i think i had a dream where i made a post about unreality and how confusing it can be for people who genuinely experience certain things marked as unreality
so anyways. here’s my post but in real life now
i have been suggested that it would be better to mark things as “your reality may vary”. but also i think that the blanket “unreality” thing could be more harmful than helpful really. I used to, and occasionally still do when my mental health is very poor, have really strong borderline delusions that i have been transported into another universe, usually when in windowless/really small windowed rooms, or in rooms with mirrors that face each other. Certain things, like horror stories about finding out you were in a dream or another reality the whole time, can trigger that anxiety big time in me. Like that one reddit horror story with the improperly rendered video game asset looking lamp. But I’m completely fine with most things marked as unreality. So, I go into a thing marked as unreality pretty sure that i’ll be fine, and then i’m not because it was the 5% of things marked as unreality that gives me horrible anxiety. And that’s kind of stupid and dangerous. I don’t like it. I don’t quite know what exactly to do about it, i just know that the “unreality” marker is just, so horribly useless to me despite having problems with certain unreality things. i hate it. i would prefer if people would describe what they are talking about so i can more easily avoid it. “This is a story that includes irreversible dimension travel”, “this is a story that may trigger anxiety about being in a dream”, “this is a story that can trigger anxiety about not being real or not experiencing real things”. I would rather have anxiety triggered by a label than read a story that goes into depth about exactly how a certain unreal thing could happen and what it would do to you.
(also before anyone points it out—yeah i do actually like this kind of horror. but i only wish to experience it when i am stable and able to dismiss such anxieties)
And specifically on people who genuinely experience certain unreality things—it can sometimes be more harmful to ask them to put that warning there because 1. it can count as a kind of nonconsensual reality checking when it comes to people experiencing psychosis and 2. it is literally their lived experience. they are likely to take offense to basically being told they are experiencing something fake.
I have phantom shifts. These count as unreality to some folks. But it’s real to me!! Where’s the barrier? how do we interact? or do we simply not? last is probably most likely, but what if we’re in the same place, talking about our experiences, often enough? a constant unreality thing is just going to become exhausting, alienating, and anxiety-inducing for at least one of us at some point. “your reality may vary” or a warning for potential delusion trigger (which can happen with anything, not just not real things) just makes more sense to me in these situations. Or, literally just outright specifying what you’re talking about so people can avoid it if it applies negatively to them. That is the solution that makes the most sense to me, like i said before. I would rather know exactly what i am getting into than have to make the gamble that it’ll be something i’m okay with.
