A decade-old reddit story has continued to capture the attention of the internet.
Over 13 years ago, an anonymous man posted the story “A Parallel Life / Awoken By A Lamp” on Reddit, which was later deleted and reposted by another user. While the story itself has been on the internet for years, it recently sparked the “lamp is weird” trend on TikTok, where users describe specific memories or feelings that they have before realizing it's not actually happening.
In the initial Reddit story, the anonymous user described his experience living in a parallel reality after he sustained a serious head injury during his last semester of college. In the story, he described living “a different life” while he was unconscious on the ground.
“I met a wonderful young lady (who) made my heart skip and my face red,” he wrote. “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.”
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The user then detailed his new life, where he got a great job and his wife ended up giving birth to his son two years after the birth of his daughter. One day, he noticed one of the lamps in his home looked “inverted” and found he was unable to look away from it.
“I stayed up all night staring at it,” he continued. “The next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp.” He added that he continued to stare at the lamp for three days as his wife grew worried for him.
Days later, she ended up leaving and took the kids with her before she realized “the last 10 years of my life are not f—— real!” After that realization, the user described waking up in pain from his head injury and becoming confused when he woke up and was taken to the hospital.
He then described “3 years of horrid depression” after he woke up, “grieving the loss of my wife and children and dealing with the knowledge that they never existed.”
He added that while he never saw his wife or daughter again, he would get “glimpses” of his “son” out of his “peripheral vision.”
At the end of the post, the user said that he wouldn't answer any additional questions about his experience, but noted that his story could be considered an “open source” and allowed people to “have fun with it,” which in turn , led to the viral trend a decade later.