We don't wake up from blackouts. It's not like opening your eyes after you've been asleep.
For us, it's like everything suddenly comes into focus. Like regaining mental alertness. It is a bit like dream mechanics in the sense that we're aware of what we're doing and where we are, and it makes sense, but then we realize we don't know how long we've been doing it or what we were doing before.
It all feels a lot more vague and hard to identify as amnesia than the hard and fast experience of blackouts people think of when they hear "DID" and "losing time."
Often, we don't realize a chunk of time was missing at all until we look at the clock and find that far more time has passed than we can account for. Or someone else mentions something and we have no idea what they're talking about. On our own, we wouldn't even notice. Amnesia can hide itself so well that you never really understand how pervasive it is until you turn your full attention to it.
I know that there are people who experience blackouts, some frequently, but blackouts are not "the DID experience" for everyone. Vague amnesia and gray-outs are probably a lot more common for most of us.
So if we say "coming to," we mean the shift where things come into focus again. Sudden awareness that oh, I'm here now. It can still be very disconcerting especially while driving, but because we don't black out and almost always have co-concsciousness before switching, it allows us to gain awareness about our surroundings etc.
Most of the time we sort of "download" from a shared database of memories so we have the bullet points of what's going on that day. It's just that the details are in corrupted files.
Hopefully we're making sense right now.
















