#1
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#3
Derealization is a dissociative experience where the world around you suddenly feels unreal, dreamlike, or like you're watching your own life through a pane of glass. It can last seconds or hours, it can be triggered by stress, trauma, sleep deprivation, or sometimes absolutely nothing at all, and it affects an estimated half of all people at least once in their lifetime.
It is, in the most literal sense, your brain deciding that what it's currently processing is too much and temporarily checking out of the building. What's fascinating is that derealization isn't always triggered by something bad. Extreme joy, shock, or even a moment of profound beauty can produce the same response. The brain's threat detection system sometimes just says, "This is a lot."
Which explains why the moments in this thread aren't exclusively dark. Some of them are wonderful. Some of them are absurd. All of them share that same quality of reality briefly becoming unstuck from itself. If your brain ever decided to briefly pretend none of this was real, it was, in retrospect, just trying to help.
#4
Its like my brain glitched for a second. I just stood there with my baby in my arms like this can not actually be happening right now. For a minute i thought it was a sick joke.
So here I am, tossing my kids back into the car as the scream in rage. Dudes got agonal respirations and zero pulse. Great.
Yell for someone to call 911 and someone else to see if the stand has an AED and initiated cpr.
Less than 10 good compressions and the dudes eyes fly open, takes a deep breath and starts trying to sit up. Im floored, cpr rarely works, never even had to use the AED. He was alert and conversing by time ems showed up.
The most surreal part is nobody, not one person acknowledged that I had just risen a man from the d**d. Gathered my children, got in line, got ice cream and then went home for a post adrenaline rush nap.
#5
I just happened to read the research a few weeks before she told me about the tumors. Complete coincidence.
#6
VeryWellMind has some advice for when life gets so unhinged that reality itself starts to feel optional. Take time for yourself. Focus on what you can control, like eating better, removing toxic people from your orbit, and picking up a hobby. Talk to someone. It is all pretty solid advice. It is also the kind of advice that is significantly easier to read in a listicle than it is to execute in a moment of dissociation.
The "focus on what you can control" piece is arguably the most useful anchor when everything feels like it's happening at once and none of it was on the schedule. You cannot control world events, other people's behavior, or the specific combination of circumstances that just landed on you simultaneously like a perfectly terrible bouquet.
You can control whether you ate today, whether you called the person who makes things feel less impossible, and whether you continue engaging with the situation that is actively making everything worse. It is a small list. It is, on the worst days, enough.
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#8
2. Had to get a second opinion from a GYN when my PCP thought she saw something abnormal during an exam. The earliest appointment was on Halloween. The receptionist told me I could come in a costume but I thought “Nah…we’re doing a biopsy. Don’t feel like talking about the C word while I’m in a costume.” I show up and the entire office is done up like Barbie and they’re all dressed like specific Barbies (the movie had come out that year). So my GYN comes in dressed like classic Barbie with the black and white stripes and cats eye glasses. She has a medical student and an MA with her, each dressed like a Barbie. She starts looking and goes “hmmm. That’s weird. Go get Dr. So and So.” (Side note: when two doctors make that statement, it’s not reassuring…) So the other doctor comes in and she’s got two people with her - all dressed like Barbies. So at one point, I have six Barbies all bent over starting in my hoo-hah and I’m in stirrups staring at the ceiling going “Is this a fever dream?” Everything is fine. No cancer. But that certainly felt surreal.
#9
The city was pretty much deserted at 6pm. Deserted except for me, and, coming toward me down Cameron Street, a guy riding a horse. Bareback. And he (the guy, not the horse) was dressed up as a Native American.
As he rode past, I looked up at him, and he down at me. Neither of us said a word. He disappeared down the road.
*Did I actually just see that, or was that a hallucination?* I wondered. So as soon as I got home, I got online and Googled for whether anyone else in Tauranga had ever seen the same thing. Turns out they had. This Kiwi dude just likes to dress up as an American Indian and ride his horse down the streets of Tauranga, for *reasons*.
Very trippy.
The idea that bad things happen in threes is a plague to our sanity. Something goes wrong, and you immediately brace for two more disasters, scanning the horizon of your life for what's coming next. It feels true. The problem is that it isn't, at least not in the way people think, and the reason it feels so convincing is actually a fascinating trick your own brain is playing on you.
The Reticular Activating System, or RAS, is the part of your brain responsible for filtering the enormous amount of information you encounter every day. When you decide something matters (consciously or not), your RAS starts flagging it everywhere. Buy a red car, and suddenly red cars are on every street. Decide bad things are coming in threes, and your brain will find the third one.
A minor inconvenience that would have registered as nothing on a normal day suddenly becomes the confirmation of a pattern that was never really there. What this means, practically, is that the "bad things in threes" phenomenon is largely self-fulfilling. The first bad thing happens, and we go on alert, primed and actively searching for numbers two and three. Look hard enough, and you will find them.
#10
So yeah, I have a "this can't be real life" moment at least once every single day. I'm 27 and use a f*****g shower stool. My body doesn't let me forget, and neither does society.
This was cathartic to write, thanks for the question.
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#12
Another fascinating psychological phenomenon is Solipsism. This is the rationale that you are the main character and everyone else is just an NPC. Other people, the physical world, the weird pigeon outside your window, they might all be a construction of your own consciousness, with no independent existence beyond your perception of it. It is, on paper, an airtight argument.
The reason solipsism keeps surfacing in conversations about surreal life moments is that it offers a seductive explanation for the feeling that reality has gone slightly off-script. If the world is a projection of your own mind, then the bizarre, the coincidental, and the cosmically improbable aren't glitches; they're just your subconscious getting creative.
January 6th wasn't an inexplicable real-world event. It was just your brain having a particularly unhinged morning. The practical problem with solipsism is that it's completely unfalsifiable, which is philosophy's way of saying it can never be proven wrong, which sounds like a strength until you realize it also means it can never be proven right. You cannot step outside your own consciousness to check.
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#15
It’s been a really quiet 6 months without my best friend, still have muscle memory of saving memes to send her. I just ended up deleting some apps we’d share memes on.
Fr doesn’t feel real still since like, we talked basically every day. I don’t know.
A close second would be talking to my dad for the last time in my 18th birthday, then less than a month later getting told he was most likely m******d. His remains or any trace hasn’t been found coming up on 10 years now.
We play with the hands we’re dealt. Between that, epilepsy, tinnitus, and a couple other issues; it’s been a pretty rough hand by the universe.
I don’t know, I just miss my friend, I guess. rip Jackie
Life is, by any reasonable measure, deeply strange. Not occasionally. Not in exceptional circumstances. Consistently, persistently, and with a creativity that no simulation designer, screenwriter, or conspiracy theorist has ever fully managed to capture.
The moments that make people stop and ask if any of this is real are not anomalies. They are, in a way, the most honest moments available, the ones where the gap between what we expected and what actually happened is too wide to paper over with a normal reaction.
Do you have a story that could top some of these? Share it in the comments!
#16
It’ll be 2 years on the 6th.
#17
Legit looked for hidden cameras.
#18
It was not like you would think it would look like, and people don’t always d*e quickly.
Horrible.
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#20
He claimed that on his end “at Microsoft” he could see multiple transactions for illegal CP. Then claimed it must have been someone who hacked my Microsoft account and used it to illegally buy illegal CP. He had me download some software that was supposed to be a “secure server connection” so no hackers could observe what I was doing. That software was IPERIUS REMOTE; a software used to view someone else’s screen.
Eventually he convinced me to log into my online banking. I didn’t know he could see my screen. Then he tells me he’s going to transfer me to my bank support and our call switches over to a series of ringing to a bank support.
Now here’s when I wisened up…
I’ve had tons of phone calls with my bank for years. Immediately when the “bank support” picks up, it’s another Indian guy and he doesn’t do anything my bank normally does when I call them. No account verifications procedures, no initial “just so you know this call is being recorded for training purposes, etc”, no professional introductions, etc. There’s some other stuff my bank normally does that I’m forgetting but I could just tell the Indian guy on the other line was NOT my bank.
He starts yelling at me at the top of his lungs screaming “the FBI have been informed and I can stop them from coming to you! CP is illegal!”
I just sat there staring at the Iperius Remote timer thingy on the pop up thinking to myself “wait, this is a secure server? What do all these icons mean? This can’t be real”
After sitting there in silence for about 5 minutes while he yelled at me over and over again about police coming and how CP is a federal crime, etc. I hung up on him.
I called my actual bank, immediately a woman answered and did all the usual professional procedures I had come to expect from my bank. We froze my accounts, got new ones. What little money I had at the time was saved.