Talking of her wedding to William, Lucy says, "... it felt a little bit like things were not entirely real." Why do you think she felt this way? Have you ever experienced a feeling like this?

"I began to feel a weird sense of something," Lucy says about her wedding to William. "It is very hard to describe but it felt a little bit like things were not entirely real." Why do you think Lucy felt this way? Have you ever experienced a feeling like this?

I'm sure that Lucy did not really know what a good marriage was supposed to be, therefore, she said yes to William without truly knowing what it meant to be a wife to him. She may have had a premonition that it was not going to last. I have felt that things were not entirely real only in moments of pure adversity and pain - perhaps because I did not believe "it" could be happening.

I think there are times when one anticipates a big event that, when the event finally arrives, one has a sense of unreality. "OMG, this is actually happening!" I've had that feeling on a couple of vacations, where I can't quite believe I'm actually there, and there's this air of fantasy about it.

Both participants make good points. Lucy was thoroughly out of her element. Perhaps it felt so foreign that she didn’t believe it was real. Perhaps she even felt the activity was somehow false or a charade. I have experienced the sense of witnessing a performance instead of an honest experience.

I think it's pretty common to have a sense of unreality when a long-anticipated event finally comes to pass. There's this whole, "Is this really happening???" feeling. I've experienced it often, with the most intense being the one time my now-husband and I were apart for several months, when he moved from Ohio to Oregon ahead of me. We met up in Hawaii, and between not having seen him in a while and the beauty of Hawaii after months of winter in Ohio, it just didn't seem real. It's been about 25 years now and I still remember that vividly.