When the World Looks Like a Film Set

The kitchen you have stood in for nine years looks like a set built to resemble your kitchen. Colors seem flat, or too bright. Sounds arrive a half second late. The faces of people you love look like faces, correctly arranged, and somehow not quite theirs. Nothing has changed and everything looks slightly counterfeit.

People who have felt this often describe it as the strangest thing that has ever happened to them, and then do not mention it to anyone, because every way of saying it sounds alarming. It is more common than you would guess from how rarely it comes up, it is not a sign that you are losing your mind, and it does settle.

What this is

When the world looks unreal, that is usually derealization. When it is you who seems unreal, as though you were watching yourself from a few feet behind, that is depersonalization. They frequently come together, and both are forms of dissociation: a protective turning down of the volume when a system is overwhelmed. Some people say they dissociate; others only ever say the room went strange.

A useful way to picture it is a circuit breaker. When too much current comes through at once, the breaker trips to protect the wiring. What trips here is the sense of immediacy, the feeling of being right up against the world. The machinery still works perfectly. You can see, hear, think, drive, hold a conversation. What has gone is the sensation of nearness.

It shows up most after high and sustained stress, after a frightening event, during or after panic, when you are very short of sleep, during long periods of grief, and sometimes with certain substances or a new medication. Cannabis is a common trigger, and the state can outlast the use by a long way.

Why the fear keeps it going

Here is the part that changes things. The state itself is uncomfortable. What makes it persist is the alarm about it.

The sequence is reliable. You notice the world looks odd. You ask yourself what is wrong with me and start checking, repeatedly, whether things still look unreal. Checking is a form of intense self-focus, and intense self-focus is exactly what produces the unreal quality in the first place. Meanwhile the fear keeps your system on high alert, which is the condition that tripped the breaker to begin with. Worry about it, monitor it, test it, and you reliably feed it.

This is genuinely good news, because it means the thing you are most afraid of, that this is permanent, is also the thing most within your influence. Most people find the state loosens once the fear of it does.

Stop checking

Cut the monitoring, as best you can. Do not test whether your hands look like your hands. Do not peer at your reflection to see if your face looks right. Do not ask people repeatedly whether you seem normal. Every check is a small announcement to your nervous system that there is an emergency here worth watching.

When you notice yourself checking, name it plainly and turn your attention outward. That is the checking. The room is fine. Then look at something and do something.

Give it a dull explanation on purpose

Fear thrives on a dramatic story. Practice a boring one until it is the first thing that arrives.

This is my system turning down the volume because it is overloaded. It is unpleasant. It is not dangerous. It will pass, as it has before.

Say it flatly, the way you would read a label. You are not trying to convince yourself of something nice. You are replacing an emergency with a description.

Come back through your senses, then leave it alone

Sensation is more useful than thought here, because thought is the foggy part. Cold water on your face. Pressing your feet into the floor. Something rough between your fingers. A strong taste. Moving: walking, stairs, shaking out your hands.

Then, and this is the important half, go and do something ordinary and absorbing without waiting to feel normal first. Cook. Weed something. Fix a thing. Talk to someone about their day. Watch something. Feeling follows participation far more often than participation follows feeling, and waiting at the window for reality to come back is the one approach that never works.

Look after the ground conditions

This state gets dramatically more likely when you are running on four hours of sleep, skipping meals, drinking to get to sleep, or holding weeks of pressure in your shoulders. None of that is glamorous to address and all of it matters. If it began after cannabis or another substance, stopping is part of the answer, even if the effect has long outlasted the use.

Tell one person

Say it out loud to someone you trust, even clumsily. Things look unreal to me lately and it unnerves me. Describing it tends to shrink it, partly because the secrecy is its own kind of pressure, and partly because almost everyone you tell will say something unremarkable rather than something frightened.

When to get help

Please see your doctor, especially if this is new, if it came with headaches, fainting, or memory trouble, if it started with a medication, or if it has gone on for weeks, since there are physical causes worth ruling out. If the answer is stress, panic, or something you went through, a therapist can help, and this is well-trodden ground for anyone who treats anxiety. The world has not actually changed, and the nearness of it does come back.