As in the dream you had while sleeping.
Mine had me seeing the sky distort and turn into some sort of dimensional rift. I remember seeing black goo falling from the sky and seeing a large, sandstone ceiling cover everything. Just beyond the reach of clouds I saw a rocky ceiling with square holes in them that lead into the darkness of space. Then, after getting lost in an ancient pyramid, the sky then turned into planets phasing into one another. Like textures in a video game overlapping one another. I saw lights in the sky flying around like fireflies and hearing a voice saying “You’re quarantined on this planet. You may not leave but we can.”
I remember a bunch over the years that I can still close my eyes and replay, so this is a harder question than it may seem on the surface.
The actual most unforgettable is a recurring nightmare that I’m not willing to talk about because fuck that.
But number two was a doozie. Heh.
Back in high school, I had one of those bonkers dreams that fucked me up bad for a while.
In the dream, I met a girl, fell in love, had kids and grandkids, grew old together. And I’m not talking about just those events and nothing else. There were entire days taking place, from waking up to going to bed in the dream. Entire birthday parties, vacations together, sitting on swings and swinging while holding hands and watching the kids play.
I lived an entire fucking life in a dream.
And I woke up from that still a fucking kid. And I immediately started crying because my family were gone, my dream family. I lost them just as sure as if they’d died. It was both beautiful and horrifying.
It fucked me up. Not that I wasn’t already pretty damn fucked up, what with PTSD already kicking my ass at that age. But that dream was brutal. Well, waking up from it was, the dream itself was amazing.
I’ve told the story of this many times online because retelling it tends to take the sting out of it a little more each time.
Not that I haven’t had a great deal of joy in real life, I have. And I’m happier with my wife and kid now than I ever was in the dream, plus it’s real. But that dream has sometimes made it difficult to be fully present in a relationship in the past. It was one of those things where knowing that the person I was with wasn’t the right one made it easier to end things before they went bad. But the fact that I would have to constantly compare reality to the dream meant that I could never be certain how much was a genuine incompatibility and how much was holding reality up to the lens of a dream.
But the older I got, the less that factored into things. Now, it’s more of a pleasant memory than a bad one. The dream has lost its sting from being only a dream, and reality is better in terms of having a fulfilling and real partner.