking hold of your dreams, If you are talking to someone you don't have to say "Pinch me, I'm dreaming" but what you can try to do is examine if you are fully sensing your surroundings.

If you sit for one moment and take in to what depth you can smell, taste, hear, feel and see, you'll find that you'll be able to distinguish what is real better. For instance listen carefully you might hear wind, or birds, or the humming of your computer. Tapping on a keyboard you have textures to feel that can't be described as mere words etc.

As for why you have conversations in your sleep, well it's proportionally anxiety, I think everybody succumbs to pre-emptive decision making on how their conversation structure will be before they have it, we do it so that we can be clear and precise with what we say while also attempting to evaluate the situation even before actually being in the situation. You might not of had the conversation with the person, but what would have been said in that conversation is obviously what's important, after all if you've had a conversation with someone that didn't turn out the way you expected, you might well have the chance to change that although you've only a "simulation" to go by.

 

Doesn't the act of waking up suggest that all the events that occured between that moment and going to sleep were dream content? If that doesn't then you might have some kind of bizarre neurological problem.

 

Do you mean you were interacting with real people (not on the internet) in a multiplayer game environment – or that they were people you had already interacted with in that setting (on the internet) before and you had invented the interactions in your dream which never happened...then worked out it wasn’t real? (if that makes sense)

The problem is that when I have the dream I am unaware, at least consciously. It is only when I talk to someone who has ‘featured’ later on then I realised that it might never have happened and I only dreamed it

Well I totally agree with that, what I dreamed happened correlates very closely with what I would imagine if I had that conversation with that person...the problem is I don't know if I really had that conversation or not until I speak to the person

Well I don't remember it. I only remember it when it has been proved beyond all doubt that it never happened in real life. Sometimes there are cues which become apparent after i've learnt it is not real which suddenly make sense...but it is rare. Normally i am left seriously confused and unable to explain what i remember

 

The latter. I'd interacted with them before however when sleeping that night and a few consecutive nights, I dreamt of interacting with them as if they were talking to me about completely different things from how I had interacted with them, it was near indistinguishable from being awake, there were only a few things observable to distinguish difference.

What I was getting at was if you run your hand under a cold tap and allow the water to flow, there is so much information that the mind can't just create. The brain tends to remember things in meta-patterns, I guess you could say a kind of overlay dot-to-dot which our consciousness connects with what it interfaces with. This is why some people see shapes in things when shapes aren't there. To have a whole reality built to the same extent as the real world would be near impossible, unless the observer isn't observant.

I wish your dilemma was as easy to fix as tying a loop of string to your finger so you remember reality.

 

Well I think i understand what you are saying, and as you said dreams rarely have the 'logical resolution' (for loss of a better phrase) as real life, but then again memories seldom do either. My dreams are often mudane without much to disguish them from reality in the first place and then a few days later they blur together with genuine memories and it is only other poeples accounts which discern the differences.

 

The only real solution I can think of is thinking about your dreams when you wake up and ingraining it into your memory that they were dreams. That will at least minimize mistakes remembering things moving forward.

 

The human mind is a weird bugger isnt it.
I dont have any suggestions either really, ive not had anything exactly like youve mentioned but i think everyone experiences alittle dream/reality bleed over effect to an extent.
The mind likes telling tales in any case, memory is notoriously slippery. What i remember that happened 10 years ago is more like a film ive created based upon my experiences rather than an accurate account of what actually happened.
Alongside the embelishments here and there ive probably completely made up things that never actually happened atall.
We're constantly re-shaping reality in our cranial editing suites, throwing in cut scenes and bits of stock footage here and there. :roflmao:

 

Is the dream we call reality real only because we spend more time in it? If you spent 66.6% time "sleeping" instead of being "awake", maybe dreams would become reality...

 

Very freaked out by something that happened after dreaming last night

I had a dream last night in which I lived in an appartment I've never seen before. I remember it having two huge slightly outdated tv screens. In itself this was of course not remarkable. What freaks me out is that for close to five minutes after I woke up I was convinced that I had owned that appartment and those huge tvs sometime back in the nineties. I was completely awake while thinking this. Only gradually did it occur to me that something about this wasn't right, and it still took me a while to figure out what my actual mistake was. What makes it even more bizarre is that I have lived in the same appartment since I moved out of my parents house 18 years ago. Am I losing my mind?

 

this isn't too unusual because i've had dreams like this about having a conversation with someone etc. when i would wake up, it was as if what i had dreamed really had taken place in real life and i was just recalling it in the dream or that was the strong feeling that i had. there is often an added effect of this event or dream recurring. though after waking up, i couldn't recall this taking place in real life. most dreams don't repeat exactly or have this effect. it is interesting though.

 

Probably not losing your mind.

If you dream with intense vividness it may be hard to distinguish dream from reality for a little while on waking up.

But you might be under a bit of stress lately? Eh, that's an easy guess, a majority of people are...

Rest confident in the fact that you're way out of the age range for typical schizophrenia onset.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Possibly I may offer some help with this.
Firstly, the need to confront people needs to be looked at and why you feel the urge to test yourself.
Obviously if the urge to test yourself and confront people is present then you have a significant clue that you are about to explore the dream issue again with someone.
So when you feel the urge to confront someone and prove the reality of an event you can know that you are dealing with your dream /reality issue.
Normally people do not have to confront people about prior events especially if unrelated to work or typical past history.

Secondly, whilst medical opinion may suggest a "Bizzare Neurological" pathology, dreams rising into consciousness is a typically normal function of how we feel the way we feel and do the things we do. "Fantasy" rising into reality is how we plan and move forward in our lives. The feelings/emotions associated with "self discovery" are also normal and not at all bizzare but can be incredibly intense to the point of dysfunction and dis-ability.

With the awareness being acute of this process you may be experiencing the intense curiosity that most people experience when exploring these realms of the way the mind works which leads to a sort of compulsive and obsessive state. [ a need to validate your understanding and learn from the experience is often underestimated in it's strength and pervasiveness.]

The key to recovery is to learn how to lower the acuteness [intensity] of your experience/knowledge to the degree where proper self-understanding can take place.

Basically, you have learned something about the way the mind works that others will seek to discredit because of there own fear [paranoia] which leads to the intensity of the experience being isolating and debilitating. Once the "genie" [ other wise referred to as pandoras box] of knowledge is out of the bottle it is damn hard to put back, until the intensity of feelings and urges that knowledge inspires is managed adequately.

hope this helps....

 

The only thing I have to compare this experience to was when I went back to work in grocery retail after being self employed for over a decade.

Much had changed in the employment world and I took on a graveyard shift job and had to learn about computerized systems, deal with personality and human rights issues from co-workers, memorize the descriptions and locations of over 10,000 products and all done at a break neck pace.

Physical and emotional overload working many hours of overtime after being used to doing all my work by appointment at my own discretion.

I would dream that I was at work, doing my job, dealing with the people and operational difficulties, awaking exhausted.

At the point where I woke up, I knew that I had been dreaming, because then it was time to get ready and go to work to do it all over again in real time. :bugeye:

You say that this has been happening for the last couple of years. Are there any changes in your job or your health, or is there any question of job security looming on your event horizon?

From my own experience, I would wonder if anxiety is at the root of your present difficulty in separating dream reality from the three dimensional.

Anxiety brings out creative actions from within, as our mind examines issues from perspectives that we may not have considered until challenged.

 

well said...IMO

 

i have had this problem most my life,exept the fact that those are the only ones i remember.sooner i noticed that the same convo happends in my future.like this one night i remember my teacher asking me to pick a number from 1-5000, i picked 3497,the exact number he was thinking of.then like a week later it happened(exept durring day in class) with the same # set and chosen number.

 

I've dreams every night, ranging from the typical ones to ones similar to movie scenes.

For some of the dreams, I've conversations with other people (being real friends or people mashed by the brain itself). Everything seems real (down to the smell, texture, heat ,taste etc.)

Usually I realise I'm dreaming when I wake up, but sometimes, I experience similar situations as just_not_there. Usually I find the person who appeared in the dream, usually my friends and ask them about whether they have did so and so, and I'll be very suprised when they said they have not.

Trying to work out how my brain takes in things perceived when awake and mashed them raondomly into the things in dreams, I've been keeping dream diaries since 5/6/2010. I then noticed the brain can never simulate things you have never experienced.

e.g. I have a dream where I'm being shot, however I feel no pain but simply collasped. After recording this dream and analyse it, refercing to what I have in my past experience and memory, I then noticed there is no pain because I've never experienced a gun shot, thus my brain cannot anticipate how it is like

My main point is, dream environments usually consists of things sensed when awake. If you can find out how A sense in reality inspires B event in the dream, then you might have a better grasp on how to distinguishing reality from a dream. (Cause no matter how real the dream is, there's always something that looks unlogical/ violates science and these things can tell you that the environment you are in is just a dream)

P.S. I was thinking about searching dream related threads to post on, so apologies for reviving this thread

 

Generally I don't remember dreams unless I wake up whilst dreaming, and then the dream I am experiencing can link all the way back through the night's REM periods. This I suppose allows distinction as you suggest. However a poor memory may cause these dreams to be mistaken as reality. So a poor memory more than some big neurological problem.

I have to admit I have experienced the phenomenon explained here, but no where near to the same extent.

My suggestion to "Just Not There" is to try an old "learning to control one's dreams" technique. Logically it could help you create a stronger differential between dreams and reality (obviously your dreams are very vivid and believable; not a detriment, just a challenge and gift).

The principle is that you decide on a unique symbol/logo that you can use to print out on an few A4 sheets of paper. Under this symbol write the words "YOU ARE DREAMING!". Then disperse these sheets around your abode in places you will be unable to avoid close opthalmic contact with them. Inside of bathroom door, on other doors or walls where you eyes will frequently linger. This technique is used to burn the symbol and its meaning into you everyday existence and therefore memory.

After some time a subject will notice that he starts to experience the symbol and meaning whilst dreaming, therefore enabling him to realise he is dreaming. This is the first step towards controlling his dreams. After said dreamer has mastered the art of not waking up straight away due to this awareness of the fact he is dreaming (rush of adrenaline I would imagine) he will find that he has power to do what he wants whilst dreaming, and even build up the ability to manipulate his dreams completely over time.

This of course will allow you to realise you are dreaming and therefore wake up. Or even start to manipulate a dream in an unrealistic way and therefore record a memory of it as a definite dream and not as reality. The bonus of the control will afford a very clear distinction, (dreams are easy to spot once you are looking) and GOOD memory of a dreamstate as being a dream as opposed to being a realstate.