the.com/derealization
A dissociative symptom where surroundings feel unreal, distant, or dreamlike, as if viewed through glass.
means A dissociative state in which your surroundings feel unreal, flat, or staged, like you're watching the world through glass rather than living in it.
from Built from the prefix 'de-' (undoing or removal) plus 'realization,' itself from 'real,' tracing back to Latin 'res' meaning thing. The word is a 20th-century coinage from psychiatry, formed to name a specific clinical experience alongside its cousin 'depersonalization' — the feeling that you yourself are unreal. Both terms emerged as psychologists needed precise language for patients describing the world, or themselves, as suddenly hollow and dreamlike.
- not psychosis
- you know it's weird, that's the horror
- common trigger
- panic attacks, weed, chronic stress
- buddy symptom
- often paired with depersonalization, feeling unreal yourself
- evolutionary theory
- possible threat-response numbing gone haywire