My thoughts as a child with DID

So when I was young, I used to have this fear that I was just a character in someone's dream, and that they might wake up at any moment and I would disappear forever. Looking back on it now, it seems like I was confused and was trying to make sense of DID symptoms I noticed as a child. Does anyone else recognize similar thoughts?

I recently remembered that thought and I'm trying to make sense of it. The dissociative symptoms and time loss I've been experiencing lately add to the fear that "I" may eventually disappear.

Am "I" not the original host? Is it possible that I will switch out and never come back into control? I've been very successful so far, and I'd hate to lose that.

I have had the off and on thought that I am really lying in a hospital bed in a coma and will one day wake up to find I have a very different life. Or even that this life is a total dream.

I don't remember anything in my childhood indicating that I was aware of something being "different" like DID. My behavior certainly indicated it to other people, but I didn't have the need to make sense of my symptoms. I actually thought nothing of my profound memory blackouts until I found out about the other alters. I didn't think it was an issue at all for some reason until then.

I know that I would often feel like I was watching myself do stuff, specifically in competitions/performances, sports, or travelling someplace new or whatnot; I always thought it was something everyone normally did though, having the main part of them recede while they did stuff when nervous or excited, although it did happen at other times too, a lot. It'd also be easy for me to watch a show over and over, since I'd forget I'd seen it all the way through. I would also get yelled at a lot by my mom for 'not paying attention' since I often would just not register conversations.

And yeah, I'd sometimes wonder if I was in a dream or something and would wake up and it'd all be different, like in a hospital, especially when I was watching myself do things, since it would all seem so surreal sometimes.



But aparently as a kid I acted out a lot, which I don't recall at all. I remember being a fairly calm child, but aparently in early elementary school I'd hit people and even threw a chair once in class, according to what my mom tells me. No recollection of this though, even after; I do remember though I'd sometimes end up in the principle's office with no clue what I'd done to be there. Makes me wonder how no one really noticed there was a problem.

Snuffthroostr wrote:I have had the off and on thought that I am really lying in a hospital bed in a coma and will one day wake up to find I have a very different life. Or even that this life is a total dream.

Interesting..That's very similar to what I interpreted back then. Does this still affect you as an adult?

chococat159 wrote: I actually thought nothing of my profound memory blackouts until I found out about the other alters. I didn't think it was an issue at all for some reason until then.

Me too..Even now I still seem to write off blackouts without giving it any thought. Most of the time, I have no idea which alter is responsible for time loss.

Bipolar_Cat wrote:But apparently as a kid I acted out a lot, which I don't recall at all. I remember being a fairly calm child, but apparently in early elementary school I'd hit people and even threw a chair once in class, according to what my mom tells me. No recollection of this though, even after; I do remember though I'd sometimes end up in the principle's office with no clue what I'd done to be there. Makes me wonder how no one really noticed there was a problem.

Same here. I remember myself as a quiet and reserved kid, but my mother says I used to get in fights at school all them time. She also says that I used to visit the guidance counselor weekly and had lunch with the principal weekly, but I have no recollection of any of that. And yea, I wonder why no one thought there was a problem..maybe they suspected something but didn't have enough evidence to do anything?

humptydumpty wrote:So when I was young, I used to have this fear that I was just a character in someone's dream, and that they might wake up at any moment and I would disappear forever.

Check.

Snuffthroostr wrote:I have had the off and on thought that I am really lying in a hospital bed in a coma and will one day wake up to find I have a very different life. Or even that this life is a total dream.

Yep.

I had a command pod which I imagined embedded in the body's head, from which I'd operate the body, others watched the body from above or the other side of the room. I'd personally attribute that to depersonalization, which was a normal part of life for many of us when we were little.


A number of us were almost certain that we were merely characters in a book.. until very recently. This has to do (I think) with the set up of our internal world, which mimicked a book or film.

humptydumpty wrote:
Same here. I remember myself as a quiet and reserved kid, but my mother says I used to get in fights at school all them time. She also says that I used to visit the guidance counselor weekly and had lunch with the principal weekly, but I have no recollection of any of that. And yea, I wonder why no one thought there was a problem..maybe they suspected something but didn't have enough evidence to do anything?

Yes, same! The only memory of guidance I have is being there when 9/11 happened. I always thought I had been delivering something to them, since the teacher sent people on errands like that, before I discovered it had been a regular thing.

I know with my bipolar, my mom denied it was possible for years before she accepted it (grandpa has it really bad); So maybe it wasn't that no one suspected there was a problem, but more that no one wanted to believe it. Convinced she has something too as well.

I had a lot of depersonalization as a child, even though I thought it was just "weird feelings" that everyone has but nobody can explain. Only a few months ago I figured out it was actually depersonalization.

I remember clearly describing myself as an empty piece of paper, like "I" don't really exist, but then again, that sounds a little more like a thought of someone with BPD than of someone with DID I guess.

I don't think I was ever in fights, I remember being a shy, polite child, probably a little more frightened of people like teachers than normal, but not really aggressive. In elementary school years, I was suspected to have ADD because sometimes my reactions were slow and I looked like I wasn't really there.
My mother has this "everything's fine" attitude, though, so she took me to some kind of center to get it checked out. I don't remember going there, but apparently they only talked to her and watched me play with her. I was only there once and they apparently said there was "nothing wrong with me". My mother said that I was too shy to ever have talked to a therapist, but I don't think that's true. That a child is shy doesn't mean you can't talk to them. It looks ridiculous to me now that they didn't insist on talking to me alone (or at all) because hey, maybe my mother was influencing me and would react differently without her around.
All in all, my childhood is pretty much a mystery to me. It seems like such a farce. But any feelings that might have been tied to DID I didn't see as weird, or even worth telling anyone. For different reasons I definitely didn't feel "normal" but never got taken seriously until a year ago.

In school I remember putting a girl in a bubble above my head. She would have an awesome time while in the bubble even though we were in an unsafe situation.

I remember when one of my classmates asked, "what's the reward?" (for an assignment), and the teacher said "60 minutes an hour", I remember I felt like it was unfair cause I'd never gotten 60 minutes an hour. Now I know why I felt like this. For a while I even tried to find out how many minutes I missed each hour. Of course until I forgot about it.

I tried to point out to people around me that we're sharing this body. I didn't know there was something to hide yet. That became clear to me years later, when I remembered that those people bullied me because of my switches.

I always thought it was really busy in the room when I was very little, to find out those people are inside me.

I remember that when B was host, a toddler, he kept thinking his sister was missing (even though we're an only child). Well I found her, 2 year ago. I never knew of her existence before but R confessed to hiding her.

I remember voices who were extremely angry with my caregivers for being ignorant and not seeing my needs. I didn't understand the voices' reaction back then but the memories of them visually manifesting and swearing at them are quite clear. It was at that moment that R decided something had to be done, and she took her role of "creator" which she had until about 3 or 4 years ago.

Sometimes I'd come to, while having done stuff that was totally not okay. I'd ruin friendships etc, but I can remember thinking it was kinda annoying that I'd 'awake' like this. The feeling in my body was scary and disorienting, and I thought that somehow my mother's grandmother's ghost had attached to me and kept possessing me. I thought I was a portal for ghosts and tried being a medium for the other side for a while.

There's a few alters of which I thought they were ghosts at first, and I communicated with them as if they were, asking how they died etc. The thing that changed this opinion was that I'd gradually remember them from earlier times.

I thought all of this was normal until late in my teens, when I had current SO and told him about the puppet in my head, main alter E. Who then took over and had a conversation with SO while I was co-conscious. He told him that he only presented as a cartoon puppet cause it was less scary to me this way. After this, even though I was co-conscious, it took another 2 years before I found out that this thing has a name, DID.

I remember growing up thinking maybe I was just someone's perception/their inner "image" of what they were reading in a book.