Finally!!! I remember what your dream reminds me of - not so much for content, but, the experience of having lived an entire lifetime in a dream.

Don't laugh, but, it reminds me of a Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Inner Light". The captain is struck unconscious by a probe and lives out an entire lifetime while knocked out. He goes from being newly married to being an 85 year old grandfather. The probe was built by a civilization that no longer exists and it was their intention to have someone remember who they were. One of my fave episodes.

"Seize the time, Meribor. Live now; make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again."
-- Jean-Luc Picard "The Inner Light"

This episode first aired June 1, 1992, and won a well-deserved Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation in 1993 that helped build TNG's reputation as superior science-fiction.

The plot is rich, but not particularly convoluted. The Enterprise encounters a probe that attaches itself to Picard's mind and feeds him sped-up memories of a future on an alien world, Kataan. The rest of his future is spent, he believes, on an alien world. He has a wife, and children, and grandchildren and becomes a part of this world's culture and community. Only when he's eighty-five and watching this planet die from an endless drought is he told that actually this is all an illusion, a life courtesy of the alien probe, which was sent out a thousand years ago in search of someone who would live this life and know the people of Kataan and then tell their story to other worlds and other people. Picard is then awakened back on the bridge of his ship, and must get used to being Captain Picard of the Enterprise once more.

The storyline is certainly intriguing, but there are no huge twists or wild rides. We're puzzled, certainly, in the beginning, but there's no build-up of suspense about what's happening. Indeed, we learn along with the crew where the probe came from, and we can figure out the purpose for the probe as soon as Data says that Kataan is now dead.

The power of this episode is almost all characterization, and it all centers around Picard. TNG put at risk its most popular and well-developed character (with the possible exception of Data) by actually changing that character in quite fundamental ways -- and by following through on those changes in subsequent episodes. This adventure is incredible not for its originality or fantastical-ness, but for its wonderful appropriateness, for its everlasting impact on Picard as a man who made so many choices in his life which were overthrown in an instant to show him so many roads untraveled and leave him the caretaker of of those paths for an entire world.
Read the full review here.

(how exciting, I learned how to do that cool link thingy )

btw - Patrick Stewart (who also plays Professor Xavier in X-Men) plays Picard in this series.