Uncertainty, false reality, wish fulfillment — through the lens of the “you’re finally awake” meme

Memes are the window into the soul of the modern man. This is true because for a meme to be successful, something must compel the host to share it. Information is not contagious on its own. Indeed, there is nothing I can do to a random string of numbers that will make you share it, with the possible exception of using only the numbers 4, 2, 0, 6 and 9.

A meme often touches on a deeper psychological truth. This psychological truth is held by many people but each individual has difficulty expressing it. It is a part of the unconscious struggling to be expressed, and the longer it remains hidden the more psychological pressure it builds. A successful meme tickles the psychological truth the right way and allows it to bubble to the surface. Memes of this sort experience sudden and explosive growth, and appears to come at exactly the right time and place to satisfy the collective psychological yearning for release.

It should be of great interest to any meme researcher to recognize the psychological background that provides the impulse to share. In this essay I will examine a recent meme that made its way around during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. I believe this meme was popularized because of an uncontrollable impulse to confront the strangeness and uncertainty of the world during the pandemic.

The “you’re finally awake” meme

The meme I will analyze is the “you’re finally awake” meme. A variation of it is shown below:

There are a few different variations of this meme, but the theme is very clear. The viewer is permitted, in the meme-realm, to exercise the fantasy that his current situation is nothing but a hallucination or a nightmare he has awoken from. It has a potent message, that we can wake from the uncontrollable nightmare that is modern life.

This meme has seen two different variations, as the following chart will show. The first variation came around 2018–2019 and focused on the opening scenes of the videogame Skyrim. The second variation is a massive release of psychic energy around August-October of 2020. It is this second peak that is my primary interest.

The psychological impulse

I had a nightmare the same week that I am writing this. In the dream, I drove down a highway and had to take an exit. I shoulder-checked to change lanes, but as I faced forward again I saw a boat parked right in front of me.

I tried to steer out of the way, but the car could not move fast enough. As the car barreled towards the obstacle, I was seized by a strange feeling tone: a mixture between panic and relief. My thought was that I wasn’t about to die because I will just wake up. After all, truly bad things have only happened to me in dreams.

Of course, I did wake up from this dream. I thought it to be illustrative of the psychological impulse that drives the “you’re finally awake” meme. Just like how in my dream, I was suddenly thrust into an out-of-control vehicle, we were collectively thrust into a raging pandemic and political theater where all the norms of life are disrupted in mid-2020. Pace-setting and reality-reinforcing habits such as eating out, watching movies, hanging out with friends are replaced with the 24-hour COVID news cycle, Zoom meetings and endless Netflix.

For most people, this change un-grounds them to reality. Suddenly, you find yourself in a strange and unfamiliar world, all by yourself, in a nightmare that you can’t seem to wake up from.

Is it any wonder that we just want to wake up and go back to the idyllic, wholesome, immanently-normal activities depicted in this meme? The “you’re finally awake” meme is not merely a picture and some text. It is the license to engage in a split second of wish fulfillment fantasy, to temporarily suspend the uncanny reality of 2020 and experience the world in a more understandable way.

It is not any arbitrary form of wish fulfillment either. The most popular iterations of this meme come with a tinge of nostalgia. It is not only the yearning for a more grounded, less nightmarish reality — it is also the yearning of the simpler world of the past. This meme is an outcry against modernity. This meme is a gasp of rebellion against the ails and complexities of modern life.

We experience our past through memories. And, though the world might have been as scary then as it is now, our memories do not contain the same level of detail. Though our parents might remember our childhood as one of struggling to make the ends meet, we remember and re-live it as being comfortably snuggled in the couch, watching cartoons and drinking hot chocolate. It was a simpler time: a simpler and more grounded reality that, whenever we are mired in an uncanny existence, we hope to wake up into it. Indeed, this effect can be quite powerful: Routledge suggests that by invoking the idea of an idealized past, politicians can provoke the social and cultural anxieties and uncertainties that make nostalgia especially attractive — and effective — as a tool of political persuasion.

Memes are also tools of persuasion. A person encountering the “you’re finally awake” meme, if he is subject to the same psychological impulse, will be persuaded to share it. Sharing the meme satisfies the wish fulfillment and alleviates the psychological pressure. Sharing the meme makes the person feel good, warm, childlike.

The false-reality meme set

The “you’re finally awake” meme is part of the set of memes that tickle the idea of a false reality. The idea is incredibly potent: that reality is not as it seem, and we just need to wake up. You may recall to the spinning top in the movie Inception, and how the idea of a false-reality can utterly grip a person’s life.

This meme set appeared quite recently in the history of memes (around 2015-ish). I believe it to be an outcry against a increasingly difficult and obscure world. It is a cacophony of voices of discontent, voices that scream “this is not the reality that we were promised”. These voices are getting louder.

The first and most prominent example is the Mandela Effect. It is the idea that things are not as we remember. Some people remember the passing of Nelson Mandela long before his actual death in 2013. Some people remember the “Berenstain Bears” was spelled differently. Others swear that the Fruit of the Loom logo used to have a cornucopia. People who subscribe to the Mandela Effect meme often attribute it to parallel universes, and some even believe that they were transported from the “correct” parallel universe where everything is good, to this incorrect universe where everything is shit.

Closely related to the Mandela Effect is the meme of “dimensional jumping”. This is the idea that through concentration, meditation, psychedelics or other methods, a person can jump between parallel universes to achieve their goals. I suggest for the reader to Google these two effects and read their subreddits: Mandela Effect, Dimensional Jumping. It is quite fascinating.

In both of these memes, the potent idea of a false reality is absorbed and shared. The meme capitalizes on the fallibility of memory and uses it to suggest what the host wants to believe all along: that there is something fundamentally wrong, uncanny, false, about reality itself. It comes as a realization which releases the decades of pent up psychological pressure — and thus, the host is compelled to share.

Let me follow this thread deeper into the rabbit hole. Some memes will appear innocuous at the surface but have this false-reality thread woven into its fabric. For example, we have the “are ya winning son?” meme, shown below.

This meme echoes the same sentiment, that the world we have once known is no longer. The dad, full of good intentions, wants to know if the son is winning. In his world, the games are simple, and the goal is to win. He does not understand that the games (and thus the world) of the son is completely different. The dad does not understand that the son cannot win. It is something alien to him.

The thread of the false-reality meme set traces back to where we are today, in 2020. The “you’re finally awake” meme is quickly followed by the “return to monke” meme, sharing largely the same traits with one key difference. Return to monke is no longer a timid whimper of wish-fulfilment. It is now a calling, a drive, a purpose. Return to monke means to reject humanity and its modern uncanniness. This meme is show below:

I’ve included a few return to monke memes here.

The contrast between “you’re finally awake” and “return to monke” is that the former is explicitly life-denying, while the latter is reality-affirming. While the former says “wouldn’t it be great to wake up tomorrow in 2003?”, the latter screams “its too late, this is all we have”. Monkey here is no longer advocating for the idyllic past, he can no more be bothered with impotent dimensional portal magic and errors in the matrix and rainbow coloured pills. He is here, he is awake, and he is ready to throw poop.

I do not know the next evolution of this meme set. However, what I can surmise is that the psychological pressure was not fully released by the “you’re finally awake” meme. Perhaps it is the escape to fantasy that is fundamentally unsatisfying to those wanting to deal with a broken reality. Will the psychological pressure find an appropriate release? Indeed, we see that in the course of 2020 that as strange events unfold so unravels the psyches of the common man. He who occupies the internet engages in a constant dance, a tango between his psyche and that of the millions of others. The meme is the music, and we are the orchestra.

(I am, of course, omitting many threads of this set of memes that deal with the idea of a false reality. The pill ideologies, for example, are all potent memes. If you would like me to go into more detail let me know. Thanks for reading!)

This article was first published on my website, https://memeticconsulting.com/. All my articles are dedicated to the public domain under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero licence. Please translate, copy, excerpt, share, disseminate and otherwise spread it far and wide. You don’t need to ask me, you don’t need to tell me. Just do it!