I've been having an increase in strange dreams, lately. Now, I know most psychologists these days don't think of dreams as meaning anything special, anymore, but I tend to lean towards the ideology that dreams do in fact mean something. So, the last few nights I've been having these really bizarre, quasi-lucid dreams that seem to last for decades, so much so that when I wake up, I'm confused, disoriented and I've almost completely forgotten who I am, where I am and what I'm doing here. The dreams tend to consist of me wandering around a derelict version of my own local area, and other than the squalor, everything is as it should be-- though the people in these dreams are reminiscent of the people I know, they aren't exactly the same as the people I know-- some have slightly different names, different hair color, eye color, some who are white in real life may be black, visa versa etc... And while there's nothing particularly fantastic about the world I'm in, there's an unreality to it all as there is with many dreams. Often I'll myself in these dreams for an indeterminate amount of time in my head, but as I've said it seems to range from a few years to several decades. Last night I was in them so long that by the time I woke up I didn't even know what the name of the thing I was sleeping in was called (a bed) or what that bright orb in the sky (the sun) was coming in through the hole in my wall (the window). It sounds silly, I know and I'm not sure what I'm asking here, but maybe it's has anyone else had dreams that last for a very long time? In short, does anyone else experience heavily extended quasi-lucid dreams?
I have had long dreams before and they seem so real! But not that long ago i had one which lasted like 10 years and when i woke up i was like 'wtf?!' I was really confused lol.
Yeah, it's kind of like that, except when I wake up I say: "I'm young again! But how?" That's how realistic this is.
Oh i didnt age in my dreams but everyone else did, i guess thats what helped me think it werent real but even with that it was too realistic, like since when do you dream about normal life? xD
See, you're sixteen and I guess it's difficult for you to remember your life ten years ago as accurately as I can recall my previous decade. But yes, I age in my dreams, and I didn't say it was 'normal,' I said it's 'not particularly fantastic,' as in fantastical things do occur from time to time, whether it be the ability to float, teleport, shift perspectives from physical to metaphysical, viewing myself from the outside in, seeing myself twenty years older than I am now on a planet covered in frost and tied by broken roads.
I haven't had dreams where I age and see it, but there have been many strange and pretty frightening dreams throughout the years. The really scary ones would result in some kind of hallucination after waking up for at least a few minutes. One instance I remember the most was when I was really little, and had a dream about being a Fraggle (don't ask I was a strange child). Fraggles always ran away from those giants, and I dreamed that's what we were doing. When I woke up, I saw two giant's hands sticking out of my bedroom wall and reaching for me. I easily stared at them for ten minutes. As for something that sounds more similar to what you've experienced, I have had a few dreams that seemed to meld with reality, and I've had a hard time separating the two. I'm not sure if that's a sign of mental illness or not, but it does make me concerned. Recently I had a dream that my family was being shot at by thugs who were driving by, right as we were leaving my therapist's office. I woke up and seriously thought I had almost been killed in a hit and run the previous night. It took me a while to say "Wait a minute. That didn't happen." I know it's not exactly what you've experienced, but it's at least pretty close...?
I think what you're describing is sleep paralysis, which isn't exactly what I'm experiencing. The only word to define what I'm experiencing that I have in my vocabulary is... traveling. It's almost as if I've been lifted from one plane of existence to another and then back.
