I do it in drawing all the time. Or painting, projects, reading ....to dissociate from the world, also my own thoughts


Here I sort, for hours.

I do honey sometimes i think i daydream to much. LISA

I celebrate when I lose time that way, disorientation and all. Yay me! I am focusing on a task at hand.

It is the time I can't account for that gets me worried.

I agree w/ Arfie and Jewell here. There is something called "flow state" where we are completely in the moments and loose awareness of the passage of time.

However, lost time when we don't know what happened during the time is entirely different and a symptom of dissociation, not such a jolly thing.

Yeah I was more referring to the kind you can't account for. I know flow, and it feels good, time flies but I'm aware that it is passing. Lately, though, it's more like I just lose time, an hour here, an hour there, and I can't recall what I was doing. That's the disconcerting part.

Are you under stress? I know there are times when I can't remember what I did the day before because stress impairs the memory.

Same with sleep deprivation.

I dissociate all the time and I dont know how to explain it and I dont even know when I am doing it, It is like I am in a black out but being sober, I have thrown things away perfectly good items that were even brand new would end up missing, People will tell me some thing that happend and I dont remember any of it, I cant even remember some times what happend that same day, It is a pretty scary thing and I dont know how to deal with it or know when it is happening, I think it is some kind of protective thing in our minds that we used when we were being abused or some thing and then we still use that coping method to this day, I hope I am saying that right, I dont know every thing and I am not a expert on this subject at all, I would like to know more about it though

Wildhorses,
When you have lost time that way, have you tried talking to friends or others nearby and asking them about how you acted or presented yourself during that lost time? That might be a place to start.

Sorry you are having to deal with this.

It seems like this thread is discussing 3 things: flow, spacing out, and lastly loosing time because awareness has become fragmented and another part of one's self may be dominating consciousness at that time so activity continues that is not remembered later.

I love flow state, and also space out way to often. What day is this?

To those who lose time, consider doing some reading on dissociative identity disorder... It is very common symptom.

When I read up on dissociation I get lost in conflicting opinions and theories. I leave that mystery be.

Much of my own formal therapy was based in the language of another era. We called the lost time, "blackouts" and in my own blackouts, there was no evidence that I was doing anything harmful, so we proceeded on the hope that continuing my pro-active attempts to work with the flashbacks and nightmares instead of fighting them would fix the problem. In my case, it worked. It has been years - maybe even decades - since I have experienced a blackout.

Yes, and like mentioned here, sometimes it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's like time flies when you're having fun. When I'm on here at DS PTSD reading and replying to posts, time really flies for me in a good way!

But I assume that by your use of the worst "lost" you're not talking about time well invested flying by out of fun. By "lost" you mean some kind of disorientation.

Absolutely. I wear a watch, just a cheap one, but one with a stopwatch to help me keep track of time at work. I also have a pocket electronic calendar, a PDA, in my pocket at all times to keep track of what day it is and what my schedule is for the day.

My traumas left me with a distorted sense of time. Especially the traumas as a kid in a civil war overseas caught between rebel and and government forces shooting and throwing flammables at each other. Time stopped when a bomb hit my car with me in it. I, a 9 year old boy, looked the rebel in the eye with the bomb in his hand. He locked eyes with mine when he lit it and cocked his arm to throw it at me.

That split second felt like a year. He had time to stop himself from trying to blow up a kid, and he did it anyway. I lost my childhood innocence in that split second. An adult could knowingly kill a kid. Later, when my dad lost his mind from the war's PTSD and his own marital problems with my mom, I learned an adult in your home could nearly kill you knowingly, too. But by then I was no longer innocent.

Those moments echo through time. On and on, there were such complex PTSD experiences week in and week out over 6 years of fighting in my neighborhood from when I was 9 until I was 15. When memories of those moments are triggered at work during my day, I fall back on my watch, stopwatch, and PDA to bring me back on task because I get "lost."

Kurt Vonnegut, when he wrote his novel Slaughterhouse Five about how in the 1960s he flashed back to being the Nazis' POW in the 1940s, called it leaking, as if time were a liquid in the mind and leaked through its containers from time to time, pun intended. I like that.

I read that as a kid before I got out of the war while I was still living through those war traumas. It made sense of how I felt when those horrible things happened and later I couldn't get the memory of them from popping back into my head.

The way Vonnegut made it seem like a liquid leaking made it just seem neutral and an accident of nature, like gravity, something I shouldn't kick myself about even if other people did kick me around about lingering on the subject and such. Memories leaking back and forth through time was a forgiving way to live with flashbacks and dissociating from CPTSD.

I have no idea how so-called "normal" people experience time, which is why I rely on devices like watches, stopwatches, and PDAs to keep track. I know it's just human to experience time speeding up and slowing down. I think in my case it's just more pronounced, as it is for a lot of us here.