So my mental illness/issues with reality tend to manifest more subtly, mostly as part of my dissociation. I stop feeling real instead of stuff around me feeling unreal. (Sometimes it feels less real, but not completely fake, if that makes sense?) Because my memory is pretty messed up anything that gets stored as the same vague feeling as remembering dreams, plus sometimes my dreams are incredibly lifelike and full of mundane details, sometimes I have to make sure certain things actually happened/didn't happen. I'm used to all that. I'm also an insomniac, I've had the "I've been awake 3+ days and my brain is giving the fuck up" hallucinations as well, though I don't count them as a mental health issue outside of the insomnia causing them. Sometimes when I wake up after a post-insomnia sleep, especially a really deep one, I have a moment of "who the what the how the???" before reality kicks in and I separate dreams from reality. Usually it doesn't take more than a minute. Last night I fucked up my caffeine intake and ended up staying up all night. This also led me to spacing on my meds because I take them before bed, which never happened, which didn't help the staying up all night. (Generally I take them when I start getting the first signs of tiredness, which are pretty consistent even if my body doesn't follow through. But I was wired and didn't get those until after the sun was up and it was too late to take my meds or I'd really throw my schedule.) This makes my reality a LOT more wobbly than usual, but it's not so bad. It's like early insomnia mental-leakage: sometimes I notice shadows that aren't there, things move in the corner of my eyes, I Thought I Saw The Cat But He's Not There, stuff like that. The post-wake up disorientation is usually a little stronger but goes away just as fast. Always gone before I'm out of bed. I fell asleep 'naturally' (read: because I fucked up my meds) some time in the late morning, had the usual weird 'my chemistry is fucked up because I fucked up' super-deep-but-not-restful sleep with super-detailed dreams wherein I was some kind of robot? I got woke up for dinner and barely knew where I was. I still thought I was a robot, but had a feeling that was Wrong. I couldn't parse the time on the clocks properly, but that also had a Not Right feeling, I think it was morning in my dream + that feeling you sometimes get when you just wake up and have NO idea how long you were asleep. It wasn't until I was out in the main room that I was actively going "this is not right, this is my house, I am not a roboty-thing I am made of meat*. Very hungry meat that should be eating dinner." When usually the mental dream vs reality sorting happens automatically in the back of my head instead of my active thoughts. It was still a few minutes later, while I was actually eating, before I'd shaken all of it. It never takes that long. (*Funnily enough I had actually reread that sci-fi story before I decided to go lie down.) I've never had it that bad and am honestly freaking out a little. How much if it is normal/acceptable before I should start to worry? I know I also tend to do a lot of "I'm Ok, this is Ok" when I actually should be concerned because I'm used to things even when I shouldn't be so I kind of need an objective third party to reality check for me.
Part of the maladjustment might be shifting your meds and usual insomnia delirium. I've known the dream/sleep-maladjustment thing to happen to NTs as well. It might just be that you were knocked out of REM at a time your brain was unloading/processing and you just got left with the descrambled data when you woke up. All that being said, if it's bothering you and you've never had it that bad before, I'd suggest talking to someone and doing a real-or-not-real thing with them. Do you have any coping skills that help you play the real-or-not-real game with yourself?
Ran out of spoons to reply last night but thank you, I did a few of my own reality-checks and hung out with my sister until I felt better. One of my NT friends told me this used to happen to her pretty often as a kid, and she's one of the sanest people I know so hearing that helped a lot, too.
