Maybe it's not that common, but It's happened to me...Though I have a pretty bad dissociative disorder so dreams/reality get blurred for me on a daily basis. I get stuff like sleep paralysis, hypnogagic hallucinations,intrusive daydreams, waking nightmares etc...
The following is a short version of the dream. I'm sorry it's still pretty long. You can take it or leave it, it doesn't really matter to me. But I know this kind of thing can happen to people.
*I had one of those dreams, where I lived an entire lifetime. It started out with me living with my abusive family as a teenager. I went to sleep, and I had this dream where I was astral projecting. I met this boy and we became really good friends over the course of that dream. When it was coming time to wake up, we were afraid we would never see each other again. I was a bit skeptical of the whole astral projection idea, but he seemed to be convinced. We agreed that later that night, we would meet up at a corner near where we both lived. That's how we would find out if it were real or not.
I woke up the next day feeling pretty weird about that. And I felt the idea of going to some random street corner later that night was pretty stupid, and decided I wasn't going to do it. I went about my normal day, and it started getting dark and as night time kept getting closer, the idea of seeing if that were real or not kept crossing my mind. I felt pretty silly for my mind even going back to it...but still I thought "what if?" So I sneak out of my parents house, and go wait by the corner, feeling like a retard, but I guess I felt like I had nothing to lose. I want to also add how strange this was for me, because I had no friends at the time. My parents didn't let me go to school. And my mother didn't even allow me to check the mail on my own. I mean that didn't stop me 100% of the time, but it would definitely be pretty crazy for me to go out to a random street corner in the middle of the night. I was perfectly aware of this in the dream, but I didn't care.
I waited there for hours. And of course, nothing happened. I guess I didn't expect anything to happen. Some guy is walking up in the distance. My stomach flips. "is that him? no that's impossible. I'm probably going to get mugged." but I can't help but to feel hopeful. I'm just sitting there trying to look natural and not look agitated/excited/scared. It turns out not to be him at all of course. But some random hobo who starts harassing me. I don't think i've ever felt stupider in my life. Then a truck drives up pretty erratically and almost hits us. Honking it's horn, and scares the hobo away. I'm about to run the fuck home, until the guy stops the car and rolls down the window. ".......daniela...?" and we were both speechless and not believing what we're seeing here. I'm pretty convinced it's a dream. Apparently he had gotten in a pretty bad physical fight with his drunk alcoholic father, who wouldn't give him the keys to his truck. And the drama was intense, and that's why he was so late. He also felt he had nothing to lose, and decided to go to that corner anyways, and maybe kill himself later when nothing came of it.
I try to wake myself up. In the usual ways, In the not so usual ways. I didn't really want to wake up, but I also needed to know if this was real or not, and I was like 100% sure it wasn't. But... Nothing happens...I couldn't wake myself up no matter what I tried. Time feels like it's passing normally. I can read street signs fine. I can feel the cool night air, and hear the chirping of crickets in the background. Other than this occurrence everything else feels extremely vividly real and grounded.
We stay out all night together, talking about how insane this is. Talking about dreaming and astral travel, and just not believing any of it and being sure we would wake up at any minute...but we didn't. he drops me off in the early hours of the morning before my parents woke up. I didn't sleep much that night. We intended to meet up again the next day.
The next day I start getting ready, and then there is a knock on the door. Shit. My parents get the door. He wasn't supposed to meet me here. My parents are like "who the hell are you?" and he says he is a friend of mine. My parents laugh "she doesn't have any friends". I come out...and I'm shocked to see it's really him and the whole thing wasn't all just a dream. Since I remember clearly waking up that morning. What are the odds? My parents flip out on me for the last time. I decide I can't take it anymore. They say they will call the cops. I decide to just leave with him and ignore them entirely. I don't plan on coming back. i don't know what i'm going to do. Turns out his father kicked him out the night before, because he wasn't so lucky to come home without his parents noticing.
We lived homeless together for a while. Looking for jobs, until he finally found one first since he was a little older and had more of a work history than me and had finished high school. After a while he was able to convince the manager to hire me too. It took us a while and we found a cheap apartment in a not so great part of town. But we were happy. I finished high school online, and basically my life just kept going on from there. Eventually getting married, growing older. We were able to work our way through college, get semi-decent jobs. And basically try to build our lives up together out of nothing*
I would go to sleep, and wake up often in that dream. There were so many vivid details and things that were way to consistent and boring to happen in a dream that it must be real life. I mean, who waits in line in the supermarket in a dream without anything crazy happening?
Waking up from that dream was one of the most surreal and confusing things that has ever happened to me. It messed me up pretty badly for a long time. I was so out of it for weeks afterwards, and had a hard time "waking up" and bringing myself back to reality. Anytime anything slightly out of the ordinary would happen I would panic and be sure that I was going to wake up all over again. I still get pretty messed up if I let myself think about it too much. For a while I was almost convinced that my real life must be a dream, and if I could just wake up maybe I could go back to my "real" life, or maybe i would wake up to something even worse.
It was a pretty emotionally draining, and...I don't want to say quite "traumatizing" but definitely a memorable ordeal...but not in a good way. Writing about it now makes me a bit anxious to be honest. Since I have actually moved away from my abusive family, and occasionally I will have extremely vivid nightmares/flashbacks/night terrors of living with them again,and be convinced that my real life now was all just a crazy dream, because how would such a loser like me ever be able to actually move away from my family?
It might sound stupid. But he was the love of my life. He wasn't perfect by any means. He was damaged just like anyone who came from a family like his. He struggled with trying not to become an alcoholic like his father. He had anger issues. But he was always trying to be the best person he could be. And even after waking up, he was always in the back of my mind if I ever tried dating much later in my life. It helped keep me out of abusive situations and relationships, becauseit reminded me that I could do so much better.
Anyways TL;DR maybe it's not common, but something very similar happened to me and it fucked me up good. I'm actually feeling pretty existential/anxious that I could wake up any second and my entire life might just be an illusion...