For the most part, those feelings fade away along with the anxiety or perceived trauma that caused them. Psychologists have proposed that feelings of unreality are also used by the brain as a protective mechanism against psychological trauma, which would explain why feelings of dream-like detachment are so often reported in the aftermath of traumatic events, such as violence or disaster. If you’ve ever been severely jetlagged or sleep-deprived, there’s a good chance that you will have experienced transient depersonalisation. It’s actually not that uncommon to experience such feelings: up to 75 per cent of people will do so at least once in their lives, but for most of them the sensations will be fleeting. Depersonalisation is often described as feeling like you’re ‘in a dream’ or ‘not really there’.
A closely related but lesser-used term is derealisation, which is the sense that the world isn’t real. The momentary experience of depersonalisation is defined as a feeling of unreality, a sense of detachment from the self. The big questions of philosophy and existentialism are usually left for introspective moments, away from the daily distractions of life.īut what if that were flipped on its head, and life was a constant feeling of disintegration, of being cut off from reality, of questioning your existence? At any given time, that is the daily experience for up to 2 per cent of the population (based on epidemiological data from Germany), who live with ongoing and unwanted feelings of unreality, also known as depersonalisation disorder. We move through our lives with a sense of flow and integration. Most people, most of the time, navigate reality without giving it a second thought.
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