Why Am I Sad About A Dream When It’s Not Even Real?
Dreams are much more a part of our emotional experience and landscape than most of us realize or acknowledge.
Consider this: one of the most common themes posted online on various dream-related boards has to do with meeting someone in a dream, engaging in some kind of encounter or relationship with them, and then waking up to realize they “don’t exist” in waking life. People report real sadness, longing, confusion, and suffering over such dreams.
I have experienced this type of dream myself and often share one of my oldest dream memories from childhood in which I woke up to realize a boy I met and played with in a dream didn’t exist as a “real person” in my world. I felt so sad and didn’t know what to do with that sadness since the grown-ups all made it clear to me that the only events worthy of feeling were “real ones,” not the ones in my books, imagination, or dreams.
Why do we feel pain or longing over an encounter that “never happened?”
Because it did, in fact, happen. That’s why. Our perception is our reality, and the more emotion a perceptual or sensual experience is paired with, the more impressed it is upon us and the more real it feels to us.
Why do we feel empathy for characters in movies and TV shows we watch, but know are not “real?”
Why are we engaged in the stories of online influencer families who we have never met and likely never will meet?
Why do we feel so committed to our video game avatars, and their successes or failures in a game?
Because witnessing their stories (perceiving the images) activates an emotional response in us, either consciously or subconsciously. And, like it or not, we even grow attached to them and their stories as a result of our emotions being activated. These fictional or unknown-to-us people mirror or project back to us our own desires, fears, wounding, limitations, hopes, or dread.
When an emotion is activated by a perception, encounter, or relationship in a vivid dream, it’s a bit more challenging for us to let go of or dismiss the feeling of realness the dream gives rise to, especially because it’s perceived at seemingly closer range, and typically from a first-person perspective. The nearness of the action, the vividness of the perceptual events, the confirmation of assumptions, and the deep feelings activated all interact to create a sense it’s really happening to us in the dream. (Note: This is a very brief, and not-so-adequate description of a much more complex process.)
As a result, remembering a dream experience often hits much closer to home for many of us compared to watching a fictional character in a TV show or an avatar in a video game. The dream typically feels as if it is happening to us.
In fact, while video games and social media certainly lead to hyperarousal for many people, for individuals who don’t regularly engage in meaningful encounters or relationships in waking life or for those who are isolated or lonely, dream experiences may seem even richer in feeling or sensation than anything in waking life, including video games.
To censure oneself for having an emotional response to a dream experience that feels so real is, in a way, cruel.
Yes, waking up from our own vivid dreams may prompt an existential question about whether or not the experience “was real” but dismissing the experience of realness the dream offers you is a missed opportunity.
Try this instead: Drop the question of whether or not a dream encounter was real for just 15 minutes. Put the existential question into an imaginary drawer for later examination and tune into how the dream left you feeling. What did the dream feeling remind you of? What does the dream event want to illuminate that you keep trying to hide from yourself or others? In what way is the dream provoking you? In what way is it stirring a longing or a need? Does it frighten you? Why? Does it excite you? Do you have mixed feelings about this encounter?
Is this feeling new? Familiar?
Dreamwork assumes there is a certain realness to the dream even if the events you perceived in the dream are not “facts” that may be proven, and despite dreams existing outside of regular space or time.
Dreamwork doesn’t suggest you abandon consensus reality, ignore physics, or drop the means by which you ordinarily navigate waking life and social interactions safely and successfully.
I am not advocating total and complete disregard for social norms, either.
Yet, dreamwork does recognize and even honors the realness of the dream experience for you, even if philosophically we can’t agree on where the dream images arise from, who or what creates them, or why they occur when we sleep. Further, the more you pay attention to your own dreams, the more real dreams start to feel for you inside them, and even after.
Simply, the dreams respond to your attention to them. (I’ve written before about how dreamwork enlivens the senses and seems to result in even more sensory-rich dreaming.)
So, if you are interested in working your dreams (and I hope you are), you should be prepared to give attention and care to your emotional experience in the dream, especially when the dream feels very real.
In dreamwork, your sensations and your feelings matter. We slow down for sensing and feeling. Doing so may be the very function of dreams and dreaming.
Consider that “real” doesn’t have to mean true or shared or absolute or fixed. Consider that real can sometimes simply mean perceived. (This interpretation of real is also helpful to those of us who find ourselves perceiving that which is beyond the five senses.)
There is both a huge benefit, and I suppose a hazard, to interpreting “real” in this way: Dreamwork demands a willingness to question your established beliefs about reality. It initiates an expansion of the mind and blurs the boundaries between dream and waking life.
I believe this is useful and important work for anyone interested in spiritual depth and knowing themselves more intimately.
I am not encouraging maladaptive, reckless, or solipsistic behavior, especially not in this current climate where it’s becoming more and more difficult to discern what is factual and what isn’t simply from the images we see and the stories that are presented to us by both legacy media and social media.
I am simply suggesting that the question, “Is this real?” can be put to the side for a moment while you explore more deeply the feelings that arise out of a very vivid dream. Let’s not be so quick to judge ourselves, pathologize ourselves, or minimize what seems to want to emerge from the deep.
When we focus too much or too little on the assumed reality of the dream (a continuum that runs from completely forgetting a dream to believing the dream realms are somehow more real and more important than waking life), we lose the chance in that moment for greater self-awareness and soul growth that comes each time something vivid in a dream catches our emotional attention.
I can say with certainty that the feelings evoked from a dream should take priority over the feelings evoked by an online influencer family or a television show because dream images are images that arise from you, internally, and pertain to you. (Even if the images in dreams are sometimes borrowed from memory.)
Dream images haven’t been curated by someone else and fed to you in the hopes of capturing your attention for their benefit for likes, traffic, opinion-shaping, or income generation, etc. (Not yet, at least!)
Consider how much emotional attention you give to external images: your favorite reality TV show characters, the news, your social media feed — and then consider how much emotional attention you give to your dreams and internal images.
If the first outweighs the second, consider that you are giving away for free to another that which could be used to improve your own life, your own relationships, and your connection to soul.
If you are sad about a dream that seems “not real,” don’t worry or make yourself wrong. You are on the path of spiritual development and personal growth. This sadness is an opening to explore the depths, and to eventually better know who the “real” you is beneath the stories of who you or others think you are. It’s a good sign!