There was an AskReddit thread titled “Have you ever felt a deep personal connection to a person you met in a dream only to wake up feeling terrible because you realize they never existed?”
The original comment being referenced has been since deleted, but you can still find some reposts floating around.
Here’s a copy of it:
throw away account cause this is really personal.
My last semester at a certain college I was assulted by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive (note he was 325lbs I was 120lbs), while unconscious on the ground I lived a different life.
I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red, I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over, after two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter.
I had a great job and my wife didn’t have to work outside of the house, when my daughter was two she [my wife] bore me a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter.
One day while sitting on the couch I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but… just… wrong. (It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade). I was transfixed, I couldn’t look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn’t go to work, something was just not right about that lamp.
I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn’t eating or drinking. I stared at the fucking lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me, by this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out. She took the kids to her mother’s house just before I had my epiphany… the lamp is not real… the house is not real, my wife, my kids… none of that is real… the last 10 years of my life are not fucking real!
The lamp started to grow wider and deeper, it was still inverted dimensions, it took up my entire perspective and all I could see was red, I heard voices, screams, all kinds of weird noises and I became aware of pain… a fucking shit ton of pain… the first words I said were “I’m missing teeth” and opened my eyes. I was laying on my back on the sidewalk surrounded by people that I didn’t know, lots were freaking out, I was completely confused.
At some point a cop scooped me up, dragged/walked me across the sidewalk and grass and threw me face down in the back of a cop car, I was still confused.
I was taken to the hospital by the cop (seems he didn’t want to wait for the ambulance to arrive) and give CT scans and shit…
I went through about 3 years of horrid depression, I was grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed, I was scared that I was going insane as I would cry myself to sleep hoping I would see her in my dreams. I never have, but sometimes I see my son, usually just a glimpse out of my peripheral vision, he is perpetually 5 years old and I can never hear what he says.
EDIT (24 hours after post): never though anyone would read this, I changed a line so that it no longer seems that my 2 year old daughter bore a child.
I have never seen Inception or the Star Trek episode so many have mentioned (but I will eventually)
I will not do an AMA
I’ve had many PM’s describing similar experiences and 3 posters stating such experiences are impossible, I’d say more research needs to be done on brain functions. Pre-med students, don’t assume you know everything.
A few have asked if they can write a book/screen play/stage play/rage comic etcetera, please consider this tale open source and have fun with it
I remember reading somewhere (probably my high school textbook) that one of the reasons people don’t like wind power being built is they cause visual pollution....
No more accidentally biting my tongue or the inside of my cheek while eating. Sometimes I’m just excited for some good food and it just gets completely ruined :(
Speed and efficiency. Why waste time downloading ad content just for it to be hidden by the browser when you can simply stop them from being downloaded in the first place?
honestly it’s guilded, but before the enshittification of discord mobile discord wasn’t far off and also it’s easier to get mod in guilded, though matrix being federated is interesting. and revolt i really haven’t tried but i have a account there
I really like to post OC edits, but there seems to be absolutely no great solution. I don’t have the storage space or good internet to self-host PeerTube, catbox.moe seems to be hit or miss, uploading huge video files to an instance is just rude, and YouTube tries to deny the privacy of the viewer and uploader at every turn....
CloudFlare R2 is S3-compatible with no egress fees, which would be useful for video hosting. They have a reasonable free tier as well, so you could try it out beforehand.
The only other reliable video host I know about is Streamable, but I’ve never looked at their privacy policy so it may be just another YouTube. Might be worth a look though?
I would like to create a bot account for a community to warn about duplicate images. First thing that i tried is to create a new account and mark it as a bot, but i couldn’t use mail address i used to create my main account. is there a way to create bot accounts without creating separate mail addresses for them? i would avoid...
Sounds like you’ll either have to make an email for each bot or make them on an instance that doesn’t require emails to sign up.
Or, if you use Gmail, you could use your own email with a + alias. For example: If your email is you@gmail.com then you could use you+bot@gmail.com as the boy’s email. It should be treated as unique by Lemmy (I have not yet checked), and all mail sent to it will automatically be tagged as Bot.
I initially rejected this idea with a reason like “You seem to forget how vile certain parts of the internet can be,” but the more I think about it the more I agree, given a few conditions. Namely that children should not be allowed access.
Forbidding children access to the internet would solve many problems, such as social media addiction (potentially leading to depression), the spreading of misinformation, and the general amount of child exploitation online. I don’t deny that such an action may introduce other issues that I have yet to consider, but I still feel that the main points are very compelling.
I am also aware that such a system is not perfect and that people will undoubtedly circumvent it, but a much larger number of people will not (if it is made difficult to do so). Unfortunately, the only conceivable way to do such a thing is some kind of age-verification system, which I am against for various privacy-related reasons.
I’ve seen in various threads that the current browser engines aren’t good, such as gecko and blink. The question is why? Why do we need a new one, and what’s stopping a new one being made? Is it just the fact that they’re a lot of work to make?
Try resizing your browser window. Youll notice that the content reflows very slowly, and that youll often see giant ugly black bars. This is a pretty bad user experience for people who resize their windows often. That alone is not enough to warrant a rewrite of anything though, so thats why it hasn’t been fixed yet.
Many laptops are made with the US ANSI layout and other layouts like UK ISO are either shoehorned in at the final design stage or relegated to shuffling symbols around and requiring both Fn+Shift to type a character that used to have its own damn key. I’m not salty.
I do this all the time when working with transformations (in personal projects). I know I need to take into account these 5 variables but I’m not sure exactly how they all fit together, and I really don’t want to get a pen and paper out, so I just shuffle things and their operators about until it works or I get bored and do something else.
I like how Tanya’s thoughts here can be easily overlooked as typical meme hyperbole by people who don’t know that that is exactly what she thinks about at all times.
Liftoff alternative
Ok, I admit, I’ve been lazy and kept using liftoff until the last moment, but that is coming soon with lemmy.world moving to 0.19.x soon....
Is there a word for the feeling of nostalgia for or missing of another lifetime one only lived in a dream?
[title] I could swear I came across it before, but then again, maybe I dreamed it. 🫣
Does wind power cause visual pollution in your opinion?
I remember reading somewhere (probably my high school textbook) that one of the reasons people don’t like wind power being built is they cause visual pollution....
Doctors don't want you to know (startrek.website)
Just a lil bit (lemmy.world)
Be mindful of allergies lads (lemmy.world)
How Croissants are made (slrpnk.net)
What are some small things we should change about the human body?
Ripping off a post I just saw in the Isaac Arthur subreddit. Imagining we work out the technical ability. Examples they suggested were:...
Your ads dont work here, brand! (lemmy.world)
🦄🐋🥓🕛 (lemmy.world)
discord vs guilded vs revolt vs element/matrix what is your favorite?
honestly it’s guilded, but before the enshittification of discord mobile discord wasn’t far off and also it’s easier to get mod in guilded, though matrix being federated is interesting. and revolt i really haven’t tried but i have a account there
What is a good video host for the Fediverse/Lemmy?
I really like to post OC edits, but there seems to be absolutely no great solution. I don’t have the storage space or good internet to self-host PeerTube, catbox.moe seems to be hit or miss, uploading huge video files to an instance is just rude, and YouTube tries to deny the privacy of the viewer and uploader at every turn....
Aliens decide to communicate with us (lemmy.ca)
Aliens want to communicate and they decide to use you and your personality as the base model for all humans. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Double Barrel (slrpnk.net)
How to create a bot account?
I would like to create a bot account for a community to warn about duplicate images. First thing that i tried is to create a new account and mark it as a bot, but i couldn’t use mail address i used to create my main account. is there a way to create bot accounts without creating separate mail addresses for them? i would avoid...
How do you think social media platforms should work?
What's the issue with current browser engines?
I’ve seen in various threads that the current browser engines aren’t good, such as gecko and blink. The question is why? Why do we need a new one, and what’s stopping a new one being made? Is it just the fact that they’re a lot of work to make?
If only it was like that (lemmy.world)
Why would I need backlit keys anyway? (lemmy.ml)
Came up with this late at night. Not while being anywhere near a laptop though.
Bad coding (sh.itjust.works)
Those who chose "never" in a "now or never" moment. How is it going for you?
Thanks for sharing, and happy holidays
What is it with anime and this trope (lemmy.world)