"The Lamp Looks Weird" Is the Latest TikTok Trend That Has Folks Confused

TikTok's phraseology and language has always been totally distinct to the platform. There is no place on the internet filled with more slang terms that will leave you confused. One recent phrase has been particularly baffling to users, though, and it's called "the lamp looks weird."

The phrase is often used to describe a period of time or an experience, and many want to better understand what the phrase means and where it comes from. Here's what we know about what it means and its origins.

"The lamp looks weird" is a phrase that people on TikTok and across the internet have adopted to refer to moments in their lives that make them think they are dreaming.

The phrase originated with a Reddit comment that is more than a decade old in which a user told a story about what happened them in the aftermath of getting assaulted by a football player for walking where he was trying to drive.

The user explained that they had lived an entire other life while they were knocked out, complete with a romance and two young children. All of this changed when he noticed a particular lamp in his living room that didn't look right.

"It was still in 3D but... just.. wrong. (It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade). I was transfixed, I couldn't look away from it," he explained.

"I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp," he continued. "I stopped eating, I left the couch only to use the bathroom at first, soon I stopped that too as I wasn't eating or drinking. I stared at the f--king lamp for 3 days before my wife got really worried, she had someone come and try to talk to me, by this time my cognizance was breaking up and my wife was freaking out."

"She took the kids to her mother's house just before I had my epiphany.... the lamp is not real.... the house is not real, my wife, my kids... none of that is real... the last 10 years of my life are not f--king real!" he wrote.

After this post spread across the internet, people started using "the lamp looks weird" as shorthand for moments in their life that seem almost too good to be real.

The experience of living an entire alternate life while you're unconscious is not a super common one, but plenty of people have moments in their lives when they feel like something is just not quite right. "The lamp looks weird" is sort of a shorthand for those moments, even if few people have experiences that extreme.

The phrase has also been misinterpreted as it's spread across TikTok, but its core meaning remains tied to the Reddit post from which it originates, even if not everyone knows where the phrase comes from.