# Sleep and Dreams > General Dream Discussion >  >  Being Someone Else in your Dream

## ICanDigIt

Hey all I'm new here. Just curious, is it odd for someone to have dreams where they become someone else or see the dream through someone else's eyes? I have had many dreams in the past where I feel as if I am playing a character or another person. Just curious if others have this sensation...

Have a great day!  ::banana::

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## XeL

It happens to me occasionally. I find it very interesting that it's a frequent occurrence to you.

I once had a lucid dream where I was the wall in my bedroom, watching two people having sex in my bed.

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## ICanDigIt

lol thats hilarious! Yeah its happened for me probably for a few years (that I can remember) and probably like once a month or so...

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## username695

Yea this happens to me. About every 1 in 10 dreams I'd say

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## Daydreamer14

Yeah; usually the dreams where I am someone else are pretty vivid... They always feel like they mean more then my other dreams. Half the time, I don't even remember _who_ I was in the dream, I just know I wasn't me. xD

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## Samael

It's a frequent occurrence to me. Sometimes I'm specific characters from tv-shows, books, etc., and sometimes I'm characters from my original stories. I've even developed an in-dream persona that can use powers and the like when I'm not lucid. 

Let's see... this last week I've been Vlad Masters (a cartoon character), an assassin, a pot, Dean Winchester, a trucker, and Lucifer.

I think it's more rare for me to be _me_ in dreams.

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## exdreamer

I had a dream I was a woman a couple of nights ago. It was a perfectly nice dream until I looked in a mirror and turned back in to my male self but was still, uh, dressed for the part...  :Oops:  ::shock::

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## kookyinc

Usually when I'm not me, I'm some video game character (not from any actual video games, though, just video games that I find in my dreams).

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## SteadyState

I don't know if I've ever had any dreams where I know I'm not myself.

Sometimes I'll be taking on the persona of other people (historical figures, fictional characters, etc) but I don't think I ever believe I'm someone else.

Hmm, I'll have to be more aware of this.

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## ICanDigIt

Wow! Thanks for all the replies everyone. This is fascinating. I'm glad to see there are plenty of other people this happens to.

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## Kaira

Yeah, I've been someone else plenty of times in my dreams. What often happens is I realize that I'm not myself and I want to change back so I either come out of the persons body or just transform into myself. One time I was some Asian princess and I had some brother but then I realized that I didn't have a brother and I started explaining it to him :p and in a different dream I was the queen or goddess of some people who could turn into wolves (my name was Kaira :3).

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## ashani

I too have dreams where I am someone else.  These are very vivid dreams and seem to center around a specific trauma in that person's life.  It's as if I'm remembering in detail, the events leading up to an emotionally traumatic experience.  In one of them, I was a teenager dealing with the alienation of her father who eventually divorces his wife and moves out.  In a couple of others I was a married woman with young children.  In one of them, the daughter died.  I remember what the houses look like, the cars, my dress, the faces of myself, my mother or husband and/or father (depending which dream it was).  In the dream where I was a teen whose father left, I dreamt about other events in her life where her father wasn't there for her.  The breaking point, so to speak, was her father moving away.  

These dreams are as real as memories of my own life.  The only weird thing is that the people I'm dreaming are not me.  And their experiences are not experiences I've had.

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## Baron Samedi

I shapeshift a lot in dreams, but I always feel like I am me. Interesting.

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## DreamingGhost

In every dream that is a non lucid I am never my self so this accounts for about 80% of my dreams where I am always someone else and most of the time I am in 3rd pov in the dreams. I find it odd to have a dream where I am not someone else.

Take Care,
D.G.  ::jester::

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## Thad2000

Add  me to the fold.  I actually experience emotion and thought like the character.  It's really odd when I'm having conversations with me...  jumping from one to the other.  I've dreamt I was a slow witted big lumbering guy to a little girl in a sun dress..    Yea on the 3rd person front too.  Usually pretty vivid and fun dreams.

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## MetalMissy

This is the same for me! 
I am someone else completely in my dreams, at least weekly. I always have very clear dreams that I remember when they are like this too. I am usually the same person though, like I am following someone else's life. I dream that I am a young  man, I feel like a young man too, with no understanding, until I wake, that I am me. I look in mirrors and see myself as a guy of about 15/16 with short dark hair.
Its a bit strange, most ppl dont have this type of dream or at least dont remember it. I have never spoken to anyone who does before.





> I too have dreams where I am someone else.  These are very vivid dreams and seem to center around a specific trauma in that person's life.  It's as if I'm remembering in detail, the events leading up to an emotionally traumatic experience.  In one of them, I was a teenager dealing with the alienation of her father who eventually divorces his wife and moves out.  In a couple of others I was a married woman with young children.  In one of them, the daughter died.  I remember what the houses look like, the cars, my dress, the faces of myself, my mother or husband and/or father (depending which dream it was).  In the dream where I was a teen whose father left, I dreamt about other events in her life where her father wasn't there for her.  The breaking point, so to speak, was her father moving away.  
> 
> These dreams are as real as memories of my own life.  The only weird thing is that the people I'm dreaming are not me.  And their experiences are not experiences I've had.

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## Mancon

A lot of people experience dreams with various perspectives. I don't know too many people who experience their dreams as someone else, but it has happened to me occasionally.

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## LucidMoon

So strange! I had this last night. I was a guy (yes i checked! haha) and it was in the past. Even had memories of that life and everything. Not lucid but still amazing. 
I sometimes wonder if we have these kinds of dreams because of films 'cause we're all used to seeing through other peoples eyes that way.

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## Neoquestmoo

As an add-on question, is there any way to force this? I'd like to try to be someone else in a dream. It'd be cool to experience life from another perspective (i.e., be different ages, different time periods, different gender, different race, etc.)

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## Brigid

You're definitely not the only one. I often have dreams where I am some random character who is not really myself. And I also have a lot of "third-person" dreams where I'm just watching things happen but I'm not a part of it.

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## binnen

> As an add-on question, is there any way to force this? I'd like to try to be someone else in a dream. It'd be cool to experience life from another perspective (i.e., be different ages, different time periods, different gender, different race, etc.)



 I'm not really a LD pro, but I have read quite a lot and these are probably your options: Dream incubation and transformation http://www.dreamviews.com/general-dr...-tutorial.html
http://www.dreamviews.com/general-lu...ion-guide.html

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## SystematicAlec

I guess you people daydream about being someone else. I admire people and sometimes even mimic them but now that I think about it I've never dreamed I'm somebody else.

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## lucidreamsavy

I can't believe I have never posted here before! I have these kinds of dreams now and then.  A week or so ago I was with this guy and I told him I'm not really Brooke (the person's body in in apparently),but then that the way I act is true to the real me.  Later, I am in my room looking in the mirror.  I had blonder hair with a wide side part, and it was curly, like styled curls.  My nose was the same, and my lips a little thinner!  My boobs were the same size as far as I could tell, and I think my skin color was the same!  My eyes were rhe biggest difference.  i have large eyes, but my eyes on brooke were really slit like i was asian, but i wasnt.  i then thought, how can i see as well like this?  they are smaller thn when i squint.  they were also more of a grayish blue color and not the blue green o have.  It was crazy.  So i go out and tell the guy that I'm different in the ways I listed.

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## TwoCrystalCups

2 words, Past life.

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## Timothy Paradox

I was a female in one dream. I was embarrassed about it for weeks.

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## Carrot

That's not weird.

I guess it's the influence of watching shows and playing games where we're experiencing a story not in first person perspective.

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## tripo

I also had this kind of dreams where i became not exactly a character from some game or movie or anime but someone who's definitely not me, and when i wake up i'd say damn i wish it would never ends  :Bang head:

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## JoannaB

I often dream I am not myself. Sometimes I am fully immersed in the other character, other times I am mostly an observer like watching a movie with a vague sense of identifying with one of the characters.

The strangest one was of myself as a giant fat goose. I also change genders and age and professions in dreams.

I think for me part of the reason is that I am not always comfortable being myself (self esteem issues) and also very aware of contradictions in my personality. Other times I distance myself from my dreams to make them more bearable. Also it has occurred to me that at times not being myself is a cheat for doing things in my dreams that I would find deeply objectionable in real life: it is ok for me to thrill kill people in my dreams if I am not myself, or it's not infidelity as long as I am not me in a dream sex scene with someone other than my spouse. Sometimes I think it is my mind's way of telling me that I have not been feeling like myself lately, something is off emotionally. Or it may at times be a clue from my subconscious that this dream is not meant to be interpretted literally: I am not myself and other things are not what they appear to be in a metaphorical dream. Usually I enjoy dreams where I was not myself perhaps even more than dreams from my own perspective, though I know of course that ultimately all my dreams are from my perspective, the question being which me am I at this time.

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## Kholdstare

I am almost always myself. If i'm not myself, i'm usually someone very similar to myself but of a different race (e.g. once I was some sort of an angel thing), but that's only happened once or twice out of the very few times it's happened. I'm talking single digits, here.

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## Timmyboy

I have had this/ I awoke as some fat kid around 15-16 who was having a lot of problems at home. At the time I was freaking out because I knew I was not myself. I don't exactly recall what was going on but the kid had lots of problems with people that were around him. At some point I woke up still in my dream as myself and I recalled everything that happened. I knew that kid needed help, so i controlled the dream to go help him out with his problems and beat up some of the people that were treating him badly. Something along those lines anyway

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## JoannaB

I just had a dream in which I was either Sherlock Holmes or someone like him, and thus I changed gender and also my personality to match the character. In this dream I felt that the reason for this was nothing more than just playing a role in a story, so it was not due to my being uncomfortable or unsure of self identity, but rather this story called for me to be someone else, so I was. Pretty cool.

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## Oceandrop

Funny that this thread exists, in one of my latest nl-dreams I found myself to be a young blind girl or at least in her head, though I was in my kitchen it was slightly different and there was another girl there, it was a very interesting experience, all the emotions of her. She could see the surroundings and demonstrated that she knew where the things around her were placed, she told the other girl she first went blind later in her life so she could still imagine/remember how the kitchen looks like. The dream continued a bit but I will stop here.

After I woke up, I am not gonna lie, I was for a second a bit sad that this person doesn't exist, mostly because I still was under the influence of the emotions I just have felt seconds ago and all her thoughts.

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## Arra

Maybe it has something to do with how strong someone associates with their identities.

I say that because, although I do occasionally have dreams in which I'm a different person, I'm usually myself.  However, when I was a teenager, in _most_ of my dreams I was a different person, and in about half of them I was male.  It seems like now my identity may be more established in my mind.  I know that I"m me, I'm used to being myself, with my gender, age, appearance, and life story.  But when I was younger, I hadn't lived as long and so the idea that I had a certain identity wasn't yet imprinted very strongly in my head.

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## SarcasmoPope

Last night I had a dream I was in a spaceship and I had to get to an escape pod that had detached from my ship. All I had was the suit I was wearing and this little white pill.
I held my breath and got out of the ship and pushed off of it to get to the escape pod. I took the little white pill and I left my body and could see I was Ellen Ripley. I had no helmet.
When I got into the escape pod I returned to my own body and stopped holding my breath, but because the ship wasn't sealed there was no oxygen so I started choking to death.
I left my body again for a few seconds before returning. As I was about to die I recognized I was in a dream. Then I died and woke up.

I have never been anyone else in a dream and I've never left my own body before so I wanted to know it if meant anything.

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## SpecterSlash

Happened to me once. I have an Original character i made, looks like the guy on my profile picture. I transformed into him and gained powers. I guess you could call that being someone else in your dream. Also, whenever I see myself in my dream I have more badass hair and im less fat.

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## Chicken

I was a guy once in my dream and I had sex with Britney Spears, it was pretty awesome! 
I would like to be an animal sometime but so far I only dream about animals, which is also nice.

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## Baron Samedi

Very interesting. I have never had a dream of being another person, only another version of myself. My friend Raven Knight has been having a lot of fascinating dreams of being different women.

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## NonDualistic

I had a dream once quite a while back. As with all dreams to that point, I entered into it believing I was this body/person/persona I was born into. I was being chased by a large colored man through an abandoned industrial complex or old shipyard, it seemed as if out on the east coast somewhere. The man was chasing me trying to kill me. After a long chase I fell and he caught me and began beating me. 
 Suddenly I took a blow to the head and found my perception knocked free of the body. As I literally spun away from the body and the man beating it, I noticed it wasn't "me" this body/ person, it was that of a woman whom I apparently had been "sharing" the experience with.

As I awoke I noticed the police arriving  and do not know whether the woman was killed or not.

This was a extremely vivid and lifelike dream that I remember yet to this day well.

This experience served to greatly weaken my association with body/person/persona.

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## belsi

Hey, this happened to me a couple of nights ago and I googled about it to see if this had happened before.


The thing is, I dreamed about being a 12-13 year old girl in some place like Syria or Afghanistan, in the middle of war.


I had two little brothers but they didn't look like my brothers, they had dark skin and wavy black hair. The youngest was chubby. And we lived in a small house, middle to low class, made of cement, a grey house with a garden in the front and a wire grille in which we had cut a hole so we could go in and out the house. We went with my brothers to a small "park" (which was actually just a very small piece of land and grass) to see the boy i liked (fair hair, 16 years old probably) to talk to him. He had a machine gun and a helmet, but no shirt. He battled with the neighbours in war, but he wasn't a professional soldier. It was the morning, about 10-11 a.m.
Then we heard helicopter noises and explosions relatively close to where we were (4-5 blocks away) and the boy I liked told us to run to our house and hide. We did, we entered through the hole in the wire grille and hid in the front garden under some bushes with my two brothers. I had my youngest brother very close to my face. I could see all his features, his eyes, his hair. We were in silence because we didn't want to get caught. 
The war noises stopped but we heard soldier steps approaching our block. We were absolutely silent. But then we made a noise. It was my youngest brother's walkie talkie, he had taken it from the streets to play with it, and it made a walkie talkie white noise and there was a voice. We turned it off but it was too late, the soldiers had heard us. We ran back to the house. It was a one story house, walls and floor made of grey cement, only one big room with no divisions. My parents were there, but they weren't my REAL parents, they were the parents of the girl. The mother was a gorgeous arab woman. The father had tattoos in his arms and shoulders. 
My parents told me to get my bag, store a few things and money, and run away through the back yard with my two brothers, and they would stay to distract the soldiers (I guess american soldiers).
So I took my bag but it was my real purse, the one I own in real life. I put in it things I have in real life and I looked down and it was my body and a dress I own and wear often. But it wasn't my life. I took my two brothers by the hand, said goodbye to my parents (my mother was really sad and moved) and I watched them hug and thought "wow he really loves her, she really is the love of his life" and ran to the back yard with my brothers. We jumped the wall of the back yard and landed in a sort of wasteland full of grass and plants. 
And I woke up. 


I don't know if this is actually real. But I woke up at 5-6 a.m, and checked Syria's time and it was about 10-11 a.m there. 
It was really vivid.
And I think it might have been real. 
And I wonder if a girl in Syria dreams about my life sometimes.

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## 101Volts

Yes, this sometimes happens to me.





> I was a female in one dream. I was embarrassed about it for weeks.



That's happened to me multiple times, including when I was Rainbow Dash once.

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## VivianVector

This happens to me a lot, or I'll often have third-person dreams. Sometimes I'm like the spirit-helper of someone else and I can fly through walls to help them navigate the dream. 
But I've never had a dream to my knowledge where I was a fictional character, even if it would have made sense for me to be so in the setting. When I'm a different person, I just know, and I'll often have strong attachments or know information about other DCs as though they are people from my own life. In saying that, these dreams aren't really any more unusual than standard non-lucids. Being a different person doesn't distress me.

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## 101Volts

> Yes, this sometimes happens to me.
> 
> 
> 
> That's happened to me multiple times, including when I was Rainbow Dash once.



... Except the part where embarrassment is concerned. Sorry, I had forgotten to mention that. Though really I've had dreams of being a woman before that even, or partially where my head is still male... Though that was back when I was 12 so I had no facial hair at the time, and it had to do with when I was screwing around in The Sims making duplicate files of female bodies and renaming them to the male files so I could select them there too. What a weird kid I was in a way, and what in the world was I thinking? Honestly now.

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## Suddzy17

I very rarely dream I'm myself, I also never recognize the people I am in dreams. Like I'm a generic person thrown into a storyline. My last occurrence of this was a few nights ago, I started the dream as myself with seven other people and people started dying, I ended up as someone else and I assume lady gaga was the killer because she and I (as someone else) duked it out in the end and I had to kill her. Very strange dream. Also, 99% of the time I dream in 3rd person, even if I'm the subject of my dream

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