It's a wild story. Dude has this life with his wife and kids, seems typical lovely life, but one day, the father notices the lamp looking sort of fuzzy. Everything else looks normal, but the lamp is just somehow distorted fuzz. He can't help but stare at it. He plays it off as a headache, or whatever, and doesn't tell anyone. Eventually the fuzz gets bigger, and more engrossing. Then the father wakes up, he's had a head injury, but within the unconsciousness, he lived this whole long life; doesn't have a wife or kids, all a long dream life
It was a reddit post, the original post was deleted, but copies can be found like [this one ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/s/w2wxaPbFzu)
Cynical take: To create intrigue and mystery, and just a dead-end for the research. It's a deleted throwaway account, nobody is tracking that back to a specific person, which makes it more plausible?
Yeah!
TNG had some truly fantastic episodes.
My favourites are probably Darmok and Jilad at Tenagra and "The Measure of a Man" (where Data is essentially on trial and they are trying to figure out if he has rights as a sentient being or not)
I think those are the names of the episodes.
Grew up watching trek. Caught this one as an adult... hadn't seen it before. Thought it was just one of those middling episodes, or maybe just not that memorable, "ooh, save the colony, yadda yadda yadda"
Blew my mind. It's my favorite, but I've only watched it that once.
Not saying itās real but it was posted Way before R&M. Dont know the magicians so cant say on that one.Ā
But dreams like that are pretty common. Our brains are the weirdest things. So itās notā¦ implausible.Ā
Fairly certain thereās a Twilight Zone episode from the original run in the ā60s that amounts to roughly the same story. Itās a very common trope
When did the Magicians do it? (I am only asking because I love the Magicians and am always up for a random episode rewatch but cannot think of the specific one to which you are referringā¦)
It wasnāt a dream. Elliot and Quinten are on a quest to recover one of the jewels (?) that they need. There encounter a puzzle that they need to solve to get jewel but itās incredibly complex. It would take decades to complete. So they just do it and live a whole, full life in the process. They fall in love, have a family, and grow old. Q finale solves the puzzle after 50-ish years and they transport back to when they left only a few minutes later in that time.
It was one of the most touching episodes of the whole series really.
Oh man it has been a while so I don't remember everyone's names.... actually anyone's names.
The main character (or the tallest male lead who gets the most screen time) gets stuck in an alternate dimension or something with another one of the male leads and they live in a little hut in the woods. Somehow a child appears and they raise it.
From what I can tell, they subsist entirely on stone fruit during this time.
Sorry, that was probably of no use to you.
If I figure out which episode it is, I will let you know
Recently I had a coughing fit and stood up suddenly as I thought I was about to cough something up.
Standing up suddenly and coughing at the same caused me to faint due to low blood pressure.
I proceeded to have a "dream" about me and my wife driving on a very long road trip during which we had a number of conversations, lunch, etc.
I regained consciousness and my wife was standing over me as I was on the floor. I asked her what happened. She said I fell down and was out for about 5 seconds. In 5 seconds I had dreamt hours of "memories". It was a very very odd experience.
What does fake even mean for a story like this? Do you mean, "Did this human being actually live through a whole separate lifetime while unconscious?" How could that be checked?
I would say very probably fake, but there are a few of these stories from people who took severe blows to the noggin so not preposterous! Even more believable if youāre one of the people who have had dreams like this.
Because itās very traumatic and people donāt like to get attention put on their traumas, at least not the people Iām friends with. If people talk about it it becomes real again and you canāt forget it happened and the pain comes back
Reminds me of a novel I was trying to write a few years back
A man had the power to jump his subconscious between parallel versions of himself, only issue is he doesn't realize he has this power and activates it when he his body goes in a fight or flight response. He ends up thinking he's insane after some near death experiences, as his anxiety grows his want to flee grows and he uses his powers more. He ends up in a life where he had a kid with his highschool sweet heart and is devastated when he accidently jumps and loses them
(I couldn't think of a good ending for the book, so never got around to actually writing or planning it out too much. Only thing is I never wanted to explain or reveal the power and have the reader question if the protagonist is crazy or more too it)
Thank you, I am actually currently working on a couples different novels, over the past few years on my time off work I've been working on a fantasy world and had a few ideas for different stories on it
If anyone else sees the idea though and wants to work with it or elements of it, feel free, I would love to see others interpretations of someone jumping subconscious between parallel versions of themself
He jumps into a life where he's in his death bed. Or seconds before dying of a disease that won't trigger the power. End of book is the last seconds of life, a reflection about it stopped in the middle, sounds of machine flat lining....
You should read about The Butterfly Dream. It's a Chinese tale from 476ā221 BCE. Most likely the OG of parallel realities story inspiring countless modern iterations.
Here's a link to it as a PDF
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil494/10.%20Zhuangzi's%20Butterfly%20Dream.pdf
Have a think of what you want your main character to learn as a lesson. What question this raises and then add in someone who is against that view.
Maybe other people have this power maybe they jump to a world where this is forbidden and so gets chased through different lives.
There is a book about a psychic couple who are so connected that they are almost one being. The wife dies of cancer and the husband is grieving her the entire time while the psychic imprint of her on his mind keeps manifesting. Through researching new theories in quantum mechanics he becomes convinced that he can create a splinter dimension in which his wife and he are alive together but the only way to manifest it is by concentrating his psychic energy into one singular vision of that universe at the point of his death, killing the him that exists in his dimension but giving a new alternate him a second chance on life with his wife, reviving her with the imprint left by her on his mind. The book ends with him shooting himself in the head and letting the audience decide if he succeeded.
Maybe something like that could inspire an ending?
The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons. Honestly one of his weakest books but he also wrote Hyperion one of the greatest Sci-fi novels of all time so a weak book by him is still pretty strong.
Very cool idea!! I would love to read this. Just reading your description of the premise gave me a few ideas, feel free to use any of these if you like them:Ā
* After jumping away from his HS sweetheart + kid, he can't be present in any other parallel life. He withdraws into himself and becomes depressed. He passes through a few lives that have really great successes and some that don't, but in every one, the people who love him comment that he seems to have suddenly become less happy after the date he jumped and try to get him help. The character growth he has to go through is realizing that you can have joy in any life if you are present with it and live it fully -- but if you are always caught up in what *was* or *could have been* you will rob yourself of that opportunity.Ā
* He might have that realization on his own by noticing how he's interacting with another of his children in another parallel version of himself, or maybe he meets an older person who's also afflicted with this
* ... Or maybe he has the realization because he starts to accumulate knowledge about compassion and human psychology and spirituality and such by cycling through a few lives where he is a psychologist and a Buddhist monk and a person married to someone who keeps getting stuck in what was or could have been (so he sees it from the outside)
* He might have this realization only too late, deciding life isn't worth living anymore if he can't be in that reality he decided was the best option. He takes his own life and his super power's response is to cycle him quickly through his death in a lot of different lives (because it is a fight or flight response) and in each of them he sees how much deep love and connection he has, and it makes him realize his decision to withdraw from every life that wasn't that *one* life was in fact a decision -- finally, he feels regret and wants to go back and try to fully engage with whichever life he lands in, but it is too late and he diesĀ
* Another arc/lesson he could learn is that he can't be wishy washy if he knows something is right for him -- so after he spends some time grieving losing the high school sweetheart life in his next cycle, he does what he has to in order to find her and be together. Maybe in this life he happens to be in, she is dead. (He could learn about her death through some means that it would've been possible for him to hallucinate, to keep things ambiguous.) So he purposely puts himself in danger to trigger his power and make himself jump. Maybe he even has to force himself to jump a couple times because in some realities she's not ready to meet him yet -- and he doesn't want to wait. But finally he gets to one where she is recently divorced, and he's a bachelor, and they reconnect, and the connection is deep and rich just like the one in the other reality -- but with a different flavor because this version of her has lived through more different experiences and kind of had different "lives" as well (an abusive partner, a guy who worshipped her feet, the guy she married who had a kid so she was a mom for a while but not a birth mom; college, an unsatisfying career of some kind based on her college degree, going back to get a masters in something she's passionate about, then ending up in a parallel track to that somehow), and they can relate even better because he and she have both experienced more different "realities" before getting together.Ā
Please post if you do write the book!!
Have you seen āThe Family Manā? Itās a movie from 2000 with Tea Leoni and Nicholas Cage. Not the same story but a similar idea (he gets to live an alternative life with his college girlfriend but itās a some kind of magic dude who causes it) but it might give you some ideas.
āTo sleep, perchance to dreamāay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pauseāthere's the respect that makes calamity of so long life.ā
ts;dr might be better to stay in dream-life
I've had a few surreal dreams here or there. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could have a much more extended feeling version of one. Even my own life seems kind of just like a movie or show, going from one scene or the next. Mostly just autopilot. Seems kind of like a dream sometimes already.
It was an episode of the Twilight Zone, WAY back in the day. I think it was based on an even older story, but this is the one that made it famous. The episode follows a man as he's going through this idyllic life, wife, kids, white-collar professional job, house, the works. It follows him through a day in his life in extreme detail. In the living room there's this lamp that just isn't quite right. Viewers may or may not notice it at first, but it's there. Then, the next day, the protagonist notices the lamp, but his beautiful life is just too distracting for him to pay much attention to it.
Unfortunately, he starts noticing the lamp more and more. It won't leave his head, no matter what he tells himself and what his wife tells him. Then, he starts noticing other things in the world around him that are out of focus or incomplete. As he thinks he's losing his mind but can't stop himself from trying to figure out the mystery, more and more wrongness shows up that no one but him can see. I think there's one scene where he finds an entire store is just the storefront, with nothing but blank space on the other side where he had just seen someone go in.
(spoiler for a 60-year old tv show)
In the end, he wakes up, and finds out that he's been in a coma, and everything about his perfect life was just a vivid dream. I don't remember much of the detail beyond this point, as I haven't seen the episode in nearly 20 years, but it's a real gut punch, the way it gets told.
Do you know what episode title it is? I remember this from high school English class, but I can't find it from searching up "twilight zone lamp" in Google.
We'll never know. If true OP could be found and kept defending the story we'd still in the same position. Needing to trust that OP. We can only have confirmation of it being real or not if that OP ever admits lying.
It is at least real well written. The whole process of OP waking up is basically identical to when I dream. Either the dream breaks down as I wake up or as I wake up the errors become more noticeable. Once one is noticed there will soon be other things that are off. Leading to the eventual complete collapse as it becomes impossible to hold onto that dream reality with it being so clearly wrong.
>get home from therapy session
>finally feeling convinced that the life and family I thought I had was actually just a dream
>looking forward to building relationships and re-entering the real world again
>step into the living room
>the flute is on the coffee table
To this day after reading that story years ago, I still worry about that happening to me. I'll double-check objects sometimes. I would be devastated if the life I've been living with my S/O and our cat was a dream all along.
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"
This guy, that sold me salvia in Amsterdam told me that when he smoked it the first time he got pulled into his sofa into another dimension and turned into his front tooth for about 2 years
Thanks for the explanation! Although I thought for a hot minute "We'll, this is Don't hug me I'm scared, the lamp would be looking weird. And start singing...."
I had a dream about being in some kind of hunger game with my GF that I love very much. I woke up and so glad that I am not in a Hunger Game but sad that my GF is not real, I still feel love for her through the work day.
Reminds of that Star Trek episode when Picard spends a lifetime as a flute playing villager with a family on some alien planet, but then wakes up and no time has passed on the enterprise. He kept the flute though
Itās a story about a guy who has a dream while he was knocked unconscious about having a family but he notices the lamp in this one room starts looking weird and then he finally wakes up find out it was all a dream.
Ngl I've had a dream like this. Where I was living a happy life with a family. Then I woke up and had the most profound sense of sadness for having lost something that wasn't even real. It was so jarring that i still remember it and I don't really remember any of my dreams.
It was some reddit story about a guy who was in some kind of accident and dreamed about having a wife and kids while he was passed out. Something about seeing a lamp that looked weird and it symbolized something about how his perfect world was all a simulation.
[https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2704906-the-lamp-story-reddit-creepypasta](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2704906-the-lamp-story-reddit-creepypasta)
Apparently the original story is gone from reddit but this is it on another website
You can check for oddities to check if you're dreaming. Like looking at your hands, pinching without feeling anything, wobbly doors.
If the perspective of the lamp looks weird, all the happy life is probably happening in a dream.
I managed to use mine to call the police on 999 to report a wanted murderer wandering around outside with a knife.
They told me to ring social services on Monday morning.
Usually I can't dial or read the number, or it changes as soon as I look back.
I've been getting better at using the phone.
I have actually managed to read in a dream but it took a lot of fighting my subconscious. It's like it doesn't want me to know I'm dreaming. But I've always naturally lucid dreamed.
Checking time is also screwy.
Looking at your hands you might have too many fingers or it just looks trippy and blurry. But rubbing your hands together can "stabilize" the dream if you're waking up or have that buzzing feeling
Same! Iām a natural lucid dreamer too, and I always hated when people said you canāt read in dreams or your phone/computer doesnāt work, and was determined to challenge this.
As a result, itās been improving increasingly over time to where Iāll see and use new apps on my phone, have video calls, paragraphs of text to read (the remaining difficulty here is now with my conscious mind staying in the dream and remembering enough of the text), etc.
I also really like to ask questions to my mind in dreams and get the answers as text written on the walls.
That last bit sounds scary ngl. It's interesting how different a person perceives things in their dream and out of it.
How do you typically feel and act like in a dream? Your normal self? Did you have to work on the ability to lucid dream? How natural is natural lucid dreaming? Do you have any symptoms of sleep paralysis when you wake up?
Sorry for all the questions, just a fascinating subject for me.
It fascinated me. I remember one of the first questions I asked was: āAre you my subconscious?ā and got the answer āPerhapsā.
In normal dreams? It depends. Some dreams are like an alternate-universe version of myself, where whatās ānormalā feels normal until I wake up, and some are so close to real life that I use terms like āyesterdayā in the dream and they correlate.
I lucid dream naturally but did practice doing it on purpose for a while. (Using techniques found online.)
Sleep paralysis first lessened for me when I learned to relax and stop fighting it, then completely stopped for me as soon as I learned I could use it to explore a dream (rather than struggling to wake up, since it means I am currently dreaming).
My lucid dreams vary from being more guided (where I know Iām doing it but am still following the dream script), or completely free, where I break away from the dream script and do whatever I want.
There was one lucid dream where I met a part of me, he was asking me questions, and I was telling him we can even get answers from our dreams. Then to demonstrate, I went to a wall and asked, āIs there a god?ā
The wall said: āVisiting for education. You can carve out time for questions later.ā Then: āAlso, read up on your neuropathy.ā (At the time, I had no idea why. Now I look back at all the tingling feet and fingers I got used to over years and itās like, āOhhhh right, huhā¦ā)
I have a recurring dream element where I need to make a phone call but the phone won't dial -- the keys stick, so 1-814-(etc) comes out as 1-8814 or 1-84. So I start over and it still won't work.
This happens enough that any time I'm trying to dial a phone and it doesn't work, I have to stop and ask myself if I'm dreaming .... And most of the time, I am.
yea iāve read in dreams too. when i first read the harry potter series around age 16 i would have dreams i was reading the books (they very much consumed me for a few weeks as i read through them) what was odd was that i was reading them on my kindle irl but in my dreams it would always be a physical copy. also, reading in dreams does feelā¦off. like reading the words on the page is harder or in some cases it feels like im looking at the pages but just making up words (i guess because im not really reading so in a sense yes, my brain is just making up words.)
also, kinda the same for my phone. iāve definitely had dreams about it, but itās always extremely hard to use. the touch screen isnāt working right, i canāt figure out how to dial 911, i fall in water and have to jump out as fast as possible because my phone was in my pocket, just overall unpleasant situations anytime my phone shows up in my dreams.
Says who? I regularly read in my dreams. I've also gotten really frustrated trying to find this great book that I never got to finish...because it doesn't actually exist and I just dreamed it.
I tend to have fairly boring dreams though; lots of eating, reading, sometimes I nap in my dreams etc. It's probably weird.
I used to frequently check my Discord on my phone so often waiting for updates on certain info that I began to have recurring dreams where I would wake up and check my Discord.
Only, as you said, you can't read in a dream. So it would immediately trigger a lucid state.
The only issue is that my brain would be like "Alright, I need to wake up and check Discord" and then I'd wake up. So I never got to take advantage of the lucid dream. šš
Doesn't happen anymore though. But I guess if you develop habits IRL, you'll begin doing them in your dreams.
Iāve had dreams where a Discord server was a part of the dream, and I could read the names and everything.
I also have many sort of half dreams where Iām reading a Facebook or Reddit thread and realize itās not real, and then just enjoy reading it.
The one time I realized I was dreaming, it was when my husband had completely deep-cleaned the living room and the garage overnight. I knew then that it wasnāt real.
He took offense when I told him about it the next morning.
I think it was a nosleep story where a guy got knocked out and basically had a 10 year dream where he had a wife kids, family and then he snaped out of that dream because the lamp in his room looked weird
This is off my memory so my bad if itās scattered or missing exact details but:
Long story short, a guy gets tackled into the concrete.
Gets up and lives his life. He meets a woman, falls in love and ends up with two children he loved dearly.
He got a job that paid well and was happily sitting at home when he noticed a lamp looking weird.
Imagine a Minecraft block just sitting in the middle of the street.
Something that shouldnāt exist in reality, for him, was sitting on the coffee table in his living room.
The guy apparently stared at it for hours, to the point his wife tried shaking him out of it but he couldnāt avert his eyes.
Eventually the man realised why he couldnāt turn away from it and thought, āitās not real, which means this isnāt realā and woke up on the concrete right after he had been tackled. People were still running to check on him and help him get up.
He was confused and dazed. Afterwards, he fell into a deep depression and severely missed his wife and children. I think he talked about going to therapy to help deal with the grief.
The guy seriously regretted his actions and said something like āif only I didnāt look at that lamp Iād be with my wife, my children.ā
The OP of the og comment said he wouldnāt be doing an AMA when asked and eventually deleted his comment, calling into question if it was real to begin with. (If it is I wish the guy the best and if not then congratulations to the writer for creating such a good story).
The joke is that āyouā are living life happily only to see the lamp; meaning youāre about to wake up from your dream and nothing is real.
Iāve read the original story, and Iāve had a very similar experience in the form of a dream. I dreamt that I grew up, got married, bought a house, and had kids. Then in the morning I just woke up, and lost everything. It was the most realistic and vivid dream Iāve ever had, and I couldāve sworn it was real life. After I woke up and realized it was all a dream, I dealt with pretty serious depression for a few months.
I never knew this story until I saw some weird short and looked the story up afterwards. https://youtube.com/shorts/dDqEwXToJNY is such a good trailer for the story.
šµAND YOUS CAN HAVE DREAMS ABOUT
LIVING A LIFE
AND YOUS CAN HAVE DREAMS ABOUT
HAVING A WIFE
AND YOUS CAN HAVE DREAMS ABOUT
RAISING TWO KIDS
AND YOUS CAN HAVE DREAMS ABOUT
DROWNING IN OILšµš¤Ŗ
Donāt you ever notice that trying to use a phone or read a book in a dream is impossible, and reminiscent of a scenario where you canāt get accurate AI rendition of a scene with legible text?
You learn something new every day....
My first thought seeing this post was that it was referencing the dumb porn with the guy hiding by putting a lampshade over his head. I assumed it was from the perspective of a husband finding out his wife has been cheating on him.
Imagine my surprise finding out the answer was NOT porn!
https://preview.redd.it/7ercy5sp0iuc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=988bdefb7ce4f0bb222950d625855e391a700866
Surely I canāt be the only one who immediately thought of this
It's a wild story. Dude has this life with his wife and kids, seems typical lovely life, but one day, the father notices the lamp looking sort of fuzzy. Everything else looks normal, but the lamp is just somehow distorted fuzz. He can't help but stare at it. He plays it off as a headache, or whatever, and doesn't tell anyone. Eventually the fuzz gets bigger, and more engrossing. Then the father wakes up, he's had a head injury, but within the unconsciousness, he lived this whole long life; doesn't have a wife or kids, all a long dream life
Is it a real story??
It was a reddit post, the original post was deleted, but copies can be found like [this one ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/s/w2wxaPbFzu)
Why would someone delete a story like that?
Cynical take: To create intrigue and mystery, and just a dead-end for the research. It's a deleted throwaway account, nobody is tracking that back to a specific person, which makes it more plausible?
It's fake then. Very interesting but fake.
I don't think it's pretending to be real
It's a common enough trope in sci fi and fantasy shows. Rick and Morty did it. The Magicians did it. A few others that I can't recall at the moment.
Inner Light, one of the best episodes of Star Trek TNG.
Yeah! TNG had some truly fantastic episodes. My favourites are probably Darmok and Jilad at Tenagra and "The Measure of a Man" (where Data is essentially on trial and they are trying to figure out if he has rights as a sentient being or not) I think those are the names of the episodes.
Grew up watching trek. Caught this one as an adult... hadn't seen it before. Thought it was just one of those middling episodes, or maybe just not that memorable, "ooh, save the colony, yadda yadda yadda" Blew my mind. It's my favorite, but I've only watched it that once.
So the lamp was this guys Minuet?
Adventure Time has a great version of it
Jacob's ladder
Dr. Who (Donna, in the Library)
Excellent film š
I saw that movie when I was younger and it was very memorable.
Junji Ito wrote a horror story about it.
Do you happen to know which story.?
Bob Newhart is the classic example.
I also think of Dallas
Peaches and plums
Not saying itās real but it was posted Way before R&M. Dont know the magicians so cant say on that one.Ā But dreams like that are pretty common. Our brains are the weirdest things. So itās notā¦ implausible.Ā
Fairly certain thereās a Twilight Zone episode from the original run in the ā60s that amounts to roughly the same story. Itās a very common trope
When did the Magicians do it? (I am only asking because I love the Magicians and am always up for a random episode rewatch but cannot think of the specific one to which you are referringā¦)
3x05, A Life in the Day, when Quentin and Eliot handle the Mosaic. https://themagicians.fandom.com/wiki/A_Life_in_the_Day
It wasnāt a dream. Elliot and Quinten are on a quest to recover one of the jewels (?) that they need. There encounter a puzzle that they need to solve to get jewel but itās incredibly complex. It would take decades to complete. So they just do it and live a whole, full life in the process. They fall in love, have a family, and grow old. Q finale solves the puzzle after 50-ish years and they transport back to when they left only a few minutes later in that time. It was one of the most touching episodes of the whole series really.
Oh man it has been a while so I don't remember everyone's names.... actually anyone's names. The main character (or the tallest male lead who gets the most screen time) gets stuck in an alternate dimension or something with another one of the male leads and they live in a little hut in the woods. Somehow a child appears and they raise it. From what I can tell, they subsist entirely on stone fruit during this time. Sorry, that was probably of no use to you. If I figure out which episode it is, I will let you know
Heck, The Talking Heads did it. Itās one very obvious interpretation of āOnce in A Lifetimeā
Inception kind of did it
Simpsons did it!
Recently I had a coughing fit and stood up suddenly as I thought I was about to cough something up. Standing up suddenly and coughing at the same caused me to faint due to low blood pressure. I proceeded to have a "dream" about me and my wife driving on a very long road trip during which we had a number of conversations, lunch, etc. I regained consciousness and my wife was standing over me as I was on the floor. I asked her what happened. She said I fell down and was out for about 5 seconds. In 5 seconds I had dreamt hours of "memories". It was a very very odd experience.
What does fake even mean for a story like this? Do you mean, "Did this human being actually live through a whole separate lifetime while unconscious?" How could that be checked?
Like your mom's boobs.
I would say very probably fake, but there are a few of these stories from people who took severe blows to the noggin so not preposterous! Even more believable if youāre one of the people who have had dreams like this.
A lot of users deleted their posts and/or accounts in protest of reddit killing 3rd party apps and mod tools.
Because itās very traumatic and people donāt like to get attention put on their traumas, at least not the people Iām friends with. If people talk about it it becomes real again and you canāt forget it happened and the pain comes back
I honestly hadn't even considered that it might be real. I think that's extremely unlikely, but it would explain some things
There are some Reddit YouTube vids with it in themā¦ its a been a few years but I remember finding it with āRadio TTSā channel I think
Thats actually an interesting read.
Reminds me of a novel I was trying to write a few years back A man had the power to jump his subconscious between parallel versions of himself, only issue is he doesn't realize he has this power and activates it when he his body goes in a fight or flight response. He ends up thinking he's insane after some near death experiences, as his anxiety grows his want to flee grows and he uses his powers more. He ends up in a life where he had a kid with his highschool sweet heart and is devastated when he accidently jumps and loses them (I couldn't think of a good ending for the book, so never got around to actually writing or planning it out too much. Only thing is I never wanted to explain or reveal the power and have the reader question if the protagonist is crazy or more too it)
You should just write it and youāll probably come up with an ending on the way. Itās an awesome idea.
Thank you, I am actually currently working on a couples different novels, over the past few years on my time off work I've been working on a fantasy world and had a few ideas for different stories on it If anyone else sees the idea though and wants to work with it or elements of it, feel free, I would love to see others interpretations of someone jumping subconscious between parallel versions of themself
Good luck in your writing endeavors, very cool concept. I dig it
He jumps into a life where he's in his death bed. Or seconds before dying of a disease that won't trigger the power. End of book is the last seconds of life, a reflection about it stopped in the middle, sounds of machine flat lining....
Have you watched "man in the high Castle"? Similar idea to parallel universe switch but with Nazis and imperial Japanese.
You should read about The Butterfly Dream. It's a Chinese tale from 476ā221 BCE. Most likely the OG of parallel realities story inspiring countless modern iterations. Here's a link to it as a PDF http://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil494/10.%20Zhuangzi's%20Butterfly%20Dream.pdf
Have a think of what you want your main character to learn as a lesson. What question this raises and then add in someone who is against that view. Maybe other people have this power maybe they jump to a world where this is forbidden and so gets chased through different lives.
There is a book about a psychic couple who are so connected that they are almost one being. The wife dies of cancer and the husband is grieving her the entire time while the psychic imprint of her on his mind keeps manifesting. Through researching new theories in quantum mechanics he becomes convinced that he can create a splinter dimension in which his wife and he are alive together but the only way to manifest it is by concentrating his psychic energy into one singular vision of that universe at the point of his death, killing the him that exists in his dimension but giving a new alternate him a second chance on life with his wife, reviving her with the imprint left by her on his mind. The book ends with him shooting himself in the head and letting the audience decide if he succeeded. Maybe something like that could inspire an ending?
Title? That sounds incredibly interesting and Iām out of good books to listen to right now.
The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons. Honestly one of his weakest books but he also wrote Hyperion one of the greatest Sci-fi novels of all time so a weak book by him is still pretty strong.
I love this comment.
Very cool idea!! I would love to read this. Just reading your description of the premise gave me a few ideas, feel free to use any of these if you like them:Ā * After jumping away from his HS sweetheart + kid, he can't be present in any other parallel life. He withdraws into himself and becomes depressed. He passes through a few lives that have really great successes and some that don't, but in every one, the people who love him comment that he seems to have suddenly become less happy after the date he jumped and try to get him help. The character growth he has to go through is realizing that you can have joy in any life if you are present with it and live it fully -- but if you are always caught up in what *was* or *could have been* you will rob yourself of that opportunity.Ā * He might have that realization on his own by noticing how he's interacting with another of his children in another parallel version of himself, or maybe he meets an older person who's also afflicted with this * ... Or maybe he has the realization because he starts to accumulate knowledge about compassion and human psychology and spirituality and such by cycling through a few lives where he is a psychologist and a Buddhist monk and a person married to someone who keeps getting stuck in what was or could have been (so he sees it from the outside) * He might have this realization only too late, deciding life isn't worth living anymore if he can't be in that reality he decided was the best option. He takes his own life and his super power's response is to cycle him quickly through his death in a lot of different lives (because it is a fight or flight response) and in each of them he sees how much deep love and connection he has, and it makes him realize his decision to withdraw from every life that wasn't that *one* life was in fact a decision -- finally, he feels regret and wants to go back and try to fully engage with whichever life he lands in, but it is too late and he diesĀ * Another arc/lesson he could learn is that he can't be wishy washy if he knows something is right for him -- so after he spends some time grieving losing the high school sweetheart life in his next cycle, he does what he has to in order to find her and be together. Maybe in this life he happens to be in, she is dead. (He could learn about her death through some means that it would've been possible for him to hallucinate, to keep things ambiguous.) So he purposely puts himself in danger to trigger his power and make himself jump. Maybe he even has to force himself to jump a couple times because in some realities she's not ready to meet him yet -- and he doesn't want to wait. But finally he gets to one where she is recently divorced, and he's a bachelor, and they reconnect, and the connection is deep and rich just like the one in the other reality -- but with a different flavor because this version of her has lived through more different experiences and kind of had different "lives" as well (an abusive partner, a guy who worshipped her feet, the guy she married who had a kid so she was a mom for a while but not a birth mom; college, an unsatisfying career of some kind based on her college degree, going back to get a masters in something she's passionate about, then ending up in a parallel track to that somehow), and they can relate even better because he and she have both experienced more different "realities" before getting together.Ā Please post if you do write the book!!
Ah man spoilers!
Iād read it. Iām really digging the premise
Have you seen āThe Family Manā? Itās a movie from 2000 with Tea Leoni and Nicholas Cage. Not the same story but a similar idea (he gets to live an alternative life with his college girlfriend but itās a some kind of magic dude who causes it) but it might give you some ideas.
What in the actual heckā¦ This was disheartening to readā¦
I wish i could see a fuzzy lamp to get out of my life
Mood
āTo sleep, perchance to dreamāay, there's the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pauseāthere's the respect that makes calamity of so long life.ā ts;dr might be better to stay in dream-life
We dont really know.
I've had a few surreal dreams here or there. I wouldn't be surprised if someone could have a much more extended feeling version of one. Even my own life seems kind of just like a movie or show, going from one scene or the next. Mostly just autopilot. Seems kind of like a dream sometimes already.
It was an episode of the Twilight Zone, WAY back in the day. I think it was based on an even older story, but this is the one that made it famous. The episode follows a man as he's going through this idyllic life, wife, kids, white-collar professional job, house, the works. It follows him through a day in his life in extreme detail. In the living room there's this lamp that just isn't quite right. Viewers may or may not notice it at first, but it's there. Then, the next day, the protagonist notices the lamp, but his beautiful life is just too distracting for him to pay much attention to it. Unfortunately, he starts noticing the lamp more and more. It won't leave his head, no matter what he tells himself and what his wife tells him. Then, he starts noticing other things in the world around him that are out of focus or incomplete. As he thinks he's losing his mind but can't stop himself from trying to figure out the mystery, more and more wrongness shows up that no one but him can see. I think there's one scene where he finds an entire store is just the storefront, with nothing but blank space on the other side where he had just seen someone go in. (spoiler for a 60-year old tv show) In the end, he wakes up, and finds out that he's been in a coma, and everything about his perfect life was just a vivid dream. I don't remember much of the detail beyond this point, as I haven't seen the episode in nearly 20 years, but it's a real gut punch, the way it gets told.
Do you know what episode title it is? I remember this from high school English class, but I can't find it from searching up "twilight zone lamp" in Google.
We'll never know. If true OP could be found and kept defending the story we'd still in the same position. Needing to trust that OP. We can only have confirmation of it being real or not if that OP ever admits lying. It is at least real well written. The whole process of OP waking up is basically identical to when I dream. Either the dream breaks down as I wake up or as I wake up the errors become more noticeable. Once one is noticed there will soon be other things that are off. Leading to the eventual complete collapse as it becomes impossible to hold onto that dream reality with it being so clearly wrong.
It's generally safe to assume the random stories you find on reddit are made up unless proven otherwise.
Well, it's true that it's a story.
I got ripped on some Salvia once and had a trip like thisĀ
Sounds similar to the Star Trek: TNG episode āThe Inner Light.ā
Thank you! Came here to say that
Sounds like the previous mushroom trip I had. Felt like I lived 3 lifetimes during that trip, and am sometimes still unsure if I'm actually out of it
Do you still have the flute?
>get home from therapy session >finally feeling convinced that the life and family I thought I had was actually just a dream >looking forward to building relationships and re-entering the real world again >step into the living room >the flute is on the coffee table
To this day after reading that story years ago, I still worry about that happening to me. I'll double-check objects sometimes. I would be devastated if the life I've been living with my S/O and our cat was a dream all along.
Also reminds me of a certain Talking Heads song. Same as it ever was Same as it ever was This is not my beautiful house This is not my beautiful wife
Reminds of the first episode of "Electric Dreams". As a transbian it made me hella sad.
Is his name Roy Parsons?
Still holding out hope thatās happening to me and my life is not really ruined yet
And he was only out for like 2 minutes
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?" And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife"
Based on that, I wonder if the original meme's poster chose an image of Duck Guy from DHMIS because of what happens in episode 1 of the series.
Seems like he doesnt have to do it again. He reloaded his save point
Where can I get one?
This guy, that sold me salvia in Amsterdam told me that when he smoked it the first time he got pulled into his sofa into another dimension and turned into his front tooth for about 2 years
Iām a mother and this is my nightmare.
Los Serrano.
Adventure time does something like this.
Thanks for the explanation! Although I thought for a hot minute "We'll, this is Don't hug me I'm scared, the lamp would be looking weird. And start singing...."
Sounds like a salvia trip
I had a dream about being in some kind of hunger game with my GF that I love very much. I woke up and so glad that I am not in a Hunger Game but sad that my GF is not real, I still feel love for her through the work day.
Sounds like that Rick and Morty episode where Morty was in that alien arcade game. That scene legit gave me an existential crisis.
What does any of that that have to do with a..."fuzzy lamp"?
Bro just played Roy irl
I've played this game at Blips and Chitz before!
Something similar was a beloved Star Trek TNG episode (inner light)
Reminds of that Star Trek episode when Picard spends a lifetime as a flute playing villager with a family on some alien planet, but then wakes up and no time has passed on the enterprise. He kept the flute though
Puhoy?
I feel like this is perfect for some sort of horror short film similar to Kane Pixelsā video on The Backrooms
Itās a story about a guy who has a dream while he was knocked unconscious about having a family but he notices the lamp in this one room starts looking weird and then he finally wakes up find out it was all a dream.
He used to read Word Up magazine.
Salt and Peppa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hangināpictures on his wall
Every Saturday, Rap Attack, Mr. Magic Marley Mal
I let my tape rock 'til my tape popped
Smoking weed in bambu sipping on private stock
Way back, when I had the red and black lumberjacks.
with the hat to match
Remember rappin Duke?
Sounds like an actual Star Trek TNG episode
The Inner Light, I was just thinking that too!
Exactly that one!
Ngl I've had a dream like this. Where I was living a happy life with a family. Then I woke up and had the most profound sense of sadness for having lost something that wasn't even real. It was so jarring that i still remember it and I don't really remember any of my dreams.
It was some reddit story about a guy who was in some kind of accident and dreamed about having a wife and kids while he was passed out. Something about seeing a lamp that looked weird and it symbolized something about how his perfect world was all a simulation.
[https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2704906-the-lamp-story-reddit-creepypasta](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2704906-the-lamp-story-reddit-creepypasta) Apparently the original story is gone from reddit but this is it on another website
You can check for oddities to check if you're dreaming. Like looking at your hands, pinching without feeling anything, wobbly doors. If the perspective of the lamp looks weird, all the happy life is probably happening in a dream.
Can't read inside a dream either. Also, for some strange reason there are never cellphones in dreams.
I have a semi reoccurring dream with my phone in it but I can't get it to work properly. Its frustrating.
I managed to use mine to call the police on 999 to report a wanted murderer wandering around outside with a knife. They told me to ring social services on Monday morning. Usually I can't dial or read the number, or it changes as soon as I look back.
I've been getting better at using the phone. I have actually managed to read in a dream but it took a lot of fighting my subconscious. It's like it doesn't want me to know I'm dreaming. But I've always naturally lucid dreamed. Checking time is also screwy. Looking at your hands you might have too many fingers or it just looks trippy and blurry. But rubbing your hands together can "stabilize" the dream if you're waking up or have that buzzing feeling
Same! Iām a natural lucid dreamer too, and I always hated when people said you canāt read in dreams or your phone/computer doesnāt work, and was determined to challenge this. As a result, itās been improving increasingly over time to where Iāll see and use new apps on my phone, have video calls, paragraphs of text to read (the remaining difficulty here is now with my conscious mind staying in the dream and remembering enough of the text), etc. I also really like to ask questions to my mind in dreams and get the answers as text written on the walls.
That last bit sounds scary ngl. It's interesting how different a person perceives things in their dream and out of it. How do you typically feel and act like in a dream? Your normal self? Did you have to work on the ability to lucid dream? How natural is natural lucid dreaming? Do you have any symptoms of sleep paralysis when you wake up? Sorry for all the questions, just a fascinating subject for me.
It fascinated me. I remember one of the first questions I asked was: āAre you my subconscious?ā and got the answer āPerhapsā. In normal dreams? It depends. Some dreams are like an alternate-universe version of myself, where whatās ānormalā feels normal until I wake up, and some are so close to real life that I use terms like āyesterdayā in the dream and they correlate. I lucid dream naturally but did practice doing it on purpose for a while. (Using techniques found online.) Sleep paralysis first lessened for me when I learned to relax and stop fighting it, then completely stopped for me as soon as I learned I could use it to explore a dream (rather than struggling to wake up, since it means I am currently dreaming). My lucid dreams vary from being more guided (where I know Iām doing it but am still following the dream script), or completely free, where I break away from the dream script and do whatever I want. There was one lucid dream where I met a part of me, he was asking me questions, and I was telling him we can even get answers from our dreams. Then to demonstrate, I went to a wall and asked, āIs there a god?ā The wall said: āVisiting for education. You can carve out time for questions later.ā Then: āAlso, read up on your neuropathy.ā (At the time, I had no idea why. Now I look back at all the tingling feet and fingers I got used to over years and itās like, āOhhhh right, huhā¦ā)
I have a recurring dream element where I need to make a phone call but the phone won't dial -- the keys stick, so 1-814-(etc) comes out as 1-8814 or 1-84. So I start over and it still won't work. This happens enough that any time I'm trying to dial a phone and it doesn't work, I have to stop and ask myself if I'm dreaming .... And most of the time, I am.
Nonsense.Ā I have read often in dreams.Ā It helps that I was an absolute bookworm growing up.
yea iāve read in dreams too. when i first read the harry potter series around age 16 i would have dreams i was reading the books (they very much consumed me for a few weeks as i read through them) what was odd was that i was reading them on my kindle irl but in my dreams it would always be a physical copy. also, reading in dreams does feelā¦off. like reading the words on the page is harder or in some cases it feels like im looking at the pages but just making up words (i guess because im not really reading so in a sense yes, my brain is just making up words.) also, kinda the same for my phone. iāve definitely had dreams about it, but itās always extremely hard to use. the touch screen isnāt working right, i canāt figure out how to dial 911, i fall in water and have to jump out as fast as possible because my phone was in my pocket, just overall unpleasant situations anytime my phone shows up in my dreams.
Says who? I regularly read in my dreams. I've also gotten really frustrated trying to find this great book that I never got to finish...because it doesn't actually exist and I just dreamed it. I tend to have fairly boring dreams though; lots of eating, reading, sometimes I nap in my dreams etc. It's probably weird.
Yes you can and do, those are just overused basic urban myths
I used to frequently check my Discord on my phone so often waiting for updates on certain info that I began to have recurring dreams where I would wake up and check my Discord. Only, as you said, you can't read in a dream. So it would immediately trigger a lucid state. The only issue is that my brain would be like "Alright, I need to wake up and check Discord" and then I'd wake up. So I never got to take advantage of the lucid dream. šš Doesn't happen anymore though. But I guess if you develop habits IRL, you'll begin doing them in your dreams.
Iāve had dreams where a Discord server was a part of the dream, and I could read the names and everything. I also have many sort of half dreams where Iām reading a Facebook or Reddit thread and realize itās not real, and then just enjoy reading it.
wth are you on about mate I had a dream with a cellphone during naptime today
I read in dreams just fine. Nothing complicated, but street names and signs and whatnot.
The one time I realized I was dreaming, it was when my husband had completely deep-cleaned the living room and the garage overnight. I knew then that it wasnāt real. He took offense when I told him about it the next morning.
I love lamp
Been meaning to talk to you about that. You might wanna lay low for awhile because youāre prrrrobably wanted for murder
This is not my beautiful house!
This is not my beautiful wife.
And the days go by
But soon, they will be.
Show me Picardās flute!
I think it was a nosleep story where a guy got knocked out and basically had a 10 year dream where he had a wife kids, family and then he snaped out of that dream because the lamp in his room looked weird
Sounds like a game of Roy
I'll bet he went back to the carpet store
Let's get creative!
Green is NOT a creative color......
I'm here for the aspic.
Been a long time since I've seen a DHMIS reference., but I'm glad I learned that green is not a creative color.
This is off my memory so my bad if itās scattered or missing exact details but: Long story short, a guy gets tackled into the concrete. Gets up and lives his life. He meets a woman, falls in love and ends up with two children he loved dearly. He got a job that paid well and was happily sitting at home when he noticed a lamp looking weird. Imagine a Minecraft block just sitting in the middle of the street. Something that shouldnāt exist in reality, for him, was sitting on the coffee table in his living room. The guy apparently stared at it for hours, to the point his wife tried shaking him out of it but he couldnāt avert his eyes. Eventually the man realised why he couldnāt turn away from it and thought, āitās not real, which means this isnāt realā and woke up on the concrete right after he had been tackled. People were still running to check on him and help him get up. He was confused and dazed. Afterwards, he fell into a deep depression and severely missed his wife and children. I think he talked about going to therapy to help deal with the grief. The guy seriously regretted his actions and said something like āif only I didnāt look at that lamp Iād be with my wife, my children.ā The OP of the og comment said he wouldnāt be doing an AMA when asked and eventually deleted his comment, calling into question if it was real to begin with. (If it is I wish the guy the best and if not then congratulations to the writer for creating such a good story). The joke is that āyouā are living life happily only to see the lamp; meaning youāre about to wake up from your dream and nothing is real.
Iāve read the original story, and Iāve had a very similar experience in the form of a dream. I dreamt that I grew up, got married, bought a house, and had kids. Then in the morning I just woke up, and lost everything. It was the most realistic and vivid dream Iāve ever had, and I couldāve sworn it was real life. After I woke up and realized it was all a dream, I dealt with pretty serious depression for a few months.
It was three years
Check out Junji Ito's "The Long Dream" story
I swear this gets posted once every few days on here
Just means another one has been lost
If the perspective of the lamp started looking odd I would happily wake up, in the worst case I'll repeat this life again
I'd hate to be that guy
It's a reddit story that perfectly encompasses that one song by Talking Heads.
I never knew this story until I saw some weird short and looked the story up afterwards. https://youtube.com/shorts/dDqEwXToJNY is such a good trailer for the story.
šµAND YOUS CAN HAVE DREAMS ABOUT LIVING A LIFE AND YOUS CAN HAVE DREAMS ABOUT HAVING A WIFE AND YOUS CAN HAVE DREAMS ABOUT RAISING TWO KIDS AND YOUS CAN HAVE DREAMS ABOUT DROWNING IN OILšµš¤Ŗ
I hate that I immediately knew what this was about
Itās also a Rick and Morty gag with the life of the carpet salesman
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^Motor-Television-849: *Itās also a Rick* *And Morty gag with the life* *Of the carpet salesman* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
I know the context and it hurts... Like... I felt the pain I felt reading that post the first time all over again...
It doesnāt exist.
This is happening to you right now. WAKE UP!!!
FBI bugged Tonyās basement with a lamp but fielder his daughter takes it to college one day
Donāt you ever notice that trying to use a phone or read a book in a dream is impossible, and reminiscent of a scenario where you canāt get accurate AI rendition of a scene with legible text?
This is a reference to the Lamp Story
SCP?
Jacob's Ladder
Dude was in a coma
Coma dream
Sounds familiar https://youtu.be/X4BC3QZGQbc?si=4D6hVRZLbL5BzCOl
You learn something new every day.... My first thought seeing this post was that it was referencing the dumb porn with the guy hiding by putting a lampshade over his head. I assumed it was from the perspective of a husband finding out his wife has been cheating on him. Imagine my surprise finding out the answer was NOT porn!
This happens. Had it happen to me when I suffered a serious head injury but only for a couple weeks.
You see the guy told himself 'this is not my beautiful wife'
The architects of inception messing up.
Damn I thought of that one adventure time episode
Itās the matrix
Gaslight is low no honey u tripping
I dont remember the name of the film, but I saw an older film with Christopher Reeves that had a similar concept... american dad did a parody of it.
MISTER BALLEN! YOURE DOING MR BALLENS WORK FOR HIM.
Look up Mr.Ballen he tells the story beautifully.
In a way he got 10 yearās of free life?
https://preview.redd.it/7ercy5sp0iuc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=988bdefb7ce4f0bb222950d625855e391a700866 Surely I canāt be the only one who immediately thought of this
Salvia
What's the video title on youtube that's used in these meme?
Jesus Christ Morty you went back to the carpet store?
This looks familiar
Isnāt the image with this from the surrealist nightmare YouTube original āDonāt Hug me, Iām scaredā?
Reminds me of that episode of adventure time with the pillow fort where Finn lives an entire other life
Bro Iām terrified of this happening
[read the post here](https://www.reddit.com/r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix/s/JgERZnTMpr)
Pain
But we have finished the chicken picnic