Well, so yesterday night i had tthe “luck” of getting to feel what depersonalisation and derealisation (DPDR) actually feels like.
I got woken up in the middle of the night to do something quite short and i almost instantly realise “Something aint right. Everything feels weird”. And then slowly I realised, what it was that I felt. It felt like I was watching someone control my body. If I wanted to lift my arm Icould “feel” felt how my brain sended the command to my body execute, and suddenly my arm moved. I felt like my true self was a few centimeters below my skin, waiting to get released from its fleshy vehicle. Everything i touched felt like i touched it with a quite big glove on. If I walked i felt like watching a stream of my body moving while sitting somewhere else with a VR Headset. Luckyly it faded away quite fast, after I was finished with what I had to do (it took 5 Minutes at max) and laid back in an attempt to sleep (which of course didnt work that well, since my mind was still processing the experience it just had).
This was devinetively the weirdest experience I had in my lifetime.
Sounds like a parasomnia, I had those occasionally before I started estrogen. I haven’t had one since starting HRT.
I still have a hard time telling when I’m dissociating or experiencing derealization or depersonalization - acute episodes are more noticeable like during traumatic events.
It’s hard for me to differentiate these as PTSD symptoms from something like gender dysphoria. My PTSD has made it harder to recognize or acknowledge my gender dysphoria.