dissociations

[cimorene]

Do you ever feel like the world around you is moving at a different speed from you?

Sometimes I feel like life and the world and... stuff... is moving by too fast, and like I'll think I'm going to do something really soon and then it'll be like two weeks later and I don't know where the time went. Carrying on conversations - even via text - with my friends feels awkward because even trying to get it together and answer in what I think will be a polite or reasonable timeframe is taxing when I am comfortably existing with my own thoughts and diverting my attention away from them to compose a reply feels like something I don't have time for (and then I continue not finding the time, like for a week sometimes).

And sometimes I feel like everything around me is moving at about 50% speed, like a video slowed down, and I can hardly stand to stand and listen to a conversation because everyone seems to take about four times as long to talk as they would need to get their point across, and everything that is going to happen seems so incredibly obvious that it's almost like I already knew it was going to happen in advance and I'm already terribly impatient for it to be over, and I'm getting more and more frustrated and having to devote more and more attention to not losing my temper. The telescoping time effect actually reminds me a bit of deja vu, which I get frequently (and I understand it's associated with anxiety and counts as a form of dissociation? so... huh), except it's sort of inside out - it doesn't feel like things have already happened, just like I already knew they were about to happen but only right as they started to, like seeing, oh, 2-15 seconds into the future at all times. Actually a bit like being forced to read along as the teacher calls on people to read something out loud, but you're all being fed the text a couplet at a time or something so you can't just go off and read ahead properly.

Anyway, Wax said that it sounds like those "might be types of dissociation" too, and I guess that makes sense. I seem to have quite a few experiences that are probably dissociation, but all the first and simplest explanations of dissociation you can find always seem incredibly weird and impossible to relate to. There's always mention of the feeling of floating above one's own body, which I can never even seem to picture properly.

The kind I'm the most positive is actually dissociation is when I'm kind of in a fog and slightly disconnected from everything around me, and it's in this state that I do things like dropping things and accidentally reaching for hot oven racks without an oven mitt because the "Oh, there's a reason not to do that" thought can't make it through all the way before it actually happens (but usually when it does I'm still thinking "Oh, huh," because that kind of fugue comes with unimpeachable calm). Anyway, the time that I burnt my hand on the oven rack I really did regret it, but mostly I find that state a pleasant and relaxing break from being in the real world and I often wish I could do it on purpose when I'm feeling overstimulated (but unfortunately I can't).

Comments

[yvannairie]

Oh that absolutely sounds like dissociation, at least the way I experience -- especially because I also go into desynched time mode if I'm overwhelmed enough. It's like I run out of work memory, and either one of two things needs to be shunted off to a hardware register -- the processes that keep my personality running, or the processes that keep me connected to the outside world -- which inevitably slows them down.