It may happen when you first wake up, or while flying on an airplane or driving in your car. Suddenly, inexplicably, something changes. Common objects and familiar situations seem strange, foreign. Like you’ve just arrived on the planet, but don’t know from where. It may pass quickly, or it may linger. You close your eyes and turn inward, but the very thoughts running through your head seem different. The act of thinking itself, the stream of invisible words running through the hollow chamber of your mind, seems strange and unreal. It’s as if you have no self, no ego, no remnant of that inner strength which quietly and automatically enabled you to deal with the world around you, and the world inside you. It may settle over time, into a feeling of “nothingness”, as if you were without emotions, dead. Or the fear of it may blossom into a full-blown panic attack. But when it hits for the first time, you’re convinced that you’re going insane, and wait in a cold sweat to see when and if you finally do go over the edge.
What you don’t know at the moment is that this troubling experience is distinctly human, experienced briefly at some time or another by as much as 70 percent of the population. In its chronic form, popular culture once saw it as part of a nervous breakdown. Some have called it “Alice in Wonderland” disease. Jean Paul Sartre called it “the filth” , William James dubbed it “the sick soul”. It’s been linked philosophically to existentialism, even Buddhism. Yet to its victims, it’s anything but an enlightened state of mind. Welcome to the world of Depersonalization Disorder.
