A recent greentext post about an imaginary wife made me think of this.

Have you ever had a dream, where you fell in love with a dream character?

I’ve had at least a couple over the years that I can vaguely remember. The dreams were so vivid, and the feeling of love for this imaginary person was so strong, that I woke up feeling rather heartbroken and a sense of longing.

Anyone else?

  • Fizz@lemmy.nz
    18·
    3 months ago

    Yes. My dreams are incredibly vivid and I can get confused between them and memories. Most of my dreams are very mundane but sometimes my brain conjures up the perfect scenario to illict and extreme emotional response. I feel like my brains testing to make sure everything still works cause my life is very stable and boring.

    The worst one recently was a dream about a faceless women who I seemed to care deeply about getting in a carcrash and dying in front of me. It felt like I had lost everything and all meaning in life was gone. I had to sit with the feeling for what felt like a lifetime. I don’t know why dreams do this and would be interested if anyone knew why this happens.

    • Zozano@lemy.lolEnglish
      21·
      3 months ago

      There are two main theories about why dreams occur.

      (Explained in computing terms)

      First is scheduled maintenance.

      Your brain essentially runs a defrag when you dream, trimming useless information. Most times, you forget about the dream, but other times you’ll wonder why you recalled that memory from 15 years ago. Your brain needs to inspect the file before sending it to the trash, but you managed to recover it before it got zeroed (unrecoverable).

      Second is threat model assessment.

      Your brain is randomly compiling memories while you dream, scanning for useful information. Sometimes a certain combination will leave a strong impression, which gets cached (saved to RAM). These memories are usually bad, and get saved to disk because we’re slow at debugging, but are invested in fixing it to avoid a kernel panic (blue screen). We spend so much time thinking about it, that the bad memory’s directory gets added to $PATH(bookmarked)