You start to feel heavy, floaty, glued to the couch, and you fight this heaviness for at least a couple of hours. Around midnight you make a serious attempt to go your bedroom, but it’s like you are magnetically attached, and you finally just give in and drift off to sleep. You have that familiar fuzzy floaty feeling that means the dissociative universe is upon you. The alarm on your phone goes off at 7:00, 7:13, 7:30, and 7:45. You regularly set multiple alarms, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You turn off all of them in your sleep, at least you assume so, because you have no memory of them going off at all.
Mercifully, you wake with a start at 8:15. Shit! You have a meeting across town at 9:00, and it takes you at least 30 minutes to get to work. You look down, and realize that you are wearing the same dress from yesterday. In fact, you slept in everything from yesterday. You take off yesterday’s clothes, put on new clothes, try to fake that your hair is clean by pulling it back, brush your teeth, fall into some ballet flats, and run out the door.
As you’re trip walking down the staircase in your apartment building you start begging God to get you out of this dissociative trip because you have an important meeting, dammit! It’s bad enough to run out the door with unwashed hair, but it’s a whole other situation to be floaty in a situation where, oh wait a minute, yes, you’re LEADING a meeting. Shit! Wake up! Now is not the time be dissociative.
Somehow you pull into the parking lot at 8:55. You run in and take the stairs all the way to the fifth floor because it’s faster than waiting for the elevator. Thankfully, the run up the stairs starts to jolt you out of the dissociation. You get to your office cube, grab your laptop and run into the conference room right at 9:02.
A Year in the Life of PTSD 
wow that would be rough!
Yeah, it was. I’m just glad I squeaked in there at 9:02.
i know that is impressive, i’m pretty sure i wouldn’t have made it on time.
Oh my . . . I don’t know how you do it.
I know those nights very well, of not being able to move, and the daze I feel in the morning. How you can get to work after this I just don’t know. So good that you can though. Well done!
Thanks, Elyn. Though I got to work, I know I didn’t look good. But I got there. We do what we can …
I hate dissociative sleeping. Happened the other day coupled with a PTSD reaction to my partner. So uncomfortable. Good on you for making it though!!! X
OMG! I am not the only one? I thought I was the only one that called it dissociative sleeping. Thanks for sharing. I don’t feel so alone in this battle.
No you certainly are not the only one. Sometimes it feels I get paralysed. I can’t sleep but I can’t wake up. Fear circles my body but there’s nothin I can do about it cause being awake feels like it would bring more fear. Hard to explain but yes you’re not alone – I get you 🙂 x
Bourbon, so sorry you experience the same thing, but it’s a strange comfort that you know what I’m talking about. If I had one wish it would be to rid all of us of this dissociative sleeping hell.
Beatriz
I call it “being floaty” too…and I’ve so been in that place tonight. Thank you for sharing what it’s like for you.
Yeah, it’s a very unfun thing, as you know …