I’m curious if anyone’s ever felt like this. For the past few weeks, my life has been miserable(I’ll spare you the details). Yet I keep remembering things that happened in the past, and occasionally I feel like I’m the person I was 5 years ago, and reality is more like a dream. I find myself remember things like smells that remind me of certain moments, and memories of the past sometimes jump into my consciousness out of the blue.
Has anyone here ever felt like they’re not really all here? Like your life right now is just an illusion and your “true” life is somewhere in the past?
It’s an odd feeling, though not necceserilly(sp?) a bad one. But it does tend to make me a bit melancholy. If anyone’s ever felt something similiar, I’m interested in hearing your stories.
Yes. I also wonder if my life is in the future and I am looking back on it. I have these weird moments where I feel like I am not really living, like I am watching myself from another place, and it scares the hell out of me. I don’t have any particular instances that I can tell you, It happens quite a lot though. I also can be brought back to the past by a smell or a song, much like you described. Maybe I am just depressed…
Well now it’s almost 19 years in the future and I wish to know if you still feel like this-
I wasn’t even alive when this was posted but I get the same thing constantly, it’s quite distressing.
No sense in answering the first couple of posters but I’ll answer Catbanana:
I get that sometimes but I’ve never been particularly distressed by it.
It feels occasionally like I’m an observer from some other culture and time, probably in the future, looking at this one from outside.
It sometimes feels to me like it might have something to do with my having worn glasses since I was six – I’m looking through a pane of glass, as if through a window – but it probably actually has more to do with a combination of the facts that:
– I had to learn social signals that others seemed to know without learning;
– human behavior is often genuinely odd and if one’s not from quite the same culture as those one is mostly surrounded by this is more obvious because one’s more likely to notice the differences
– I read a good bit of science fiction and fantasy and am therefore very familiar with stories in which a person is popped into a society out of a different place and time
-- we actually are all time travellers in a sense, and often even by the time we're in our teens some things about the world we live in will have significantly changed, and once one's aware of this it's -- at least for me -- easy to look around and wonder what now-familiar things will seem, in the future, to only be part of the past.
I dodged a life threatening situation about 10 years ago by dumb luck. Every now and then I get the weird feeling that I actually died that day, and everything since has been a hallucination. It’s all some kind of “what if” that I saw in my last moments, or as a ghost.
But yes when I’ve gone through major life changes even sometimes a long while after the event I’ll have fleeting thoughts about this new existence being a sort of dream or feel like a different version of me. I think a lot of it just comes from depression about life changes outside my control and nostalgia or longing for a happier past.
I mean, sometimes I start reading a thread and it takes someone else to point out to me that it’s a zombie so old that people born after it died can vote, so…
I occasionally have moments where my whole life doesn’t seem real. It happens less frequently than it did when I was a kid/teenager, and sometimes it takes being in an altered state. I had a vivid episode a month or so ago after drinking too much. It was like being in a dream where you’re discovering these things about reality just by thinking about them, but they’re news to you. I was just marveling at the fact that this is my apartment, and that guy over there is my husband, and that little fluff ball is my cat, and I’m a lawyer, and I know how to scuba dive, and, like, duuuuuuuude.
I’m definitely the same person I was 5 years ago, not to mention 55 years ago, and of course I keep remembering things that happened in the past, what the fuck am I supposed to be remembering, things that happened in the future?
Umm, well no I don’t feel like
It’s all the same life but none of it feels particularly illusory.
To avoid future regret, I tell myself that I’m not a 2020 person, I’m a 2021 or 2023 time traveler who’s gotten to come back and make the changes he needed to make in 2020.
You mean there are people who don’t?