[Arohanui]

Hey guys,

about 3 years ago i quitted my studies and went on to travel the world in the next 2 1/2 years. (Mainly NZ and Australia) During that time I worked a lot on finding out what my true passion, morals more like my truest self really was. I made huge improvements and got rid of my ego steo by step. At one point i was just pure positivity and love, my body was radiating optmimism and compassion. I was so calm, centered, peaceful but at the same time somewhat wise. Everything made sense and life felt like it was just flowing perfeclt, there was nothing to worry about.
Other people where kind of drawn to me at this period and it felt like i could help them all a little by just very deeply and compassionatly listening to them. I always knew what to say or not to say. I felt so connected to myself and everyone around me. I understood everyone of them and why they did the things they did or say the things they said. It felt like because i was so in tune with my inner self, i was able to see deep into the soul of everyone else, i felt soooo connected to them. And everyone kind of sensed my positivity, people used to call me the Ghandi or Buddha of the hostel. I saw the potential and good in everyone and was communicating directly to that. I felt so connected to my Inner wisdom or the universal wisdom.

Also my senses were super strong. I was living just in the very moment. I could listen and follow more than one conversation a time, it felt like i was super aware of my surruondings, like i had a 360° radar of pure awareness. The feeling of my own body was so nice. I was able to squeaze every muscle if needed, but also release any tension by just feeling into it. It was like i really felt my body for the first time.

The world around me was so beautiful as well. I was so interested to learn new things every day. no matter if it was about nature or if i learned about or from others. It was like I was for teh first time really awake, my mind was so calm and crytsal clear, I understood erverything in an instant but on a a really deep level as well.

To summarize it, I felt like I was the best version of myself. It was amazing.

This sadly only lasted for a few weeks, and suddenly I had DP/DR. It was like i went from being in heaven to straight hell, like i went from full light to full darkness.

Looking back now makes me think if it was really enlightenment or if i was to some degree depersonalized my whole life before but wasn´t aware of that. Maybe during that time of "enlightenment" i just wasn´t depersonalized for the first time in years and years. Because i kind of think that the "enlightened state" i was in is our natural state as souls. That´s what living on earth and having the human experience should or at least could feel like.

So another question i keep coming back to atm is wether the whole DP/DR thing is just another step towards our natural state of just being who we are or to put it more simple: just being

Because the one thing that helps me most these days to deal with everything is to let it all just happen.. Feel like I´m not myself? Fine, who am i then lets´s observe and find out

I´m feeling like I´m not really present and somehow I´m afraid of everything and everyone? Fine let´s try to let it all happen, feel into the fear, be the fear

It´s so hard to describe with words.. It´s like I´m on the one hand surrendering to the whole DP/DR thing and thus not overthinking it and thus feeling more comortable with it, on the other hand it feels like I´m slowly letting my true self win the upper hand again and use me (my ego maybe?) as a puppet

A funny little experiment i came up with yetserday was to play some nice music, with the intention to dacne and then just let the dancing happen, just see what my body or I or whoever is controlling my body at the moment comes up with, iit made me feel comfortable, with just wathcing my body but not feeling attached to it, for the frist time.

Another thing that really helps me atm is to forget about all kind of memories of who i was or who i think i am. I was always afraid to never be myself again, but probably i won´t. This experience is way too life changing to be excatly the same anyways. Maybe it´s time for us to let our past self go and just look in this very now moment who we are right now, what do we enjoy right now, what do we feel right now. Breaking with all my old self images and believes i had about the world and people made me calmer again and somewhat a little bit more back in reality.

Curious if anyone felt/feels the same..

 

[Arohanui]

Also somewhere deep inside of me I have a really strong feeling/belief that I´m gonna be fine one day and will have learned a tremendous amount from this, this positivity kept me going through the really rough times and made me not hurt myself and not give up on myself.

 

[RedSky]

Yes! this is exactly how I felt a couple months before my derealization set in, although my feeling of enlightenment was from shrooms. I have always been incredibly depressed especially the year before I took shrooms because of a lot of things but during this trip (was my first time) I saw myself for who I really was and I saw why I wasn't happy. It was a very intense experience but it was almost like I was meditating without trying, I could see how arrogant and thick headed I had been and I just decided to let it all go and not care so much. The whole trip was amazing and I felt truly alive for the first time in a while, and I felt like I had maybe opened up my third eye and my senses were all working better then they ever have. I was already an open minded person before this but it widen my horizons more and I just sort of changed, I remember feeling an actual shift and it was almost physical like "this is what people try to achieve in life, this is how people are meant to feel all the time" It was like an overload of happiness and it changed me.

For the next couple weeks I felt amazing and people even told me I seemed like a better/happier person, but then for whatever reason while I was smoking weed one day it happened, BOOM! derealization.

I don't know if it was because it was super strong or what but upon waking up the next day the "high" still lingered, it never went away and after awhile I became a mess and had the worst panic attacks/anxiety attacks of my life.

That was all about 10 years ago and while I have made tremendous progress since but I still can't seem to make the brain fog go away, its still there 24/7 and I feel like I have been robbed of my 20's. The past 2 years however I get these "Pockets" of clarity as I like to call them that last anywhere from 2-15 seconds where it seems my derealization is gone. I have been fighting this shit for far too long and maybe I am close to recovery and I keep trying new ways everyday to combat it and some stuff helps and others don't but I just wanna get back to feeling alive again.

 

[ThoughtOnFire]

I've been through this before dp. We call it "the peak". I was 16 years old and smoking tons of weed and reading philosophy books at night and writing down learned insights. Over the course of about 5 months I was improving myself and gaining more and more self confidence. I talked to actually everybody in school, everyone laughed at my jokes. It culminated in July 2003 and I felt so high on life (but in a down to earth way) that the best weed didn't effect me since I was already feeling so good. My thoughts were clear, my senses were fine tuned and etc. I thought it would never fade away. Thought that I had found the meaning of being alive, how to live. Then a week later I had a breakdown and have been dp'd ever since.

 

[TDX]

Because i kind of think that the "enlightened state" i was in is our natural state as souls. That´s what living on earth and having the human experience should or at least could feel like.

The more I think about "enlightenment", there more I move closer to viewing it as a pathological state, just like depersonalization. Although it sounds highly pleasant, it is certainly no "natural" state. Evolution didn't design our brains to feel bliss all the time. Animals with "enlightenment" would die out quickly. Maybe depersonalization and "enlightenment" are somehow related in a similar way like depression and mania.

 

[ThoughtOnFire]

The more I think about "enlightenment", there more I move closer to viewing it as a pathological state, just like depersonalization. Although it sounds highly pleasant, it is certainly no "natural" state. Evolution didn't design our brains to feel bliss all the time. Animals with "enlightenment" would die out quickly. Maybe depersonalization and "enlightenment" are somehow related in a similar way like depression and mania.

Nah,

This Peak/Enlightenment before DP felt more Natural than anything I've ever been through.

 

[ThoughtOnFire]

The Peak aside... I believe that the aim of self actualization is to be as Natural as possible.

 

[ThoughtOnFire]

 

[Billy D.P.]

I had a very similar experience. I was traveling the South Pacific, mid 20s, not a care in the world, meeting the most incredible people from every walk of life, the happiest I'd ever been two times over. I remember sitting on the pier at sunset looking out over Milford Sound, the most beautiful place I've ever been, and thinking to myself I had finally "made it." I had gone through a DP episode once before that took a handful of years to overcome which then led to extreme anxiety and complex PTSD, so I was familiar with suffering by this time. But I felt like I was finally past all that, which is so ironic given two months later I was in the most depersonlized HPPD state imaginable, truly believing I was dreaming while I was awake and nearly checking into the E.R. because my condition was so bad.

In "Feeling Unreal" Simeon devotes quite a few pages to the idea that DP states often occur as a result of fluctuations in arousal. There's quite a few documented cases in literature and of course on this site that follow a very similar pattern, often involving drugs of course. It's interesting how so many people are at the apex of their lives when this happens though. I wonder if our brains were wired to either not respond well to intense chemical pleasures or if there's just a strong correlation to drugs which can induce euphoria and fright in extreme doses so closely together.

 

[eddy1886]

Enlightenment or too much Marijuana thats my question....

I felt enlightened many times whilst stoned out of my mind....Guess what it left me f****d up......

Our minds are not supposed to go to those "enlightened" places....We are meant to live in reality not in a self induced deluded paradise.....

No wonder our brains tuned out on us...We avoided reality way too much (Dissociated) and hence forgot how to get back there......

 

[dpsucks]

The more I think about "enlightenment", there more I move closer to viewing it as a pathological state, just like depersonalization. Although it sounds highly pleasant, it is certainly no "natural" state. Evolution didn't design our brains to feel bliss all the time. Animals with "enlightenment" would die out quickly. Maybe depersonalization and "enlightenment" are somehow related in a similar way like depression and mania.

Thats exactly how I feel about these sorts of experiences. There's really no evidence that enlightenment, ego death, etc is really anything other than psychosis, dissociation or just your brain being messed up.

I never had any sort of "enlightenment" feelings until after I had developed dp/dr from synthetic drug usage (bad trip). If synthetic drugs can induce these feelings, what does that tell you.

 

[Arohanui]

First of all thank you guys for sharing your thoughts and experiences it somehow made me happy and really excited to know that there are other people who experienced excatly the same.
Do you guys feel like there is any connection between the peak of happiness we experienced and living with dp/dr ? I can´t put my finger on it but they must be interconnected somehow.

Yes! this is exactly how I felt a couple months before my derealization set in, although my feeling of enlightenment was from shrooms. I have always been incredibly depressed especially the year before I took shrooms because of a lot of things but during this trip (was my first time) I saw myself for who I really was and I saw why I wasn't happy. It was a very intense experience but it was almost like I was meditating without trying, I could see how arrogant and thick headed I had been and I just decided to let it all go and not care so much. The whole trip was amazing and I felt truly alive for the first time in a while, and I felt like I had maybe opened up my third eye and my senses were all working better then they ever have. I was already an open minded person before this but it widen my horizons more and I just sort of changed, I remember feeling an actual shift and it was almost physical like "this is what people try to achieve in life, this is how people are meant to feel all the time" It was like an overload of happiness and it changed me.

For the next couple weeks I felt amazing and people even told me I seemed like a better/happier person, but then for whatever reason while I was smoking weed one day it happened, BOOM! derealization.

I don't know if it was because it was super strong or what but upon waking up the next day the "high" still lingered, it never went away and after awhile I became a mess and had the worst panic attacks/anxiety attacks of my life.

That was all about 10 years ago and while I have made tremendous progress since but I still can't seem to make the brain fog go away, its still there 24/7 and I feel like I have been robbed of my 20's. The past 2 years however I get these "Pockets" of clarity as I like to call them that last anywhere from 2-15 seconds where it seems my derealization is gone. I have been fighting this shit for far too long and maybe I am close to recovery and I keep trying new ways everyday to combat it and some stuff helps and others don't but I just wanna get back to feeling alive again.

Hey man, really sad to hear how long you´ve been battling for. I guess you already tried that, but in cas you didn´t: what really helps me right now is to let go of my self images, let go of that happy person. Because I always wanted to go back to that, feel alive like i was then, i thought this is who i really am, that it´s my most natural self, like

Nah,

This Peak/Enlightenment before DP felt more Natural than anything I've ever been through.

described here. But comparing how I am feeling or not feeling today to my former "enlightend" self always put my attention to what is wrong with me. I tried acting the same way as i was back then but it didn´t work. So instead of clinching to the past and the good memories i´ll try to focus on the now again. I mean people change over time, so right now I´m not the same person i was back then. DP/DR changed too much, but what i can do is completely surrender to the situation and find out who i am now. Not by controlling myself or judging myself, but by listening and just observing myself.
Since I´m doing that I slowly feel like a person with character again..

Also since you´ve have years more experience living like that, i would be really interested in which ways of dealing with it you tried and which you feel like helped you the most heads up buddy, there are people who finally got out of dp/dr and you´re gonna be one of them

I've been through this before dp. We call it "the peak". I was 16 years old and smoking tons of weed and reading philosophy books at night and writing down learned insights. Over the course of about 5 months I was improving myself and gaining more and more self confidence. I talked to actually everybody in school, everyone laughed at my jokes. It culminated in July 2003 and I felt so high on life (but in a down to earth way) that the best weed didn't effect me since I was already feeling so good. My thoughts were clear, my senses were fine tuned and etc. I thought it would never fade away. Thought that I had found the meaning of being alive, how to live. Then a week later I had a breakdown and have been dp'd ever since.

Perfect description of how i felt back then, did you ever feel like that again ?

I had a very similar experience. I was traveling the South Pacific, mid 20s, not a care in the world, meeting the most incredible people from every walk of life, the happiest I'd ever been two times over. I remember sitting on the pier at sunset looking out over Milford Sound, the most beautiful place I've ever been, and thinking to myself I had finally "made it." I had gone through a DP episode once before that took a handful of years to overcome which then led to extreme anxiety and complex PTSD, so I was familiar with suffering by this time. But I felt like I was finally past all that, which is so ironic given two months later I was in the most depersonlized HPPD state imaginable, truly believing I was dreaming while I was awake and nearly checking into the E.R. because my condition was so bad.

In "Feeling Unreal" Simeon devotes quite a few pages to the idea that DP states often occur as a result of fluctuations in arousal. There's quite a few documented cases in literature and of course on this site that follow a very similar pattern, often involving drugs of course. It's interesting how so many people are at the apex of their lives when this happens though. I wonder if our brains were wired to either not respond well to intense chemical pleasures or if there's just a strong correlation to drugs which can induce euphoria and fright in extreme doses so closely together.

Hmm the last point is very interesting, why does the extreme fright last so much longer than the euphoria ?
A friend of mine suggested that all this light I experienced during the apex was too much for me to handle at that point, that it wwas too early, that i wasn´t prepared but with enough pratice like meditation, astral travels asf.. and maybe a teacher or guide one can handle all this really strong energy and not go into a shutdown mode afterwards. She used the metaphor that all this energy/light was like me being a light bulb and when it got too much i just snapped and that´s what dp/dr is roght now.

Also how old have you guys been when you felt this peak/apex of live/ enlightenment?

Enlightenment or too much Marijuana thats my question....

I felt enlightened many times whilst stoned out of my mind....Guess what it left me f****d up......

Our minds are not supposed to go to those "enlightened" places....We are meant to live in reality not in a self induced deluded paradise.....

No wonder our brains tuned out on us...We avoided reality way too much (Dissociated) and hence forgot how to get back there......

Hmm interestingly i felt more real or to be even stronger, real for the first time when i was enlightened. And i was in this state when i wasn´t taking drugs as well, as ThoughtOnFire mentioned even weed wouldn´t effect me anymore, because i felt so good all the time, so there was no need to smoke anymore.

Thats exactly how I feel about these sorts of experiences. There's really no evidence that enlightenment, ego death, etc is really anything other than psychosis, dissociation or just your brain being messed up.

I never had any sort of "enlightenment" feelings until after I had developed dp/dr from synthetic drug usage (bad trip). If synthetic drugs can induce these feelings, what does that tell you.

Hmm so you only had those moments after you took a synthetic drug ?

 

[ThoughtOnFire]

Enlightenment or too much Marijuana thats my question....

I felt enlightened many times whilst stoned out of my mind....Guess what it left me f****d up......

Our minds are not supposed to go to those "enlightened" places....We are meant to live in reality not in a self induced deluded paradise.....

No wonder our brains tuned out on us...We avoided reality way too much (Dissociated) and hence forgot how to get back there......

Nah man,

I smoked weed for 2 years before I got this Peak and DP. I smoked nearly every day, multiple times. This was no marijuana high.

First of all thank you guys for sharing your thoughts and experiences it somehow made me happy and really excited to know that there are other people who experienced excatly the same.
Do you guys feel like there is any connection between the peak of happiness we experienced and living with dp/dr ? I can´t put my finger on it but they must be interconnected somehow.

I liked your light bulb metaphor. My own metaphor is that we built our tower too high, and Reality destroyed it and the rubble is DP for us. And if you're familiar with Jungian Psychology, we must have tried to transcend our Shadow Archetype without looking at those Psyche Contents, and it somehow backfired when we reached for the Stars.

Also since you´ve have years more experience living like that, i would be really interested in which ways of dealing with it you tried and which you feel like helped you the most heads up buddy, there are people who finally got out of dp/dr and you´re gonna be one of them

The best things I've found are basic. Find the joy in the simple things of life, like a cup of coffee in the morning, taking your dog for a walk, small talk or even a deep conversation with a close friend, a certain nostalgic song, saying hi to a stranger, these kind of things. Other things that help is having a balance between comfort foods and eating well. For me that just means drinking a good amount of clean water daily.

One thing that I wonder about your experience of this is... are you constantly trying to find your way back? Not necessarily to the Peak, but out of DP? I.e. are you always seeking some kind of mental conclusion or insight to "snap you back to reality".

Meditation helps of course too. Acceptance is key in coping and moving towards recovery. Mindfulness will take one a long way.

 

[Surfingisfun001]

Nice to read your story it is very interesting. I can relate to a lot of what you wrote.

A few weeks before my DP occurred I had come out of my religious upbringing and was beginning to see through a lot of the programming and conditioning I had been brought up in. For the first time I felt I was becoming my own self, my own person, with my own worldview, and thoughts about life. I felt better than I had ever felt in my life. I felt like I was becoming who I really am, without the pressure or influence of other people/religion/outside programming and conditioning. I felt very free mentally and at peace. I felt clearer. I was in college and I remember feeling more clear minded when writing papers, I had better rhythm when playing the guitar, I recall surfing better. I think that I just dropped all the baggage that I had been brought up in that had been weighing me down all my life, and accepted who I am, and felt free and at peace as a result. I became more of who I was because other peoples expectations of who they wanted me to be no longer mattered to me. I felt that I really connected with my true nature. For about 3 weeks I felt the happiest I had felt in my whole life.

Then seemingly out of nowhere the DP hit me. It came and went in waves for the first few months, then became chronic and has been chronic for over 10 years now. It's been hell, the complete opposite of the 'peak' experience prior. I feel that I have been continually trying to get back to who I was before this but no matter what effort I put forth I remain stuck in DP. It was like the carpet just fully got ripped up from under my feet. I've tried everything I can think of over the years but nothing has helped.

I have wondered if somehow the DP state was brought on by the realizations I had just prior to acquiring DP. However it really makes no sense. Why would I go from feeling like myself, happy, and clear headed to DP, extreme mental suffering, and brain fog? And still be stuck in a DPd state 10 years later. Makes no sense to me.

 

[ThoughtOnFire]

It could be that we moved passed our lifetime conditioning without ever processing the content of the programming. Like sweeping dirt under the rug, it's still there, just moved aside. And then it may have backfired since we didn't deal with the psyche components, just momentarily had bypassed the old mind structure. And the strain could have been too much for our minds to bear and so...that broke our minds?

 

[Broken]

I had a very weird experience in 'the' panic attack on weed. It felt as though my sense of self had exploded into a massive infinite empty space... then there was a thought that said 'you don't deserve this'.. and I came back to my body contracted and panicking. Perhaps if I had something to label that experience prior to it happening I could have 'let go'.. but I had no idea what it was and it was very scary.

Interesting that red sky said they had a great experience on mushrooms. I watched a Paul Stamets podcast with Joe Rogan and he recommended psilocybin and lions mane. I tried the Lion's mane and am getting subtle positive results. So am going to be MICRODOSING magic mushrooms when I can get some. I know I will get an earful for it, but I've tried everything. And this seems plausible to reroute connections in my brain. I won't be tripping as that would be dangerous.. could work, could go horribly wrong. Either way, microdosing has been shown to help untreatable depression, ptsd etc

I don't know if because of trauma we are wired to freak the fuck out when we are relaxed or at peace.. it is like as soon as we let our guard down we are retraumatised. So there is always this untrusting, edgy, tension there. Every god damn second... who knows what any of it means

 

[Surfingisfun001]

I've had nothing but positive experiences with psilocybin. It's just been temporary for me though, I always return to the normal DP state after.

 

[Broken]

Good to know... even the 'bad trips' are often said to be insightful. Are you in the uk? Microdosing might be worth looking into.. just need to find some way to get hold of some.. it is around the season they fruit in the uk, but mixed reports on their availability

 

[Surfingisfun001]

No I'm in the US. I remember seeing some cool mushroom grow kits online from the Netherlands, but they don't ship to the US.

 

[Broken]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41608984

A study.. they were however given a substantial dose and this gave improved symptoms that were long lasting. Can't say I would agree with the large dose, but there were reports of the default mode network (DMN) becoming 'more stable'.. whatever that means. But the DMN is thought to be impaired in DPD, specifically the medial prefrontal cortex suppressing emotions.

Sorry hijacked the thread a bit... but kind of relevant as people have very spiritual/mystical experiences on shrooms... and people from the study claimed to be 'resest, rebooted, reborn'.. guna go hunting Monday