Hello everybody, welcome back to another video by DissociaDID, it's Chloe! Today I want to talk to you about dreaming.
This is a question that we've been asked a lot about, ever since we started the channel.
People are very interested in how dreaming works when you have more than one consciousness going on in one mind
So I'm going to tell you all about how that works when you have dissociative identity disorder. See you in a minute!
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So, one of the first things that people tend to ask about dreaming and sleeping when you have dissociative identity disorder:
"Is it always the same person who falls asleep who then wakes up again in the morning?"
The answer to that is no. You can switch in your sleep. Obviously, you won't be aware of it...
...unless you are dreaming, sometimes then you'll remember and sometimes you won't, just like with any other dream.
Just because one person went to sleep in the body doesn't mean that they're going to be the one who then wakes up in it.
The same thing, again, that tends to happen with us is that, say, I will put the body to bed or Kyle will put the body to bed...
"We need to sleep now. This is night time for all of us."
And a little will front and wake up in the body and it will have been maybe 20 minutes and then they're like, "yay, you know, let's go play, let's go do something else!"
Or someone will wake up in the body and decide that they're not tired, and that they've finally got a chance to use the body, so they want to do something.
They'll get up and go do whatever it is that they decided that they want to do, that they haven't had a chance to.
Because perhaps they haven't been out in a few weeks, or maybe they don't get much time in the body.
It can be very hard to regulate sleeping, and having chronic fatigue like we do also adds another element to that.
If you'd like a video about what CFS is, then please do leave a comment below, and we'll consider making that for you!
But that is completely unrelated to DID. That's a physical issue, rather than a mental issue.
It can be very hard to regulate sleeping and to enforce sleeping schedules. Just like anyone, any of us can get insomnia,
or be very very hyper for sleeping, or fatigued and out of commission for the whole day, just like anyone.
Our bodily reactions to sleep and to daily stresses change, but that doesn't mean that we're all gonna feel exactly the same way.
So somebody could be stuck in the body fronting who has insomnia and can't sleep, but everyone else inside will be sleeping.
But because that person is in the body, the body is awake!
If someone else were to front, they could probably sleep in the body and let the body get some rest.
I reckon a few of you might be thinking around now:
"Well, why doesn't someone else just take over the body so that the body can sleep?"
We aren't always able to control our switches like that. It's not something where we can just say, "Oh, hey, this would be helpful, let's [switch!]"
It doesn't work that way, unfortunately.
It can for some people, and generally speakinig the more you get to know your system, the better your communication with your alters gets...
the more likely you are to be able to make decisions like that, to encourage each other to front, or to stay back, or to work together to encourage a healthier life.
And that's why when a lot of people say, "oh gosh, well, you know you're giving your alters names!" and "this is all made up in your head!"
and "if you're accepting it in this way, you're going to make it worse for yourself, and you're never going to heal because you're listening to the voices in your head."
It's in ways like this where it's actually the opposite. In order to heal when you have dissociative identity disorder,
and in order to make the most of your life and make it as easy to deal with as possible, in as healthy a way as possible,
you need to eventually be able to communicate with your alters, or at least try to communicate with your alters.
Because of the way our brains work,
no one alter is going to be capable of taking on a whole life experience on their own, because our minds are literally fragmented.
So, for example,
if I had followed what people like to say on YouTube sometimes, about "you should be ignoring this," and "you're making it worse for yourself,"
and "you're just doing this for attention, otherwise you would be pretending they don't exist," and stuff like that.
If we had acted like that, then there would be no way to
encourage someone else to switch, or be aware that someone was near the front and say,
"hey, do you reckon you can step forward and take over, because I can't sleep and the body really really needs to sleep."
The better your communication is, the more likely you'll be able to make decisions like that with your system,
the more aware you are of your system members, the easier it will be to understand where people are in the inner world;
how close they are to the front, who can communicate with which alters. Not all of our alters are aware of each other.
I'm not aware of all the alters in the system. I can't speak to all of them.
A lot of the others can only speak to some people as well.
So, it's not like we can all sit down in a room and chat.
Sometimes that can happen! Not all of us, because there are a lot of us... [laughs]
Communication for things like this, just for regulating daily life -- something that would be relatively easy for somebody with a singular personality --
you make a decision and then you try your best to stick to it.
Not saying that that is easy, but it adds a whole other level of difficulty when you have 26 or 27 people all trying to do that in their own way.
You have their own opinions about when they want to sleep, or how tired they are, or what they want to do when bed time happens.
So let's say that the body does sleep right through the night!
None of the alters who switch out will wake the body up and disturb the sleep. What happens then?
Will the person who's fallen asleep In the body still be the one to wake up the next morning?
No, not necessarily. So I could go to bed, and Kyle may be the one who wakes up in the body the next morning,
and because of that if somebody's fallen asleep and someone else wakes up,
then that means there has been a switch (or more than one switch!) in your sleep.
Usually you won't be aware of this, but when it comes to things like dreaming, it can get a little bit more interesting.
We can share dreams. I can watch other people's dreams.
I can have a dream and then switch and the dream becomes controlled by another alter, and I'm watching.
So kind of like if we were living daily life and somebody else became co-conscious and switched with me,
so that they were controlling the body and I was co-conscious, rather than I am controlling the body and they're co-conscious.
It's like handing the steering wheel over to someone else while you get to watch from the passenger seat of the car.
And the person with the steering wheel is the one who's controlling the body,
or in this case controlling the dream. Not necessarily controlling the dream as in lucid dreaming,
but the one that the dream revolves around, the person who's walking around, the dream-person.
Whereas somebody else is kind of watching what's going on, usually from a different perspective.
I've seen Kyle dreaming and watched it from like a bird's eye view, which does happen in real life.
When you're dissociating, you can sort of "float up onto the ceiling," as I've described it before.
So you're watching yourself from a bird's eye perspective, or watching yourself from across the room, or from behind you, or something like that.
Which is why it can be hard to ground yourself in the real world.
If you're watching yourself act like a video game character, third-person perspective,
it's very difficult to feel like yourself and grounded in a world that's real, that you have control over.
I've never been able to consciously switch in a dream because... I'm dreaming?
It's like when you look back on a dream. You can make decisions and stuff like that in your dream, but you're not awake.
Your brain is not working at the same kind of capacity.
Your brain is working through the events that happened to you lately, how you're feeling, and bringing it up to you in a sort of...
metaphorical dream state. It's the same kind of thing. We will be going through it in a dream state.
It's not that one person is kind of awake, watching someone else dreaming.
We're both sharing the dream experience.
But one person generally will be having the dream, and the other person will be watching. This doesn't happen very often!
It has happened a few times, actually. and it's almost always me and Kyle. I don't usually get to see other people's dreams.
I have had other alters appear in my dreams,
but I don't know whether that's my brain dreaming, or whether they were actually consciously there in the dream with me.
Sometimes that does happen. That happens with littles a lot, actually. It's happened with Kyle before, too.
Something else that's interesting is that I actually used to be able to lucid dream. Lucid dreaming is where you can control what happens in your dreams.
This was just for a period of a few years; I can't do it anymore.
Even when I clocked on to the fact that I'm dreaming, I can't then change the dream.
But I used to be able to pick up on a nightmare occasionally.
This was just for a period of about maybe four years, when I was a teenager. I could say,
"I'm dreaming, this is a nightmare," and I could make myself wake up. I could also change what I was doing in the dream,
so I once had a dream and halfway through this dream, I was a dragon for some reason -- I could control when I breathe fire and stuff like that,
but I was a hundred percent aware that I was in a dream, and I was trying to change what was happening,
and I was able to do that. Not completely, but to an extent I was able to do that, so I could lucid dream.
But that was way before I knew about having DID, like way, *way* before. I've also had alters meet me in dreams,
so first present themselves to me in dreams. The one that sticks in my head the most is way before I knew I had DID --
we were diagnosed, I think we were twenty years old, early 2017 -- when I was 14 or 15, I had these recurring nightmares, and this was way way way before...
I even knew what DID was. I think that I'd heard of multiple personality disorder, but it wasn't even in my range of thought at all!
I just thought I was very depressed, which I was, but I had these recurring nightmares, and it happened for three or four nights in a row.
And I knew that these were different from normal nightmares.
The first thing that made it different was the fact that it happened in my bedroom, and every single time it happened I was convinced that I was awake.
Everything was extremely real. These nightmares scared the life out of me.
I've had some really frightening and unpleasant nightmares, and I've had some really frightening and unpleasant flashbacks, even at that point,
but the reason this scared me so much was because the antagonist in this dream, these dreams that I kept having, knew me.
But it knew me better than I knew myself, and it preyed on my weaknesses.
It preyed on the things that I was proud of, but were unhealthy for me, that put me in danger.
It was trying to teach me a lesson, and it *did* teach me a lesson.
But it was one of the hardest lessons I've ever had to learn in my life, all the way up to this point.
This alter was -- I didn't know it was an alter at the time, but it was an alter: a persecutor.
They took the form of a trickster demon.
If you've ever seen the anime Soul Eater, I can show you what he looks like. He looks like this,
and later on, he integrated with an introject of one of my abusers.
He still exists in our system, still is intensely frightening to me, but in these dreams,
Demon, which is what he's known as, knew my weaknesses, and he would trick me and I was always going out of my way to help.
You know, like it doesn't matter what happens to me, doesn't matter how hurt I get,
I need to help, I need to help you, you know, even if it kills me. That kind of thing. I had a very martyr-like personality,
very martyr-like mentality as to why I was on earth, and what my purpose was, and the fact that I wasn't important,
but everyone else's happiness was by far more important than mine, and other people's safety was more important than mine.
Demon took that to new levels of fear.
He scared me so much in these dreams because he knew me better than I knew myself.
And he could warp the way I thought and the way I acted into ways that made me see just how dangerous that kind of behavior was ,
and just what kind of trouble it could get me into -- had already gotten me into, unbeknownst to me --
and also what kind of trouble I could get the people I loved into, and that I needed to be stronger,
and that I needed to take responsibility for myself and my feelings,
and that it was okay to feel anger, and it was okay to feel rage, and it was okay to exist as somebody for myself,
rather than just existing to serve other people. And in these reoccurring dreams -- it happened three or four nights in a row.
It was able to shape-shift in the anime that this fictive was from. It got to the point where it ended up making threats on my family.
In the dream, this isn't in like real life. They wouldn't ever hurt anybody outside of our body, not ever. They're not dangerous.
They're only dangerous to us.
I managed to reach through the wall, 'cause my parents bedroom was the bedroom next to mine, and he disappeared.
I knew where he was going and what he was going to do.
For some reason, I knew that it was in my wardrobe and I reached in, I grabbed it, and it was him, but in the form of a plushy toy, and I ripped it up.
I was furious, angry, panicked, frightened, but mainly just furious that, you know, I'd done the right things, and I was being a good person,
I didn't deserve this, and he's made a mockery of me, and I can't let him do this.
I can't always be the good girl. I need to stand up for myself. I can't let him do this.
I ripped him up. And that was the last time I ever dreamt of him, until recently. That stayed with me.
I didn't know that that was an alter in the dream and that this was how he was communicating with me, that was how he taught me that lesson.
It's okay. It's okay not to be a martyr. And I needed to step out of that role in order to protect myself and my system, which I didn't know about at the time,
and in order to prevent more abuse. And he did that in a extremely unpleasant way.
I won't go into the details of what he would do to me in these dreams or anything like that, or why he was so frightening and is even more frightening now in my opinion,
after he integrated with an introject of one of my abusers. Alters can introduce themselves to you in dreams,
and they can communicate with you in dreams, or at least some can. It is entirely valid if you meet an alter in a dream.
It's just as valid as if you met them by finding that somebody has left writing to you in the real world,
or they recorded a video for you, or they left marks in pen on your arm or on the mirror,
or self-harmed, or anything like that.
It's just as real because it's all happening inside your head. All of that is happening inside your head.
But that's so real. Your brain is an organ and, you know, just like if something was happening to your lungs,
there's no reason that anyone would think that that's not real just because it's inside your body. It's the same thing with your brain.
So there's some insight into how dreaming works with dissociative identity disorder,
and I hope that it answered some questions that maybe you didn't even know you had!
If you do have more questions or would like a sequel on this, or even a debunking DID video on the science of dreaming with DID, then please do leave a comment below!
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So, please do remember to like and subscribe, and I will see you all in the next video everybody! Thank you for watching. Bye!
