
Bandersnatch Shows You What Depersonalization Disorder Feels Like - swamy_g
https://acoachcalledlife.com/bandersnatch-film-dpdr/
======
brootstrap
Interesting and good to learn about this real problem. The show had me really
on edge (like all black mirror content) until they kind of broke the 4th (5th
wall?) with the netflix thing at the end. Watching this guy talk to his
therapist because he was being controlled by netflix was friggen hilarious to
me...

I think i have felt this way at time, usually when really high. The whole LSD
trip with colin in particular.. I liked that rant, the multiple realities, the
time is a flat circle thing.

The movie hit pretty hard, good on black mirror guys for pushing boundaries of
film as we know. Even some folks who dont usually get into black mirror were
like, well i want to retry it and pick the different cereal to see what
happens!

~~~
ardit33
Yo, no spoilers please...... or at least warn about it. Not everybody has seen
it.

~~~
twothumbsup
The show has been out over month now and you willingly came into a thread
about the show. Any plot that's spoiled is entirely on you.

~~~
setr
Tbf I had no idea this thread was about black mirror from the title, as I
wasn’t aware of the director, and I normally read comments before the article

~~~
twothumbsup
I thought "Black Mirror" was in the title, my mistake.

------
ada1981
I thought bandsnatch did a great job of articulating what psychosis was like.

I spent the better part of a decade in that state of mind.

Grateful to have rebuilt my psyche from scratch and be free of that.

Occasionally I catch a flicker of it and need to bring myself back into a
state of relaxation.

~~~
swamy_g
Would you be willing to share more? What triggered it? And what were your
symptoms like?

~~~
ada1981
In college freshman year I tried to teleport to see my gf by driving into the
back of a semi on I-79. As far as I can tell it didn’t work.

I spent a lot of time lost in what felt like a deep metaphor / parable.

One time I thought my gf as an alien from another star system; when I looked
out at the city of Madison, WI I saw present day Madison but also an overlay
of an ancient city — it felt like this was some sort of eternal city that
always was.

I walked into a church and saw the priest was a vampire.

I had a conversation with a time traveling Albert Einstein at an airport in
Boston.

At times it felt like childhood make beleive, there was still a tether back to
reality but I was deep in the other realm.

At times terrifying. Flights into the depths of hell and judeo-Christian
mythology.

I was also in and out of suicidal depression.

Somehow I also managed to start a number of projects and get lots of press and
even some investment, but I couldn’t keep anything going sustainably.

A few years ago I was at wits end and had a vision that guided me to start
feeling my emotions.

That led to Psychedlic therapy, Somatic Therapy and Breathwork.

It also led to a new context for relationship and learning how to navigate
love induced psychosis and coming out the otherside more healed.

Eventually I was able to get underneath the symptoms.

I found abuse in my childhood, dishonest and narcissistic care givers, a
school that couldn’t hold my high IQ, bullying, etc.

I was also always fascinated with technology, psychology, shamanism, the
occult, Psychedlics, personal development from a very very early age...
sometimes this feels like my purpose.

Anyhow, I’m symptom free, healthier than ever, in love and engaged, running a
fairly full transformational coaching practice (supporting unicorn founders
and other creative minds), building an eco village island at Majagual.org and
have no need for medications.

Western Psych said I’d be on meds for the rest of my life. Turns out I
followed the path of others like Jung - going mad and then creating your own
tools and frameworks to find your way back out.

~~~
dkersten
Thanks for sharing and congratulations on breaking free from it!

~~~
ada1981
You are welcome.

------
DaiHafVaho
Fresh account for obvious reasons.

I wonder whether I "suffer" from this. It's not really suffering. I am very
comfortable being a meatbag who hallucinates that they are thinking thoughts;
I know that none of it is really real in the way that physical artifacts are
real.

Now I have a new and better explanation for why I have visual hallucinations
sometimes, particularly halos and fuzz.

For anybody else: Don't worry. You aren't controlled by any one thing. You're
a colony of trillions of cells, all working together to produce a mutually-
beneficial outcome.

Edit: Do I have free will? I don't think that the question makes sense. I have
free will in the same way that my subatomic particles have free will [0]. I
have the ability to choose and to choose not to choose, but none of that
entails free will [1]. I can even say that I have free will, but that does not
mean that I have free will [2]. I think that, even if free will is a thing,
maybe I am not a thing which can have free will because maybe I am not a thing
at all.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will_theorem)

[1]
[https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html](https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec18.html)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)

~~~
mfoy_
Interesting, I really appreciate you sharing your perspective.

I mean no judgement by this, so I put a certain word in scare-quotes, but
would you say that perhaps everyone who _doesn 't_ have DP/DR is actually
_more_ "delusional"?

~~~
DaiHafVaho
I'm not sure.

It's possible that I came to my conclusions purely through philosophical
reasoning, and that I am suffering the sort of defect that famously consumed
Cantor or Gödel or Pirsig. It's easy to say, "I'm not crazy! You're the one
who's crazy!" Or perhaps there is a repressed childhood of abuse somewhere in
the memories, but who can tell whether repressed memories are a real thing, or
whether memories are trustworthy in general.

At the same time, though, people delude themselves all the time. It's a
cultural thing; I think that memetics is the right field of study for figuring
out how that works. And once one starts to realize how delusional their
cultural beliefs are, one cannot help but start examining themselves. Upon
learning about p-zombies, for example, I realized that I must be a p-zombie,
because I had no evidence to the alternative and no way to refute the
argument.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"I can't refute it" does not imply "therefore it must be true". Neither does
"I have no evidence against it".

~~~
DaiHafVaho
Of course. A proof is that which convinces; I was convinced, but that doesn't
mean that you have to be convinced. I was presented with evidence which I
can't share with anybody: my experiences.

------
clearing
I haven't seen this, but as someone who's had DPDR for the better half of a
decade, I don't think this article frames it 100% properly (which, to be fair,
is harder with this than, say, general anxiety).

Yes, fear does come up during derealization experiences, but the difference is
there's no grounded "you" experiencing this fear, more that the fear comes as
"the experiencer" reconciling the reality one experiences with a new and
disconcerting distance. This reads more like a profile of Pure-O OCD (they're
comorbid so I got the two-for-one), where there is somewhat logical rumination
about a specific fear.

I've never really had a DPDR experience where I was questioning my own free
will. To me the external world at the time is best described as seeming
aggressively real to the point it seems false, objects indistinct from others,
bereft of any intent or memory. You feel like you've lost some foundational
understanding of the world that has been instilled in you forever.

~~~
bonesmoses
I had a very protracted DPDR experience start around when I was 12, and slowly
dissipated over the course of a decade. I woke up one morning, and it was like
I was slapped out of my body. It's like I was piloting a Me(ch) suit.

I wasn't seeing through my eyes. They were transmitting, with perceivable lag
and some kind of acknowledged overlay, their sensory data. It's like being
embedded in _extremely advanced_ and nearly seamless VR, but also hyper aware
of the "nearly" part. It's like the Uncanny Valley effect, but directing it
toward your own sensory system.

It doesn't feel quite real anymore, and you don't know why. So that's probably
how I'd convey it. "You know the Uncanny Valley? Imagine everything you
experienced felt that way."

It's uniquely awful.

~~~
kall1sto
Very well described.

------
mentos
Random aside: Anyone else watch the Fyre Festival documentary on Netflix? I
feel like that could be an interesting choose your own adventure similar to
how Bandersnatch was done. Let people make decisions as if they were in charge
of the festival and see if they could come out the end of it having made it a
success or not.

~~~
sucrose
Yes, I was so intrigued by their story. I feel like the right person could
pull it off. I've thought about this documentary non-stop for the past couple
of days.

~~~
colemickens
> I feel like the right person could pull it off.

I uh, I guess I'll bite. How? If anything, I think it's funny to imagine it as
an interviewing exercise to suss out people with delusions of grandeur who
have lived a life free of real-world consequences.

They basically had a failed FEMA campsite without water or electricity, or
effectively, shelter. It absolutely blows my mind and shakes my understanding
of humanity to think that people got sucked into that or that there would be
folks lining up to get suckered again, or that people somehow think it was
ever achievable based on the timeline and current human time-travel
technology.

While I understand Billy's "charm" and even how to use it at times, it's
amazing how enough of it will convince people to believe absolutely any
delusional fantasy. Partying with a bunch of Insta influencers glued to their
phone sounds like hell, anyway. Who doesn't want to hang out with the grown
adult proudly bragging about urinating on all of the bedding?

~~~
mentos
I think maybe a timeline where they listened to the guy suggesting they use a
cruise ship to transport people might be 1 correct choice.

After that they said they chose between 10 venues, maybe there is a timeline
where they could have done something on the main land (Nassau) and crowd
sourced more appropriate villas with AirBnB. Delaying the event by 1 week to
avoid the yachting event might have brought airbnb prices down to a reasonable
threshold.

Maybe secretly there is no actual successful decision tree and its just a dark
reminder that some things are never meant to be. Maybe at the start there is
an option 'refund everyones money' haha and thats the only positive outcome.

------
afpx
Bandersnatch made me feel like I participated in an invasive data science
project that I didn’t agree to.

~~~
pcmaffey
I don't know if this point gets brought up much, but I wholeheartedly agree.
The data generated from situational A/B testing is scary. Just imagine what
you could learn by looking at one viewer's choices across a range of
situations that you control... While I doubt the mass-analytics is there yet,
it made me shudder at the privacy implications for the future.

~~~
kian
Couldn't one technically do this right now with online games?

------
empath75
This is actually a pretty common side effect of chronic mdma use — I went
through this a bit in my mid 20s. And I had a friend go on a few month bender
after burning man who was telling me he could read minds and was living inside
a simulation. Not in a theoretical, isn’t it fun to think about way, but in a
“I can control reality with my thoughts” kind of way. Definitely not a
pleasant feeling.

Seems like somehow the serotonin system is responsible for maintaining your
belief in reality and free will.

~~~
davebryand
The bodies of knowledge and practical tools (meditation/breathing/etc) from
the great spiritual traditions over many thousands of years come to exactly
this conclusion: your consciousness DOES create your reality. "Control" of
reality is a different beast, you have to ascend to very high levels to
achieve that, but it's 100% possible and happens all around us.

~~~
mfoy_
I think you have it a bit backwards. You perceive reality through your
consciousness. So if your consciousness were to interject a filter of its own
choosing, your subjective reality would be affected. However, this has no
bearing on objective reality. You can't will bad things to not happen, but you
can choose to perceive them as less bad.

It's like writing a SQL query "SELECT name, MIN(51, objectiveScore) as
subjectiveScore FROM TestResults" and then say "hey look, no one failed!". The
data in the table is still going to have any sub-50 scores it originally did,
you've just turned a blind eye to them.

~~~
davebryand
Maybe, or maybe we exist within a realm that is more like a video game, where
each frame is generated based on the prior state of the game plus the inputs
(Thought) from every character in the game? This is what people mean when they
say "thoughts are things" or talk about "conscious creation".

Ultimately the topic of Awareness or Consciousness transcends rationality, so
the only way to know what the hell I'm talking about is to try and walk the
Path yourself. :)

------
randyrand
Have DPDR, I appreciate that DPDR is becoming more talked about. Makes me feel
less alone and less abnormal. Thankfully, I've slowly (~years) been returning
to normal.

------
davebryand
This is the state that most of us committing our lives to spiritual practice
seek to achieve. All of these overlap with symptoms of Enlightenment, although
the enlightened being has conscious control over all internal processes, so
they are not only able to feel joy and love, they've reached the source of
those emotions.

* _Detachment from self, feeling as though one is watching a movie about oneself._

* _A sense that one is not in control of one’s thoughts and actions._

* _Reality may seem dream-like or unreal._

* _Distorted sense of time._

* _Perceptual alterations like visual snow, halo around lights._

* _Emotional numbness, unable to feel joy or love._

~~~
mindgam3
What you are describing is getting high, not spiritual practice. Nothing wrong
with getting high per se, but it can be extremely dangerous if you confuse
those states with "Enlightenment".

The experience of transcending one's ego identity may feel similar to
dissociation or depersonalization at times. But the end result of awakening is
not a dissociative state. It's being fully present to all of your emotions,
not numbness at all, but simply not attached to them in the sense that they
don't automatically dictate your response. You still feel all the things that
apply to your normal sense of self, but you're able to observe them and act
from a different place.

There is a real risk to people getting lost on the spiritual path and ending
up in places like nihilism or dissociation. Be careful.

------
sergefaguet
i feel a bit confused about this "disorder."

i spend hundreds of hours a year meditating to get rid of my sense of self. it
is the best thing about the LSD experience too.

the idea that one is not in control of one's own actions is called "seeing the
illusion of free will which is obvious to anyone who has ever seriously
thought about the issue."

the idea that you are watching a movie about something that does not actually
have a self is called "ego death" or "enlightenment."

~~~
swamy_g
The problem with DP/DR is that the loss of control/feeling of unrealness is
not pleasant. It's the opposite. Your ego is not completely lost, it's still
very much present. But it feels really threatened. You feel like you are on
the edge most of the time. You feel like you might go insane or die any minute
(when the intensity gets high).

After years of getting my grounding, I feel like I can manage these feelings.
I don't have them that often. But it takes practice, and you have to surrender
when the feelings are overwhelming.

For functioning in this world, you do need a sense of self. But it also helps
when that self realizes that it is part of a whole. Without a self, I don't
think you can operate in this reality, so there's no point trying to get rid
of it.

~~~
renholder
>You feel like you are on the edge most of the time. You feel like you might
go insane or die any minute (when the intensity gets high).

Mine's been far milder (thankfully) and the best way I could explain that
feeling is like being a boat with it's anchor dropped. You're very much the
anchor but, when you hit the DP/PR, you're also - very much - the boat, as
well - being tossed about by the waves.

It's like events happen but you're kind of pedestrian to them, seing them
after-the-fact, almost[0].

That's the best way that I can describe it but I'm not even doing it justice,
overall; just from my own anecdotal experience(s) and it's a piss-poor analogy
at that. Sorry.

[0] -
[https://media.giphy.com/media/UrO3di2UKs4qA/giphy.gif](https://media.giphy.com/media/UrO3di2UKs4qA/giphy.gif)

------
mfoy_
I recently read "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" and in it, the author
raises many interesting ideas about consciousness, the mind, self, free will,
etc.

Would someone with DP/DR say they possess free will? Would _you_ say you
possess free will?

Is the test for "having free will" simply feeling like you have it? Or
_saying_ that you have it? Does an AI that says "I am sentient. I possess free
will." actually have those qualities? Do we?

~~~
unimpressive
Obvious resolution: There's no such thing, the universe is deterministic but
not predictable. This doesn't matter very much in practice, punishment is
about game theory so your 'free will' to perform or not perform an action is
kind of irrelevant.

~~~
mfoy_
That's my takeaway too. In practice, it doesn't really matter since we only
have the one universe to observe, so there's no material difference between
one model and the other.

~~~
trevyn
But be aware: The free-will model can be uninstalled from your brain, and this
may have interesting side-effects. (Including possibly temporary DPDR, though
I wouldn’t necessarily call DPDR a bad thing, just... atypical. And it helps
to have solid coping strategies.)

------
danburbridge
Interesting, the symptoms remind me a lot of many of the themes of Phillip K
Dick's works, particularly the questioning of reality and consciousness.

~~~
roywiggins
PKD had his own unusual experiences:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_expe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick#Paranormal_experiences)

------
md224
If one is having a panic attack regarding free will, it might be helpful to
remember that if you're able to speak the words "I have no control", then
you've proven yourself wrong: you just exerted control over your vocal chords.
Helpful reminder that you're not a prisoner in your own body!

~~~
jjnoakes
Unless whomever is controlling you made you say that so you'd think you were
free...

~~~
md224
True, but then they'd need to be reading your mind to know that you were
thinking about it. The plot thickens...

Also, if this controller needs to do external things to influence what you
think about, rather than just controlling your thoughts directly, then there's
already a hint of free will in the choice of your thoughts.

