I sometimes get flashes of something like that when I've been up late, staring at the computer screen, maybe waiting for something to finish loading. Only what's on the screen in front of me will exist any more; all the surrounding objects will turn into something else. The light falling on the side of the computer will become a doorway into an unfamiliar room.

I lived for almost 20 years in a certain city on the east coast, then later in a city on the west coast that had a few things in common with it. For years I kept catching myself confusing locations in one city with locations in the other.

In between, I lived way out in the country where there weren't any street lights and the nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away. To get to my house after dark I had to follow a footpath through the woods by flashlight. Pretty regularly, the path would start looking unfamiliar to me and I'd start wondering if I'd somehow ended up on the wrong planet with no way back.

The other day I happened to be driving past the end of my street where I almost always turn left to go home. This time I was on my way to a different destination a few blocks away and wasn't going to turn. The intersection looked so different to me that I had to look twice to make sure it was really the same one and all the landmarks were where they were supposed to be.

Vickie, I think we're talking about similar experiences but I don't know what they're called. I may dissociate but I've never been diagnosed with dissociation.