It feels like a ######6 dream

"It all just feels like a ######6 dream!". This is a very common phrase among people who suffer from some form of depersonalization disorder. Although there is not much public awareness about depersonalizaton disorder, it can be a very debilitating disorder. I am 15 years old and I have symptoms which resemble depersonalization disorder because of my depression. The symptoms are sometimes present and sometimes are not, but when they are there it feels as is I am in a dream and nothing is real at all. It feels as if I might just suddenly wake up in my own bed. I get this weird sense that I am watching myself go though life. These can all be very hard symptoms to deal with. If you are ever confronted with a severe onset of the symptoms I described above I feel that you should see a psychologist immediately. There are medications for this available if it gets too serious. Good Luck everyone.

- Jimmy

I am 13 and in middle school. i have dp/dr, depression, and generalized anxiety. today was my first day of school. i depersonalized the whole day. i can't find anyways to knock myself out of it and find it even more impossible to get out of it at school. most of the time i just want to curl up in a ball, close my eyes, and escape inside myself. but unfortunatley i cannot do this in school. any words of advice would be very helpful, especially coming from another teenager.

i think i know what you're saying. i'm 16. i've never been diagnosed with this but as i'm reading i'm feeling like that's what i always try to say but can't get into words. i'm scared i may be in a "state" right now. i feel like i'm watching myself go through life (i feel disconnected), and i feel like if i don't watch myself carefully and stay away from anything dangerous i might just vanish, or die, or hurt myself. i have ocd and depression also, though, maybe it's just a combination of the two at the current moment. even though this might not even be a current moment because i feel like i've died already.

that doesn't make any sense, does it.

I have exsperiance the feeling that i was dreaming a few times.
Everything gets calm and slow and i cant really describe the feeling it is really weird. This only happens once in a while and only lasts for at most a few hours.
Some times i have dreams when i sleep and the next day i have problems remembering if those dreams happened in my life or if they were just fake. This kind of scares me!!

Ribcaged i think i made sense of it. You were saying that it feels like you not alive and you just watching your live from a diffrent persepctive or spot?

I have to remind myself things are real. It sucks. Things feel unreal to me at least half of the time.

I feel the same way like I am not real like I am just a set of eyes watching everything. Even when I am involved doing something I don't feel there. I have to really think about memories because it feels like my life has vanished and i'm just now like I was never actually alive.

byonush wrote:I feel the same way like I am not real like I am just a set of eyes watching everything. Even when I am involved doing something I don't feel there. I have to really think about memories because it feels like my life has vanished and i'm just now like I was never actually alive.

I can agree with that more than I have been able to agree with anything recently.

Memories... The worst part of whatever this is. I tend not to remember anything in a real sense after I've participated in it. I can watch a movie, and five minutes after it's finished, I can remember small shots, but overall, I have to think amazingly hard to put my finger on what the movie was about, and what happened during the duration of it.

When I think about my own memories, I don't seem to remember anything as my own. It's as if I'm watch a scene acted out by someone else. I hardly ever see memories through my own eyes, and if I do, it tends to fade.

However, I've always lived with this, and so I don't really know any better. But I've only started to observe this recently.

But yeah... Memories seem to be the most bothersome of all symptoms for me. If I remember myself doing something, it's either through the eyes of an unknown observer, or it's a fantasy-based scene acted out by someone who apparently looks like me. Sometimes they don't even look like me.

I tend to dwell on that a lot.

As for everything else, I pretty much agree. For the past few hours, I've been riddled with what I deem to be severe derealization, as well as dissociation. And when it's gone, I won't be able to remember how it feels, which will cause me to question if I actually felt anything at all.

Whoopie!

I myself live with what seems to be some form of disassocation. For the last ten years, every waking minute of every day at least 50% or more of myself doesn't feel like I am even alive. I've had some trauma in my childhood and I definitely had anxiety and depression growing up but everything didn't come to the surface until I was 17 (about 10 years ago) when I witnessed an accident. RIght as the accident happened, I went outside of myself and I was just frozen and felt like I was in a dream. Funny thing is that I never really woke up out of that 100%.

I've experienced a huge amount of anxiety and depression throughout the years but I've learned how to cope with both the anxiety and depression which isn't that pervasive in my life anymore which is good.

The most extreme experiences I've had with disassocation was when I would get off of work or just at random times I would just drift off and lose touch with myself and most of my surroundings. I remember one time someone was talking to me and I drifted off and he tapped on my shoulder to get my attention and I barely noticed it and heard his voice as if it were in the distance. Anther time someone was pushing me from behind and I didn't even realize it was happening. I of course never stayed in that intense state for long periods of time.

I've gone to therapy, taken every anti depressant drug around and nothing really solved the feeling of being in a dream and feeling like I am dead. Medicines did help me cope with anxiety and depression though which was something. I'm not currently taking any drugs.

In a way I feel as if my life ended 10 years ago or I went into a coma and I'm still waiting for the day that I'll wake up. The human mind is weird.

No one can really tell that I'm "different" than any other person. With my friends when I let myself be myself I tend to be on the darker side of life and say depressive/negative things but some of it is my personality and some of it is depression or what not.

Has anyone experienced similar things as a constant for many years like that?

Ok, finally, I found something that sounds exactly like my fiance's perspective.

He doesn't remember ever feeling really there but when he talks about the sexual abuse situations he suffered through as a child, he is different and sometimes doesn't remember talking about it. I think at that moment he is really there 100% but it hurts too much to stay there and he disassociates completely if he can't just stop thinking about it fast.

Normally, he has a routine and he hates change. He is about to move across the country to be with me and it is hard because he chose to but he is not at all happy about it.

A counselor diagnosed him as depressed and anxiety...or some combination of the two and put him on Wellbutrin about a year ago. Despite the fact that he has been telling me since October that he doesn't think it is doing anything for him, he has not discussed stopping its use with his doctor because its a change.

He says that he doesn't do anything until someone else tells him to, even though he knows he should...because he just doesn't really care. But I don't think it is really primarily depression as much as depersonalization or some other type of disassociation. He doesn't care because he doesn't really like anything...he's indifferent about almost everything. He is very intelligent and funny and sweet and just the greatest guy but he thinks badly about himself and just generally tries to avoid thinking about decision type things at all.

One thing that he really experiences and likes is sex. I read that depersonalization is often minimized by intense physical or emotional activities. I am not suggesting all you teens have sex under the guise of mental health treatment, as it doesn't last...the personalization(?)

However, he feels guilty about wanting sex and even about needing food. He says he would like to just be a machine and not have emotions or any fleshy life needs or desires.

Anyway, here are my questions after much web research:
1. Do you think depersonalization is misdiagnosed as depression or commonly coexistent?
2. Do you think that eliminating/treating the depersonalization would automatically reduce or eliminate the depression? I mean, if you are unhappy because you are not really experiencing life, wouldn't experiencing life eliminate that?
3. Has anyone found any treatment that works???? I keep reading that total recovery is often possible but that there is no treatment i particular that is effective...this is contradictory.
4. As a person with depersonalization, what do people do that is counter productive for you? I am trying to help him with this and I don't feel very comfortable with the times where he makes a choice but then acts uninterested in that choice, like moving here. I mean, he asked me to marry him and he said he'd move here but he also acts like his life is ending and that makes me feel guilty about wanting him here and needing his help and agreement on finding a place and stuff. Would it be better to do it all myself or to make him face the things he is avoiding (house searching, etc) so I don't have to shoulder it all myself?

I have been experiencing this feeling quite often over the last year. It seems to be getting worse day by day, when sometimes I don't even realize what I am doing because it all appears to be a dream. The strangest thing about this feeling is that it appears to be a dream that I have had before, like I know what I am going to say or do next and I know what is going to happen before it happens. I have even had this dream like feeling when I am asleep and really dreaming. I don't understand what is happening to me but I feel like this is getting out of control. I have tried to suppress this feeling by just telling it to "go away" and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.