One day, the YouTube algorithm fed me a clip of an interview between English podcaster Chris Williamson and Internet personality MrBallen. I hadn’t heard of MrBallen before watching this YouTube video, so he wasn’t the draw for me. The draw was the title of the video, “The Disturbing Reddit Lamp Story.” The title intrigued me, especially considering a lamp was involved, and I’ve been having evolving dreams about disturbing lamps over the last many years.
From a few minutes into MrBallen’s tale, I could tell where this was going. I’m a storyteller myself and I’ve heard stories like this one before. In fact, I’d experienced something similar to this myself. (More on that later.)
The story is about a man who claims to have lived many years of life inside a head-trauma-induced coma, only to be returned back into his injured body, with vivid memories of that life, to discover the events of that life never happened.
The claim is that the man was in college when the accident happened. He survived the accident, and soon after convinced the woman he had a crush on to date him. They fell in love, had two kids and a whole adult family life followed. Then one day strange things started happening to him, mainly involving his eye sight and perception, all focused around this lamp in his living room. Eventually, he loses consciousness in that life, and wakes up back in his body, in the hospital, age 20 or so, told he had been in a coma for some time. He insists this other life was “real” and suffers from a very painful depression following what feels to him the very real loss of a whole life and a family.
A few years ago, I listened to a podcast in which a different man shared a similar story. His reality-altering experience was induced by taking a very large dose of the psychedelic plant Salvia. This man, too, claims to have lived — inside a minutes-long trip — many many years of an alternate life. Except he lived inside the body and perspective of someone not himself.
After taking a bong hit of this plant, he felt himself be sucked up into a type of portal and “emerged” on a dock on a lake inside the body of a man who had apparently been knocked unconscious in a waterskiing incident. He maintained a sense of self from before and memory of his life “back home,” but his “friends” on the waterskiing dock recognized him as their friend of a long time and concerned, took him to the hospital where doctors diagnosed him with medical amnesia. You can listen to Steve Cantwell tell his own story here, but it too involves an individual who claims to have lived eight years inside a different life before being “returned” to his “original life” once the trip ran its course.
If you read the comments section on both YouTube videos, you will find that there are many people who profess to either know someone who had a similar experience or had one themselves, of varying degrees.
Above, I even mentioned I experienced something similar myself.
In fact, I experience a version of this type of sometimes-painful transition “between lives” on a regular basis when I wake up from my very vivid dreams. This has been a feeling state I have become quite familiar with since I was a child, which is one of the reasons dreams have always been such a topic of fascination and curiosity for me. Not everyone dreams this vivdly, and so it may be hard for you to relate to it. But some of you may very well relate.
I have lived many, many lives inside dreams. (Read this article which goes more deeply into the idea that you are not always “You” in a dream.)
And the more I recall and engage with these types of dreams in waking life (using dreamwork), the more real many of them seem.
Some of you may argue, “oh no, a vivid dream is not the same thing as what these men are describing.” Most will call what those men experienced a “very intense hallucination.” Certainly, the phenomenon of “time slippage” or disturbed time experience is a known side effect of hallucination, whether due to drugs, medical conditions (such as temporal lobe epilepsy or migraine), or certain psychological disorders. So is dissociation or depersonalization.
Perhaps both men — one due to head trauma and the other due to psychedelics — fell deeply into a hallucinatory state.
Dreams are different, though. Aren’t they?
I’m not so sure.
Different, but maybe also the same. In fact, I am here today as a consciousness researcher and a dreamwork practitioner precisely because of how real dreams often feel to me — and to others. For many, seeking the answer to “why does my dream feel so real?” is the impetus to start dreamwork or talking to a practitioner about their dreams. Vivid dreamers express a range of feelings about their experience from excitement to fear to loneliness. (More on vivid dreams and loneliness here.)
And this brings me to what is at the heart of my own research — whether I am exploring dreaming, memory, time, relationships, healing, trauma, consciousness, or the paranormal: I want to know what it is that makes the dream experience feel real, and to know what it is that differentiates that experience from the embodied sense of Me — or of “I am” — that we identify as the real of waking life.
I suppose I am also seeking the “why.” What is the purpose of these types of dreams or altered states? Why does one person go through such an experience, and another person does not? What follows? How can these dreams and experiences transform us? How do they?
* * * *
Papers have been written comparing hallucinatory states and dreams, noting some similarities, but I don’t want to get too clinical in this article, as I am mostly interested today in reflecting on the emotional experience that follows waking up from a very vivid dream; a dream that feels so real, one is left with a sense of longing, grief, desire, love, pain, terror, sadness, or even comfort for many hours or even days following the dream.
I believe it is the emotional experience, and lingering feeling states after, that have the power to transform us.
Have you had a dream that left you with a particular feeling for hours or days? It’s pretty powerful when you think about it — how a nightly dream, spontaneous imagery that presumably comes from somewhere inside us, seems to be able to stir up such a strong and long-lasting state of feeling.
When we dream, we really believe we are living the lives the dream images present us with. In the dream, we believe the experiences and events are real, almost every time. (Save for skilled lucid dreamers.)
Because of this sense of the real, each night, if we fall deeply enough into sleep, we are able to experience at least one or more other lives. As with the lives the two men described above, some of these dream lives may take place in an alternate timeline of You, in which you still maintain a sense of your waking life Self, but the events are strange, don’t make sense, are out of order, or don’t match with your story of you. Other dream lives send you into the first-person perspective of an individual with a historical context and autobiography completely unfamiliar to you. Nothing at all is the same as your waking life. Sometimes you even dream of being someone else, not you. Or in a different era.
Nonetheless, while inside them, these dreams feel very real and immediate, despite their strangeness or otherness. The events are actually happening to you in the now.
Eventually, however, you wake up, you experience waking life with your senses, you begin to remember who you are in this life and all of this life’s stories and attachments.
It doesn’t take long before you re-adjust to your sense of your I, your point-of-view, your history, your stories, and typically willingly forget the lives you just lived in dreams.
Unlike the two men, most of us determine those lives were not real and forget them.
Why?
* * * *
What makes the stories of these two men so compelling?
- They each maintained memories of the alternate life and strong feelings about the alternate life upon return.
- Each maintained a belief that the experience was real, and not a hallucination.
One element that seems to distinguish these two stories from your average vivid dream has to do with the feeling of the passage of time inside their experience.
Is time necessarily an indicator of realness?
I think most us know by now that perception of time is a funny thing — especially in dreams. What do you really notice about the passage of time in your dreams? How do you know if a day has passed, or eight years?
Time doesn’t seem to matter as much in dreams, does it? In the recorded dreams I receive from clients I hardly ever see notation of clock or calendar time. I may receive a dream with a note that indicates a dream event took place “in the morning” (perhaps, the room was lit by daylight) or night (the dreamer was walking down a dark street). Or a dream client will note that an encounter “seemed to last for a very long time.” But I rarely get a dream note that indicates “it was a Wednesday morning.” Alternatively, I often get notes of strong emotional reactions to time, “I was late for work and about to miss my train. I was super anxious.”
How do you sense the passing of time when you are in your waking life? What makes an hour feel like an hour? What makes a lifetime feel like a lifetime?
Is it calendar time that makes an encounter feel short or long? Is time what makes an encounter with another person feel solid or real?
Pause before you answer. Tune into a memory of a really painful time of life. How aware were you of clock or calendar time during these moments? And if you were aware of calendar time, was it truly the passing of the days that you were aware of, or rather, how agonizing it was to wake up each morning and still feel so much grief, so much pain for so many days, weeks, months, years?
I am willing to bet you remember most the depth and intensity of your pain or loneliness or grief (or whatever feelings were strongest during that time for you.) And while you may have a sense of how the passage of time felt during those experiences (interminably long or too short), your memories of clock time or calendar time aren’t as crisp or clear as the memories of your emotional state during that time.
* * * *
I don’t know what to make of the Disappearing Reddit Lamp tale or Steve Cantwell’s salvia trip story or the many claims of others in the YouTube comments.
I will tell you I am always interested in listening to personal stories like these. I have lots of questions when I do. If you have a dream or a personal story like this that happened to you, you can feel free to send it to me.
I will also share with you that in addition to being a very vivid dreamer, I now often dream of being inside another person’s awareness in which I am not Me, Jen. Sometimes I remember Jen’s life and stories inside the dream (and then I am confused, similar to what Steve Cantwell claims to have experienced) and sometimes I am fully engaged in the experience of being this Other Me inside the dream, with no attachment to Jen or curiosity as to what happened to Jen’s life, family, history, etc. In those dreams, in the experience of it, Jen seems to be gone.
When I wake up, however, I am Jen again (and I say a little prayer for this) and soon this Other Me is “gone.” Unless I write the dream down and contemplate what it was like to feel inside the Other Me, I lose the memory of that “life” entirely. Even when I do remember the life, it’s not so easy to re-inhabit the feeling of it.
Through my dreamwork practice and the support of my dreamwork community, I’ve learned to deeply appreciate this experience of going to sleep, becoming another Me, and believing entirely that I am that Other Me.
Even though doing so sometimes leaves me feeling frightened, sad, lonely, longing, or ashamed.
Other times, I wake up laughing, exhilarated, joyful, grateful … feeling more alive than ever in this life as a result of being the Other in the dream life. I’ve learned something new about myself through experiencing life as that Other.
I understand why forgetting our dreams serves a purpose. After all, for many of us, it may seem too much to carry all that feeling on top of what we already feel as a result of this one waking life. Forgetting our dreams is likely a trait humans possess on purpose. Or it could be one we developed evolutionarily over time. I’m not sure.
But I also understand how the Disappearing Reddit Lamp guy, if he isn’t an urban legend, would not be able to forget the life he believes he lived “inside the coma,” why he would so desperately hold on to it.
I feel this way about so many of my dreams and dream life experiences. And through remembering them and working them, I have discovered a way to honor their realness, and to integrate the experience and resulting feelings into my waking life.
I believe this is an overlapping necessity of altered states of consciousness like psychedelic trips or NDEs, and vivid dreams: the need for honoring, remembering, feeling, processing, and ultimately, integration. Unfortunately, many of us emerge from these experiences feeling shaken to our core and without a trusted friend, family member, dreamwork practitioner, or counselor to support us, listen to us, and help us. What would it be like if there was someone else opposite us to not only to try to help us make sense of what happened, but to also to process it, deeply feel it, and allow it to work through us toward healing.
Dreamwork has offered me such a unique and beautiful framework for speaking, validating, and processing the real feelings that result from my dream travels. I hope that all “travelers” and explorers are able to find a method and a practitioner that supports them in their own processing and integration. This is something, fortunately, the psychedelics community already practices and embraces. Vivid dreamers, I believe, as we experience these types of states often and intensely, could also benefit from formal settings for process and integration, as well, whether with a dreamwork practitioner, or with a “dreams-informed” spiritual counselor or therapist.
If you’re a vivid dreamer seeking such a space, you’ve found it.
