DAE Extremely intense feeling of déjà vu / dreams bleeding into reality. Has anyone experienced this?
I'm experiencing something that honestly unsettled me, and I'm trying to figure out if anyone else has gone through something similar.
For the past few weeks, almost all of the media I've been consuming has been true crime, Reddit paranormal stories, real-life murder cases, and other creepy or disturbing content. That's pretty much been my entire media diet.
Another thing worth mentioning is that my dreams have become incredibly vivid. When I dream, I often become partially conscious—I know I'm dreaming, but not enough to fully wake up. The best way I can describe it is that I form actual memories of my dreams, almost like memories from real life. After waking up, I can usually remember them quite well and can still clearly tell the difference between dreams and reality.
My dreams also tend to mix real-life situations into them. Sometimes I'll dream about coding problems, debugging issues, or random fictional scenarios where I somehow come up with a solution inside the dream. When I wake up, I remember those dreams surprisingly well.
It's also been the rainy season where I live, so my sleep has been pretty fragmented. I've been waking up multiple times throughout the night for the past several days. Sometimes the dream continues after I fall back asleep, and sometimes it completely changes.
Now, here's what happened today.
I woke up around 8 AM, which is pretty normal for me. My morning was completely normal. Then around the afternoon, I started feeling slightly lightheaded. When I got to my dad's shop, something very strange started happening.
Everything suddenly felt like it had already happened before.
Not in the usual "I've seen this before" kind of way. It was much, much stronger than normal déjà vu.
Videos I watched felt like I had already watched them.
Customer interactions felt eerily familiar. There was one interaction where I genuinely felt there was absolutely no way this hadn't happened before. It felt so familiar that I felt like I could predict exactly what the customer was going to do next.
Even while writing this post, part of me has that weird feeling that I've already had this exact conversation before.
The best way I can describe it is that it felt like the thin wall separating my dreams from reality had shattered. My dreams felt like they were bleeding into real life.
I would randomly get mentally "lost," and then I'd come back with the strange feeling that I had just woken up from an old dream.
The closest descriptions I can come up with are:
- "It feels like I woke up in a timeline where everything happening has already happened before."
- "Someone turned the déjà vu dial all the way to 100."
Because I've been remembering my dreams so vividly lately, it almost felt like everything happening around me had already happened in one of those dreams, even though I couldn't necessarily remember a specific dream where it happened.
The feeling lasted for the entire morning and gradually faded later in the day. Throughout the whole experience, I still knew what reality was. I never actually believed my dreams were real—I just couldn't shake the overwhelming feeling that everything around me had already happened.
Has anyone experienced something like this before? Is there a name for it? I'm especially curious if fragmented sleep, vivid dreams, or consuming a lot of disturbing content could contribute to something like this.