You're Finally Awake / You Hit Your Head Really Hard

For The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim opening meme, refer to Toddroll / You're Finally Awake.

About

You're Finally Awake, also known as Waking Up From 2020, is an image macro series featuring photographs of people and animals looking at the camera, captioned with messages written as if the reader suddenly regained consciousness and discovered that the recent years or even their entire life were a product of their imagination. The format inherits its snowclone caption from Skyrim's Toddroll meme, also sharing strong similarities with What If It All Was Just a Dream? format.

Origin

On August 23rd, 2020, Consumeproduct.win^[8] (successor of the shut-down /r/consumeproduct subreddit) user Motherfuckermike posted an anarcho-primitivistic Return to Monke meme based on a photograph of a group of gorillas looking at the camera, captioned "You're finally awake! That fall looked really bad. Industrialized society? Humans? What are you talking about? Let's go eat ants." The post (shown below) received over 140 upvotes in one week.

Spread

On August 25th, 2020, Facebook^[1] user Adam Toumi reposted the meme to the Facebook group The Chimp Zone: Primate Portal, where it received over 1,000 reactions and 760 shares in three days.

On August 25th, 2020, Twitter^[2] user @imoutoboobs reposted the image, gaining over 1,900 retweets and 6,200 likes in three days. An August 26th, 2020, repost by iFunny^[3] user Memesoftheprophet garnered over 35,000 smiles in three days.

The viral spread of the image inspired more memes following the format which conveyed nostalgia and wistfulness for the past eras. On August 27th, 2020, Instagram^[4] user memetides posted one viral derivative of the original meme which received over 3,900 likes in two days (shown below, left). A repost by iFunny^[5] user Quemtrails received over 17,600 smiles in the same period. Later on the same day, Facebook^[6] group I did it all for the limp bizkit memes posted another meme based on the format which went viral the following day (shown below, right). A Reddit^[7] repost of the image received over 62,300 upvotes in /r/dankmemes before being removed.

The initial examples prompted the active spread of the format in late August 2020, with viral examples being posted on Facebook, Twitter and other online platforms.

Related Memes

What If It All Was Just a Dream?

What If It Was All Just a Dream? is a meme genre and a catchphrase that suggests an idea of alternative reality in which a popular internet phenomenon, such as a well-known meme or a popular influencer, has never existed. The memes often feature the background of the meme with the primary meme component erased, or show an edited image in which zero search results found for that meme.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References