From Dream To Meme: The Rise Of Memes Inspired By Dreams

In February, Twitter user @haoeru posted a meme depicting Family Guy character Lois Griffin next to a pile of blue pills and text reading Yass Pills, a string of words you can’t help but imagine in Lois’ voice thanks to her addition.

The meme doesn’t make a ton of sense until you turn to the caption, reading, “I tried recreating the meme I saw in my dream,” explaining its random structure. The post took off, quickly gaining over 65,000 likes and being reposted by several meme pages across social media. I reached out to @haoeru to ask her what it’s been like watching the meme blow up, and she told us, “I was so shocked to see it get so much attention! I genuinely thought it was going to get around 60 likes at most but I woke up and saw it had gone viral.”

Only a few days later, her dream-turned-meme was taken a step further and voiced over by a user on TikTok with a killer Lois Griffin impression, which was taken by memers and used in a number of other posts referencing Yass Pills. People even began reimaging the meme, such as in a post replacing Lois with Hatsune Miku or a YouTube video with Lois as a Gacha Life character. Yass Pills had quietly begun spreading around every corner of the web, and although it hasn’t hit the big leagues just yet, it’s gaining more and more power and interest in the eyes of those who experience it every day, showing a strong potential format given enough support.

“I love looking at the memes [people have made]. I get a good laugh out of them. It’s honestly kind of a weird experience but overall a fun one,” Haoeru told us.

The most interesting aspect of @haoeru’s meme isn’t its virality (a pill-based, Family Guy-based, ironic meme format isn’t exactly the wildest thing to go viral), but its origin as a dream.

“[In the dream] I’m in my room and I look down at my phone,” Haoeru said. “And the [meme] is just there. I look away and there’s a man standing on top of my shelf. That’s about all I remember.”

I asked her how accurately she believes she recreated the meme, and she said, “I tried to recreate it as closely as possible, but I couldn’t. I can't remember the font at all and the background was the Family Guy living room but it was blurry. Also, Lois was actually holding the pills and smiling.”

Yass Pills isn’t the first meme to come out of a dream. In fact, the subreddit /r/ThomasThePlankEngine, started in 2019, is a forum made specifically for users to share memes they saw in dreams. It’s garnered over 27,000 members since the beginning and spawned a number of dank one-off memes. The subreddit was even featured in a Vice profile earlier this year. However, the phenomenon of entire meme formats coming from dreams as opposed to one-off hits like the kind produced on the subreddit is something relatively new.

The first example of a format from a dream is probably BODE, a 2016 Tumblr format where users put the word BODE (short for bodacious) over images of cats. Between then and now, we've seen at least two other formats come from dreams, and interestingly, they've both come out in the past few months, showing a significant increase in the frequency of meme formats from dreams. The first one this year was Wiseposting.

Back in May, Twitter user @materialgirlrap posted a meme describing a nightmare of hers where everyone was doing something called Wiseposting, and she couldn’t do it right, resulting in cries of, “mmm, no, very unwise.” The post went viral, gaining thousands of likes and retweets and heaps of comments reading “mmm, no, very unwise,” as if dragging the user right back into their nightmare.

The very next day, the subreddit /r/wiseposting took off, quickly acquiring over 19,000 members and filling up with rehashed Wise Confucius memes, new ironic memes parodying them and a whole lot for faux-wiseman shitposting. With only the word “wiseposting” to go off, the subreddit’s community invented the context around it, turning wiseposting into an entire niche meme genre overnight. The sub is still active, effectively reviving Confucius Say memes for a new ironic era of memers in an ultimately fascinating way.

So, what does it say that two significant meme formats have come from dreams so recently? The simplest answer is a coincidence, and that’s likely a large part of it. But we also have to look at how fast-paced the current meme landscape is, and how far and few between true classic meme formats are becoming. Many say we’re living in the post-ironic meme era. Absurd, ironic, and nonsensical memes hold great value in the market, and memes borne of dreams are about as absurd as they get.

When a dream-based-meme is actually funny and open to variations, it’s propped up naturally by the community like any other good meme format is. This is undeniably rare, and a reason why so many memes on /r/ThomasThePlankEngine are hits on the subreddit but don’t exactly spawn formats that carry on.

The closest comparison we can get to memes from dreams is memes made by AI, like the memes made by Shitpostbot. Shitpostbot’s memes are random by design. Users feed the AI various meme parts and it combines them based on what users upvote, creating extremely random but often funny memes. The memes made by AI are completely unfiltered, much like the memes made in dreams.

Unlike AI, however, dreams reach into the brain as their source. Dreams are heavily thought to be based on subconscious thoughts and things happening in your day-to-day life. This offers a potentially personal touch that AI memes can’t achieve while keeping the absurdity that helps them succeed. Memes from dreams seem more natural than those from AI so far. They offer something that’s original, rather than something made up of used meme pieces fed to a machine brain. There’s a good balance between relatable and absurd that’s sometimes lost with AI memes, making dreams one of the most unique places for memes to be born.

With that in mind, I asked @haoeru whether she could think of anything that might influence the dream. “I guess it might be because I use Family Guy reaction pics," she said. "I also started using yass as a joke around that time, but I have absolutely no idea where the pills part came from.”

While these are two of the only known cases of meme formats created in dreams so far, it wouldn’t be surprising if more begin to pop up in the coming years. Interestingly enough, on June 19th, mere days before this piece was published, a Twitter user named @Xploshi tweeted out another new meme that came to them in a dream. This one describes a fictional video game called "Wario Where," based on the Warioware series of games. In the dream, Wario finds out about the game and goes on TV to denounce it.

I had a dream about a bootleg Warioware called “Wario Where” about trying to find him on a where’s Waldo page and Wario got so angry about the bootleg that he made a 144p resolution Chris Chan esque video demanding it be taken down I have provided a reconstruction below pic.twitter.com/MEZj10lXwg

— Xploshi (@Xploshi) June 19, 2021

The tweet gained about 1,000 retweets and 7,000 likes in a week and has already spawned several memes referencing it across Twitter, most posted under the original post as comments. It may not be as explosive as something like Wiseposting or Yass Pills, but it shows yet again the increased frequency with which these dreams-turned-memes are becoming, and how eager users are to interact with them.

If you’ve ever dreamt a meme or anything that could be a meme, there are worse ideas than trying to recreate that meme and sharing it with the world. As the saying goes, “Don’t let your memes be dreams.”

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