The Weirdest Thing that has Ever Happened to Me

*Note- this is a true story. It actually happened to me. I have done my best to accurately record all of my initial impressions of the event.*

I was 16 years old, in my junior year, swimming at the varsity swim meet. I had been struggling all year to improve. I had barely made the swim team, and all of my teammates were light years ahead of me. Yet today, somehow, everything just felt *right.* I no longer felt as though I were fighting the water. Instead, the ebb and flow of each ripple seemed to assist me as I cleaved my way forward with each stroke.
I swam better than I had all semester, so much so that I won by a solid margin.
Coach Catherine watched me through narrowed eyes as I filed with my teammates into the locker room. It was clear that she did not think I had earned the win. I knew she didn’t like me- she was very hard on me during practice, and she had said multiple times that I did not deserve to be on the team.
Inside the locker room, my friends and teammates told me to ignore Coach Catherine. She was rude, jealous, old- why couldn’t she just be proud of the improvement I’d made? They began to mock her very soundly in my defense, making fun of the no-nonsense and somewhat frumpy woman by singing and dancing to the song, “I feel pretty.”
Then Coach Catherine entered the locker room, and where laughter, jeering, and song had rung out moments before, silence fell.
“Everyone but Bridgett, get out,” she said sternly.
The other girls rushed to comply, giving me sympathetic looks on the way out. Soon I was left alone with this sharp- eyed, intimidating woman. The woman who hated me. The woman all my friends had been mocking moments before. As Coach Catherine approached me, I was certain she was about to kill me.
But then she put her arms around me and said, with a little laugh, “oh, Bridgett, this is just a dream.”
I pulled away. “What do you mean- that I’ll just wake up and find that the swim meet hasn’t happened yet? That I didn’t really win?”
Catherine just looked at me steadily, and said nothing.
“What like… my whole life has been a dream? That’s impossible.”
It was impossible. I had clear memories of my whole life, that I could summon to my mind instantly. I thought of playing with my pet bulldog in the backyard. I remembered moving to California with my mom at the beginning of the school year, and the long drive we had made together. All my memories of my mom and my dog and my house and my friends couldn’t be false.
But Catherine was still staring at me with that knowing look.
“This can’t be a dream. Everything looks real.”
And it did look real. Everything was solid and vibrant. I could focus on every piece of detail, like the dirty section of ceiling just behind the light-up exit sign near the locker room’s back door.
“If this is a dream, then I could just open my eyes and wake up. I’ll prove this isn’t a dream. I’ll open my eyes as wide as I can and-”
And then I woke up.
I was in my bedroom with my spouse in our apartment. I was an adult in my early 30s. I had no dog, no swim team, and a very different mom than the one I remembered in the dream. I had never won a swim meet, or swam competitively, or had even been to California.
My mind had conjured a whole, alternate life for myself in that dream, and my I had been attached to it- had loved it. Then I opened my eyes, and it all vanished forever.
What I found even more disturbing, however, was that the part of my mind I conceive of as myself- *I* – did not believe that it was a dream, and had been absolutely convinced it was real. Another part of my mind had communicated with me through a character in the dream, and *I* didn’t believe it, even though it was right. That part of my brain had knowledge that *I* did not.
I spent the next two weeks wandering about my like in a sort of solipsistic haze, wondering how I could be sure anything was real, or trust my own perceptions of it. To this day, a part of me is convinced that different subroutines of my brain are sentient in themselves, and quite separate from *me.*
However, one thing I’ve learned from the dream is that you have to accept the reality you’re presented with, and if you ever find a way to test it, you should do so.