Dream-reality confusion: Why old dreams can feel like real memories (2024)

FAQs

Dream-reality confusion: Why old dreams can feel like real memories? ›

For some people, past dreams can subsequently feel like real memories — an experience commonly referred to as “dream-reality confusion.” If you're scratching your head, wondering how the line between dreams and memories can become so blurred, consider this: Human memory is both fallible and malleable.

Sometimes the dreams we have seem so real. Most of the emotions, sensations, and images we feel and visualize are those that we can say we have seen or experienced in real life. This is because the same parts of the brain that are active when we are awake are also active when we are in certain stages of our sleep.

Persons affected by oneirophrenia have a feeling of dream-like derealization which, in its extreme form, may progress to delusions and hallucinations.

“Neurological structures work together to create a vivid perceptual experience, like a visual hallucination, that we sometimes remember, and sometimes don't, upon waking.” If you've had a day or time period that's been full of extreme emotions, it can potentially lead to vivid dreams.

That feeling is often described as déjà vu.

The term 'Oneirophrenia' describes a state where a person becomes confused about the distinction between reality and dream as if he or she were living in a dream state. ¹. The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology defines oneirophrenia a 'dreamlike state of consciousness. ².

Lucid dreams are when you know that you're dreaming while you're asleep. You're aware that the events flashing through your brain aren't really happening. But the dream feels vivid and real. You may even be able to control how the action unfolds, as if you're directing a movie in your sleep.

Simply put, tired people sleep more deeply and dream more vividly. An extension of this is dream-reality confusion (DRC) that occurs in approximately 15% of all healthy people with this percentage going up to 83% in patients with narcolepsy and also shows an increase in those with a borderline personality disorder.

Alarm clocks, and irregular sleep schedules can result in abrupt waking during dream or REM sleep, and thus result in recall of dreams. Sleep apnea, alcohol, or anything that disturbs sleep can also cause dream recall,” Dimitriu says.

Control enables dreamers to alter the dream plot, dissociation occurs when the dreamer experiences the dream as if it was displayed on a screen, as in waking derealization, or sees himself from the outside, as in waking depersonalization (Sierra and Berrios, 2001; Falkai, 2015; see also Windt and Voss, 2018).

Why am I mixing up dreams with reality? ›

It is also possible that when dream-reality confusion occurs, this could represent unusual memory encoding during sleep (essentially, there is something unusual about the way in which the dream is converted during sleep, before it is stored in long-term memory).

Epic dreaming is a type of disturbed dreaming described as experiencing daytime fatigue. after dreaming all night. To investigate whether such phenomena is simply a vivid dream or more of. a disturbing nightmare, we are going to look at the physiological and psychological aspect of epic.

Conversely, a riveting conjecture exists that dreams might also function as conduits to alternative dimensions or elevated states of consciousness, suggesting a more profound and expansive role than traditionally conceived.

They have discovered that if you wake up with vivid memories of your dreams, it typically means they occurred during REM sleep. REM sleep is when we tend to dream. The deepest NREM sleep is when the body fully relaxes and repairs itself. Learn about the stages of sleep here.

Deja vu in dreams can happen as a result of this memory blending because parts of several experiences mix together to give the impression that the dreamer is reliving the past. The dream simulation hypothesis, which contends that dreams replicate real-world experiences, is another explanation.

Hypermnesia is a phenomenon in which memory performance improves across repeated tests even though no new exposure to the study material occurs between tests. Hypermnesia is a combined effect of reminiscence (item gains) and intertest forgetting (item losses).

Unfortunately, there's really one way to tell if a memory is real, and that's to compare your memory to independent evidence of the event. However, that may not be possible in a lot of cases and without that independent evidence, people generally only identify false memories correctly about 50% of the time.

Having vivid dreams every now and then—especially in times of high stress or emotional upheaval—is nothing to worry about. However, mental health does play a role in dream creation, and frequent vivid dreams might be a symptom of a mental health condition.

Sometimes, dreams come true or tell of a future event. When you have a dream that plays out in real life, experts say it's most likely due to: Coincidence.