Mixing dreams with reality?

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Ever since I was in pre-school, I've always had trouble deciphering my dreams from reality. When I was little, I'd be extremely convinced that whatever I dreamed up actually happen and if I had it my way, I would've gotten in a fight over it. This has continued through my whole life. Like if I dream up a conversation or something, I'm like "Did I dream that or did that actually happen?" I know now that the weird, abstract dreams are all just dreams now, but when it comes to the realistic bits, I have a really, really hard time telling the difference. And then the other night, for the first time, I had a dream within a dream, which only ended up confusing the heck out of me. And I can remember all these dreams so vividly, too, so it's really like I was there.

My mind has played plenty of tricks on me like this before, believe me, so nothing's new. But this is really annoying if anything. Does anyone else have this problem? I've been dealing with it all of my life.

That happens to me sometimes, but not often.

Not that much, it only happened when I was younger, and I still am struggling to separate some memories from dreams and realties when I was younger, but not now.
EMZ=]

I constantly have this problem. I've had hallucinations before, so I don't know if that's playing a factor in this or not.

Just had dream last night in which I 'woke up' in the dream when in reality I was still dreaming. I thought for sure when I 'woke up' that I wasn't dreaming anymore. I even told myself to try and remind myself I was dreaming to make it a lucid dream. Then I woke up in real life and discovered it was all a dream that seemed very real.

Many of my dreams do become real I've noticed. Something will happen during the day and give me that deja vu feeling; then I remembered I dreamed of that situation. Once I dreamed my grandfather was having a heart attack. The next morning we got a call and at the time I was having that dream he really was having a heart attack. Weird....

Yes, that's a problem with me, too. Dreams, daydreams, Reinforced fantasy, delusions, hallucinations. Where does the truth end and that begin? Though, I don't have a problem with telling the truth. If there's any doubt in my mind about it, it doesn't leave my cranium, ha-ha!

I have almost no problems with that.

I did however have 1 reoccurring dream all throughout my late childhood and early teenage years (ages 8 to 14/15 perhaps) that was absolutely realistic.

In it I always I got up at night, sometimes went to the bathroom, sometimes to the kitchen, felt thirst, felt the carpet beneath me, hear the door creak, hear my steps, taste the drink... it was utterly realistic and all details were in it, including waking up, thinking over where I could go, thinking about how eerie it was to get up at night and horror films and other such things and wanting to switch on the lights.

There was 1 exception to that realism though: the light never came on.

I was, for many years, absolutely certain that these dreams were reality and that at night electricity is shut off and that you thus can't switch on the lights until the next day.

Once I realised that these just had to be dreams I never dreamt this dream again.

I can totally relate to this. When I was little, my dreams mostly consisted of ceiling vents and curtains becoming alive and evil.

As a result, everytime I went into my room at night, I would run down the dark hallway and immediately turn a light on, and this also sort of caused my obsession with staring up at ceiling vents.

This doesn't really happen to me. In fact, occasionally a memory will pop up in my head (usually an image of a place), and I will quickly be able to determine that I've never really been there, it was from a dream.

Sometimes I have problems with dreams in a similar fashion, well more like dreams that I wish were real and when I find out they weren't real, I get sad.

also see this:

i dreamed this a while ago

What is there to say our dreams aren't their own reality anyway?

It happens to me all the time because even though I have bizarre dreams as well and know those are fake, I have realistic dreams that I can't tell if they really happened or it was just a dream. I have hallucinations as well. I had 2 weird dreams last night but I know those were just dreams. One was about a schizophrenic patient in a room (I don't know if this was taking place in a hospital or not) but she had disorganized schizophrenia and was acting very weird. Then the other dream was that unemployment hit 9.3-9.6% somewhere in that range. Maybe its a psychic dream! Lets pray unemployment doesn't hit that high this year!

I just "googled" "mixing dreams with reality" and this came up. I was wondering if anyone else has this issue and it seems like they do. With more stress in my life lately, I seem to be having more of a problem deciphering which happened and which was dreamed. Seems that the more memory issues I have, the more I have issues with this, along with stress. I wish I could find more info about this from something more than just blogs or forums, though.

I have a similar problem but not nearly to the same extent and I wonder if it can even be called the same thing.

The only time I ever mix up dreams with waking life is when I dream I'm in the kitchen and there is a food I like in the cupboard, fridge, or on top of the cereal cupboard. It's usually junk food.

I wake up and I remember that mom or dad recently bought some more junk food and I make my way downstairs expecting to find it. I look where I remember seeing it and to my disappointment nothing's there. Then I realize that there was never any food there. I dreamt the whole thing.

Last time it was Jois Louis. Everything else is easy for me to discern but this one type of dream throws me off every time I have it.



I also have a false memory that may have originally come from a dream but I'm not sure. It could've originated with my imagination or from something I saw on TV when I was a kid.

The thing is that we don't usually question our memories. If we remember it happening it must of happened. That's why, for a little while, in one instance, I believed something absurd. I believed that when I was younger I had a horn growing out of my head and my mom ripped it out of me just because I remembered it.

If I remember it it must have happened right, wrong? It wasn't until I was thinking about telling someone about the experience that I looked at how I would have sounded and realized the whole thing was absurd. That's when I realized it was a false memory.


I'm wondering if that memory of having a horn growing out of my head was a result of confusing dreams with waking life.