Social Media Is Affecting My Dreams

Throughout my entire life, I’ve always remembered my dreams. I’m always that guy who wakes up and makes someone suffer for 10 minutes as I describe the pointless fragments of a dream that makes sense to no one. There was a time as a kid I would fight sleep as hard as I could because my dreams were becoming so vivid, so lucid, I was scared to fall asleep. The older I got, the more I welcomed sleep and started enjoying it, or appreciating dreams because they were so vivid, so lucid and I thought it made me different, or maybe I thought of it as a nightly escape. Then Facebook happened. Twitter happened. Social media at our fingers on the constant. Recently I realized how much constantly being plugged in is affecting my mind when I try to unplug for the night, and the influence everyone else’s online thoughts are having on my own.

Typically I will check email, get on Facebook and Twitter, read a bit, watch Sportscenter then go to bed. But there are two things I’ve noticed a drastic change in since social media came in and got all Freddy Krueger on me.

First: I will have a dream that includes someone I haven’t talked to in 15 years, an old childhood friend, and it stems from seeing a random status update she/he made. So my dreams are now being infiltrated by people that have no meaning to me now, and really had no meaning to me when I was 12.

Second: I have the worst kind of dream possible. The dream where you wake up, and for a split second you think you are in the most perfect relationship with the girl that you dreamed about. For the first few hours of the day you are constantly trying to fight the feeling off, realizing how silly it is, and you try to get over it. You try to get over an imaginary dream with a girl that is the opposite of reality. (Note: Umm, maybe it’s “up my therapy appointments” time?)

For example, in a one-week period, I dreamed on 2 different occasions I was dating Chelsea Peretti. It wasn’t about sex or anything; we were just totally in a serious and cute relationship in my dream. When I woke, I had to briefly come to terms that my dream relationship with a comedian I have never met just wasn’t going to work out. For the rest of that morning I felt like I’d just ended a serious relationship. WHAT. IS. WRONG. WITH. ME.

Where did this come from? Probably from a random tweet of hers I read, or maybe when I was scrolling through my Instagram feed a picture of her popped up.

Social Media is no doubt playing a part in my dream world, and the easy solution would be to not check it before I go to bed. But in a weird way, I like having a dream about a person I haven’t thought of in years, it makes me reminisce the next day. And also, since my real life relationships are going from one date to another, maybe it would be nice to find a little stability in my dream world.

Have you noticed Social Media affecting you and your dreams? I’m curious to know.

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