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

It’s possible to be used in that context, same way OP is saying that he feels nostalgic for something that didn’t happened. Saudades is a feeling of nostalgia. So if someone was asking the exact same question in Portuguese he would ask something among the lines of “what’s the name for saudades of something that happened in a dream”