Is this a DID thing?

So when I experience emotions I get really surreal pictures in my head. And I may or may not know what it actually is trying to express. Like I was in therapy a few days ago and in my head I saw blue acid rain cutting a man into slices which rotated and floated apart while in another corner there was an intricate gold crown with white powdered faces in it which kinda vibrated so that the faces merged together and pulled apart. I had just offhandedly mentioned that some of my thoughts were in pieces of color bc I didn't think it was weird and my therapist had much more of a reaction than I'd expected. I still don't really know what it means. I've never done hallucinogens (nor found evidence of me doing them) and it's not actually psychosis and no one I've talked to knows what I'm talking about so...is this a thing?

Ok I don't know if this is something similar, I also don't know if it is a DID thing but before I became aware of my DID if I had something emotional going on I would get 'sent' internal pictures. These pictures came from a dissociated part of myself- a bit like having a dream but you are awake at the time....this was nearly 20 years ago now and it doesn't happen so much any more. I do have an internal for whom these images (as well as dreams) make perfect sense but she/he does is not able to share with the rest of us. Don't know if that is any help......

not necessarily. it could also be related to anxiety issues and/or possibly even an OCD type situation with intrusive images. it could be a link between feeling emotions which can overwhelm you/confuse you and then bring up those images for whatever reason and could be your brain trying to figure out what is happening, etc.

i have had a lot of different types of things and never quite knew what was related to what..i would have a lot of intrusive images that seemed to just come out of nowhere no matter how i felt or what i was thinking, etc. they were highly distressing to me and then of course made me think about them more and created a cycle like that.

for me, some things overlapped at times though too, both DID/dissociation/trauma related and OCD which made it more confusing.

curious how it made you feel when your therapist visibly reacted like they did? if mine showed any indication of fear, shock, etc., it would kind of upset me because it's supposed to be a safe place to share those things, and they hopefully would be able to help sort out what it is to some degree.

Thanks so much for the responses!

OCD occurred to me because my sisters have that. But it's real world based for them like they think things that could actually theoretically happen involving them? Like they're going to kill someone etc. Idk if it's always that way...

The main thing that makes me think it might be a dissociated part sending pictures like @LittleMie said is because of how detailed and completely made up they are. Like they are very clearly nothing I've ever seen before but I didn't consciously make them up...but when I zone out and draw random crap it actually looks kinda similar but atp I feel like I'm just psyching myself out I don't really know.

Yes, this may be a DID (or OSSD) thing.

The intrusive images likely are coming from an insider. They could be fantasy. They could also be images of real events of the inner world. Until you make contact with the source you won't know if they are fantasy or real. And, because the inner world is inside your head, in a sense it is fantasy. Fantasy that has a kind of reality.

About your therapist. If it worries you, you might ask the therapist what the reaction you saw was about. You might also say what you thought it was about. For what it is worth, therapists just like persons with DID tend to be phenomenally sensitive. Sometimes therapists have extrasensory experiences such as dreaming their client's dreams. So the client describes an intrusive image and the therapist may be sitting there thinking "Oh my God, I saw that too! Aaak! I don't want this guy's stuff in my head." Or, the therapist hears the same images described by more than one client. Creepy!!!

Remember what Hamlet told Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Sometimes I'll get explanations from my gatekeeper, who is an alter though an unusual one. Sometimes I'll get images that are creative metaphors for what he wants me to understand. Sometimes I'll get both and they don't always match words to picture.

So he might tell me we have alters we haven't yet met and "sends" me an image of nook in a large room that no light shines into, a representation of alters who are connected to us (the room) but who we can't yet see.

We have a couple alters who don't or can't talk. We have picked up random images from Ashar which we can then interpret. These are more realistic -- what happened -- than those from Sphinx, whose images often carry a symbolic meaning rather than literal one.

After we met him, we got images from Jack that "proved" he had grown up in a family in Kentucky, even though that didn't literally happen since we grew up elsewhere. They were quite realistic and believable.

Some of the dreams we had as a child are still far more vividly recalled than most of our childhood. The dreams or daydreams we remember may be more symbolically meaningful than the chaos that happened. Some of them are like our own bizarre fairy tales that contain the emotional truth or necessary lessons of our life without the real world detail.