When reality does something so far outside the expected parameters of normal life, your brain just… buffers. Not fear, not joy, not confusion exactly. Just a full stop. A complete cognitive pause where some part of you needs a moment to confirm that what is currently happening is, in fact, currently happening.
An online community recently asked people to share their most “this cannot be real life right now” moments, and the thread is one of the most honest collections of human experience on the internet. Funny, devastating, bizarre, and occasionally so cosmically strange that reading it at midnight is not really recommended. Enter at your own risk.
More info: Reddit
#1
Im an RN. It was my day off and im coming home from the beach with my 3 young children. We stop for ice cream and as soon as I get my last kid out of the car, a man standing next to my car shuts his trunk, turns around and collapses, becoming completely unresponsive out of nowhere.
Its like my brain glitched for a second. I just stood there with my baby in my arms like this can not actually be happening right now. For a minute i thought it was a sick joke.
So here I am, tossing my kids back into the car as the scream in rage. Dudes got agonal respirations and zero pulse. Great.
Yell for someone to call 911 and someone else to see if the stand has an AED and initiated cpr.
Less than 10 good compressions and the dudes eyes fly open, takes a deep breath and starts trying to sit up. Im floored, cpr rarely works, never even had to use the AED. He was alert and conversing by time ems showed up.
The most surreal part is nobody, not one person acknowledged that I had just risen a man from the d**d. Gathered my children, got in line, got ice cream and then went home for a post adrenaline rush nap.
Image source: DemetiaDonals, bialasiewicz
#2
I was driving home late one night at around midnight. There was a very thick fog out to the point where I couldn’t see more than a few feet away from my car. I was driving incredibly slowly. I came up to a stop sign and when I came to a stop an old man slowly crossed the street in front of me heading towards the waterfront. Behind him there were about 60 ducks all walking in a straight line. The old man never turned to my car or acknowledged me in any way.
Image source: SneakyPeterson, Lisa Yount
#3
Saw a guy shoot himself in the head right in front of me.
It was not like you would think it would look like, and people don’t always d*e quickly.
Horrible.
Derealization is a dissociative experience where the world around you suddenly feels unreal, dreamlike, or like you’re watching your own life through a pane of glass. It can last seconds or hours, it can be triggered by stress, trauma, sleep deprivation, or sometimes absolutely nothing at all, and it affects an estimated half of all people at least once in their lifetime.
It is, in the most literal sense, your brain deciding that what it’s currently processing is too much and temporarily checking out of the building. What’s fascinating is that derealization isn’t always triggered by something bad. Extreme joy, shock, or even a moment of profound beauty can produce the same response. The brain’s threat detection system sometimes just says, “This is a lot.”
Which explains why the moments in this thread aren’t exclusively dark. Some of them are wonderful. Some of them are absurd. All of them share that same quality of reality briefly becoming unstuck from itself. If your brain ever decided to briefly pretend none of this was real, it was, in retrospect, just trying to help.
#4
I’ve had several. But, a good one happened to me recently. I found out that a woman (a barista at one of my local Starbucks) who had inoperable brain tumors for a decade is finally going to be able to have them removed because she started an experimental treatment protocol I told her about.
I just happened to read the research a few weeks before she told me about the tumors. Complete coincidence.
Image source: MaleficentGift5490, DC Studio
#5
Last year my mom’s cancer returned so quickly after she literally finished chemo. One day we were celebrating her being done, and then a couple weeks later we were told she had cancer in like 4 other places. Her doctor was just stunned. She went into hospice a month after finishing chemo and passed away two weeks later. The entire time it just didn’t feel real, I kept thinking I was going to wake up from a bad dream. Even after she passed away there were a lot of days where it just did not feel like real life.
Image source: MysteriousPlatypus, tksonique
#6
Looking at house prices in my area…800k-1.5 mil for s**tboxes wondering who the f**k can afford that s**t…and all of it still sells…blows my mind every time.
Image source: Moist-Taro, zinkevych
VeryWellMind has some advice for when life gets so unhinged that reality itself starts to feel optional. Take time for yourself. Focus on what you can control, like eating better, removing toxic people from your orbit, and picking up a hobby. Talk to someone. It is all pretty solid advice. It is also the kind of advice that is significantly easier to read in a listicle than it is to execute in a moment of dissociation.
The “focus on what you can control” piece is arguably the most useful anchor when everything feels like it’s happening at once and none of it was on the schedule. You cannot control world events, other people’s behavior, or the specific combination of circumstances that just landed on you simultaneously like a perfectly terrible bouquet.
You can control whether you ate today, whether you called the person who makes things feel less impossible, and whether you continue engaging with the situation that is actively making everything worse. It is a small list. It is, on the worst days, enough.
#7
Trump getting elected a second time after trying to have his vice president lynched.. and pretty much every day of his second term. It’s exhausting to watch an angry senior citizen brazenly attack the country he is supposed to represent on a daily basis and be praised for it by people who suffer the most for his corruption.
Image source: OneCar2359, Natilyn Hicks Photography
#8
1. The total eclipse.
2. Had to get a second opinion from a GYN when my PCP thought she saw something abnormal during an exam. The earliest appointment was on Halloween. The receptionist told me I could come in a costume but I thought “Nah…we’re doing a biopsy. Don’t feel like talking about the C word while I’m in a costume.” I show up and the entire office is done up like Barbie and they’re all dressed like specific Barbies (the movie had come out that year). So my GYN comes in dressed like classic Barbie with the black and white stripes and cats eye glasses. She has a medical student and an MA with her, each dressed like a Barbie. She starts looking and goes “hmmm. That’s weird. Go get Dr. So and So.” (Side note: when two doctors make that statement, it’s not reassuring…) So the other doctor comes in and she’s got two people with her – all dressed like Barbies. So at one point, I have six Barbies all bent over starting in my hoo-hah and I’m in stirrups staring at the ceiling going “Is this a fever dream?” Everything is fine. No cancer. But that certainly felt surreal.
Image source: Pretend_Kangaroo_, Adam Smith
#9
I was hiking alone and suddenly a man was approaching from the other direction. It was Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but keep walking towards him. As the actor Ted Levine passed me, he gave me an expression that said, “Yes, I am him and no, I’m not going to kidnap and k**l you.”.
Image source: Figgywithit, The Silence of the Lambs
The idea that bad things happen in threes is a plague to our sanity. Something goes wrong, and you immediately brace for two more disasters, scanning the horizon of your life for what’s coming next. It feels true. The problem is that it isn’t, at least not in the way people think, and the reason it feels so convincing is actually a fascinating trick your own brain is playing on you.
The Reticular Activating System, or RAS, is the part of your brain responsible for filtering the enormous amount of information you encounter every day. When you decide something matters (consciously or not), your RAS starts flagging it everywhere. Buy a red car, and suddenly red cars are on every street. Decide bad things are coming in threes, and your brain will find the third one.
A minor inconvenience that would have registered as nothing on a normal day suddenly becomes the confirmation of a pattern that was never really there. What this means, practically, is that the “bad things in threes” phenomenon is largely self-fulfilling. The first bad thing happens, and we go on alert, primed and actively searching for numbers two and three. Look hard enough, and you will find them.
#10
The most surreal moment of my life was the first time I went to the CBD in Tauranga, New Zealand.
The city was pretty much deserted at 6pm. Deserted except for me, and, coming toward me down Cameron Street, a guy riding a horse. Bareback. And he (the guy, not the horse) was dressed up as a Native American.
As he rode past, I looked up at him, and he down at me. Neither of us said a word. He disappeared down the road.
*Did I actually just see that, or was that a hallucination?* I wondered. So as soon as I got home, I got online and Googled for whether anyone else in Tauranga had ever seen the same thing. Turns out they had. This Kiwi dude just likes to dress up as an American Indian and ride his horse down the streets of Tauranga, for *reasons*.
Very trippy.
Image source: risenphoenixkai, Fahimeh Mehrabi
#11
Northern lights in Alaska. So beautiful it didn’t feel real.
Image source: ParkCitiesPartner, Getty Images
#12
When lockdowns happened .
Image source: No_monster, rawpixel.com
Another fascinating psychological phenomenon is Solipsism. This is the rationale that you are the main character and everyone else is just an NPC. Other people, the physical world, the weird pigeon outside your window, they might all be a construction of your own consciousness, with no independent existence beyond your perception of it. It is, on paper, an airtight argument.
The reason solipsism keeps surfacing in conversations about surreal life moments is that it offers a seductive explanation for the feeling that reality has gone slightly off-script. If the world is a projection of your own mind, then the bizarre, the coincidental, and the cosmically improbable aren’t glitches; they’re just your subconscious getting creative.
January 6th wasn’t an inexplicable real-world event. It was just your brain having a particularly unhinged morning. The practical problem with solipsism is that it’s completely unfalsifiable, which is philosophy’s way of saying it can never be proven wrong, which sounds like a strength until you realize it also means it can never be proven right. You cannot step outside your own consciousness to check.
#13
I worked at a bar. One night this guy comes in for a drink. He says he’s waiting on friends. We chat a bit He tells me that it’s his first time at our bar, he really likes it, and hell definitely be back, but his friends changed plans so he’s going to meet them. Cool. Cut to a week later and there’s a cop asking about this guy. She shows me a picture, I recognize him, and tell what little I know. I ask what’s going on and she tells me that he was m******d after he left the bar and his body was discovered in the trunk of a car a few hundred miles away. I may have been the last person to speak to the victim. I think about it sometimes. If I’d chatted with him for a little longer would he still be alive? Would someone else have died in his place? .
Image source: WaffleHouseGladiator, freepik
#14
Standing in line at walgreens at 2am buying only a single can of beans and the guy behind me had the exact same can. same brand same weird look in his eyes. we just nodded at each other like two soldiers who’d seen too much. never spoke. never forgot each other.
Image source: Puzzled_Ad_1937, Kovina Đurić
#15
Finding out my own brother was stalking, impersonating me, and trying to k**l me after stealing my identity.
Image source: NeuralAbomination, tonodiaz
Life is, by any reasonable measure, deeply strange. Not occasionally. Not in exceptional circumstances. Consistently, persistently, and with a creativity that no simulation designer, screenwriter, or conspiracy theorist has ever fully managed to capture.
The moments that make people stop and ask if any of this is real are not anomalies. They are, in a way, the most honest moments available, the ones where the gap between what we expected and what actually happened is too wide to paper over with a normal reaction.
Do you have a story that could top some of these? Share it in the comments!
#16
My sister went in for stomach pains last December on the 18th. On the 24th, they gave her 2-3 years. Two days later, they gave her 1-3 days… she’s now in an urn in my room. I hadn’t seen her since 2019, was planning on bringing her out to my power engineering graduation next month. Last time we talked was on the 15th of December.
It’s been a really quiet 6 months without my best friend, still have muscle memory of saving memes to send her. I just ended up deleting some apps we’d share memes on.
Fr doesn’t feel real still since like, we talked basically every day. I don’t know.
A close second would be talking to my dad for the last time in my 18th birthday, then less than a month later getting told he was most likely m******d. His remains or any trace hasn’t been found coming up on 10 years now.
We play with the hands we’re dealt. Between that, epilepsy, tinnitus, and a couple other issues; it’s been a pretty rough hand by the universe.
I don’t know, I just miss my friend, I guess. rip Jackie
Image source: iXeons, Ahmet Kurt
#17
Getting on a plane and moving country. I moved in with my long distance gf after a few months of knowing eachother, lockdown restrictions were still pretty tight and I couldn’t leave her apartment for 2 weeks after arriving. We’re married now and moved country two more times since.
Image source: modernmessiahman, Toa Heftiba
#18
The night my parents kicked me out of the house. I had just turned 18 like two months before and had graduated high school a week before this. I literally remember looking up at the stars and thinking about how I was never gonna go back home from that point forward, and how my life will never be the same…
It’ll be 2 years on the 6th.
Image source: Raski_Demorva, Curated Lifestyle
#19
I was one of those people with an underlying condition during covid. Didn’t know it at the time. I am permanently f****d now. Sometimes I wish it had just taken me out. If that wasn’t enough, I get judgmental stares for wearing a mask in public. *It’s almost as if I have to or something.* it’s like people expected us to just d*e and it makes them uncomfortable that some of us didn’t and are suffering now. I’ve literally been purposely coughed on **twice**, and that is not a unique experience. Some people are nice, but it opened my eyes to how truly pathological a lot of people are. I consistently see at least one person grimace in my direction every single time I’m out in public. The way the public views sick and disabled people could not be more clear. They do not care about us, and in fact, a lot of people would be happy to watch us d*e. Getting sick fundamentally changed the way I see the world. No one gives a f**k about anything until it affects them personally. Also, the fact that an entire party managed to politicize a deadly virus and targeted hate campaigns against masks and vaccines, was and is disgraceful. From the bottom of my heart, f**k you MAGA. I’m not a “I don’t wish this on my worst enemy” type of person now, I sincerely hope it happens to all of them. Maybe then they would understand.
So yeah, I have a “this can’t be real life” moment at least once every single day. I’m 27 and use a f*****g shower stool. My body doesn’t let me forget, and neither does society.
This was cathartic to write, thanks for the question.
Image source: Strict-Profit7624, Getty Images
#20
One time I almost got scammed by some dude with a thick Indian accent over the phone. I thought I had called Microsoft but I had actually called a website pretending to be Microsoft. I had never been on the phone with Microsoft before so I had no idea. I told him my technical problem and at first he was helping me but then switched things up.
He claimed that on his end “at Microsoft” he could see multiple transactions for illegal CP. Then claimed it must have been someone who hacked my Microsoft account and used it to illegally buy illegal CP. He had me download some software that was supposed to be a “secure server connection” so no hackers could observe what I was doing. That software was IPERIUS REMOTE; a software used to view someone else’s screen.
Eventually he convinced me to log into my online banking. I didn’t know he could see my screen. Then he tells me he’s going to transfer me to my bank support and our call switches over to a series of ringing to a bank support.
Now here’s when I wisened up…
I’ve had tons of phone calls with my bank for years. Immediately when the “bank support” picks up, it’s another Indian guy and he doesn’t do anything my bank normally does when I call them. No account verifications procedures, no initial “just so you know this call is being recorded for training purposes, etc”, no professional introductions, etc. There’s some other stuff my bank normally does that I’m forgetting but I could just tell the Indian guy on the other line was NOT my bank.
He starts yelling at me at the top of his lungs screaming “the FBI have been informed and I can stop them from coming to you! CP is illegal!”
I just sat there staring at the Iperius Remote timer thingy on the pop up thinking to myself “wait, this is a secure server? What do all these icons mean? This can’t be real”
After sitting there in silence for about 5 minutes while he yelled at me over and over again about police coming and how CP is a federal crime, etc. I hung up on him.
I called my actual bank, immediately a woman answered and did all the usual professional procedures I had come to expect from my bank. We froze my accounts, got new ones. What little money I had at the time was saved.
Image source: irubberyouglue1000, Zhangxiao
#21
When known felons get voted in as president but some states still consider weed illegal.
Image source: Annabis9807, History in HD
#22
Was sent to the hospital because I fell and twisted my knee. Expected to be home in a couple of weeks after it healed up and had a little physical therapy to adjust to walking again after spending some time in bed.
Six months later, after being transfered to a different hospital, not getting any real physical therapy to help me walk (only enough to keep my muscles from degrading), I’m looking at being transfered AGAIN, this time to a hospital I’m told can actually help me walk again. And I’m told it’s a 90% lock, but they’re not certain yet.
F**k my life.
Image source: Any-Tumbleweed-9931, chormail
#23
Finding out our whole neighborhood burned down in the Eaton fire. Not a good day!
Image source: sillysandhouse, Adam Young
#24
When a 15 year old student I had broke open a stress ball at started eating the goo inside and then refused to wash his hands and mouth out.
Image source: _blue_sunsh1ne_, Suhaib Zaadh Zamani
#25
My 17 year old daughter was scouted randomly in public to walk in fashion week runway shows for a major designer fashion house, i wont dox myself by saying which one. There was 10 days between being randomly approached by a stranger in public and asked if she had ever modeled to the morning we were sitting on the airplane to Paris. Completely freaking surreal experience.
Image source: detritu, NEOMEN Magazine
#26
When my ex husband threw me through a bookcase. He’d pushed me into it before, but put some effort into it that time and I went through the middle of it.
I just remember looking up from the floor and the bookcase was AROUND me….
Image source: human-kibble, Anton Dios
#27
This is so “unserious” compared to others right now, but sometimes my first grade students say the most ludicrous things and I just feel like I’m in a sitcom. I was just sitting at my desk Friday morning as they trickled in, doing the attendance on my computer and I overheard a kid say “that wasn’t actually magic I was doing yesterday- I actually just put a bunch of glitter in my pants!”- and I’m sure my face likely reflected the full W*F moment of that while also trying not to laugh. One time one of the girls mentioned she wore a “sports bra” to gymnastics as a shirt and I literally had to give a PSA that ‘bra’ is not a swear word. The s**t that comes out of my mouth on a daily basis is unreal- like imagine a child bawling their eyes out and trying to tell you something with a whole muffin in their mouth and having to sweetly say “okay, what if we take the muffin out and put it in a napkin just for a minute so I can understand what you saying because right now it’s just crumbs and a lot of drool and I want to help but I can’t understand you and also I’m worried you are going to choke….” A few days ago a child peed themselves because they saw a bug and it made them nervous. Im responsible for teaching these small people to read while my lessons are getting interrupted for teeth falling out- we once had 3 in one day from separate kids! I literally feel like I live in a weird little dream wonderland.
Image source: lokeilou, Andrej Lišakov
#28
Went to a home improvement store and asked an employee where the 5 gallon buckets were. She asked me to describe them.
Legit looked for hidden cameras.
Image source: bawkbawkslove, Getty Images
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