Alternate Reality

Reality lately has been unreal. I keep thinking, how do I know that everything I know right now isn't a long and strange dream? What if I'm asleep and eventually I'll wake up and think, "That was a horrible dream. I'm so glad my life isn't really like that." And how do I know for sure that I'm not dreaming? Anyone could say I'm not but in the middle of the dream it seems you can rarely know that it's truly a dream. Dream reality is still a reality, right?

Is this life a dream? It seems that life really has become nothing more than a dream to me. This realization is making life easier. After all, eventually I'll wake up and everything will be okay. Even if I wake up and life isn't what I hope it actually is, it can't be that much worse than what I've gone through in this dream-life.

Perhaps it's just this situation that's a dream. Perhaps I'm dreaming that she's gone and this dream is just a very long one in which I'm going through day after day of her not being here anymore. But sooner or later I'll wake up and she'll be there, just like she's always been. Even this thought is comforting to me. Even this thought has me acting more like myself.

The not knowing for sure is what's getting me. I'm not truly convinced that any of this right now is a dream. But I'm also not convinced that it's not. I wonder if I'm having a psychotic break. Then I thought to myself, would someone who is having a psychotic break know it was happening? My initial response to that is that I wouldn't know I was entering a psychotic state.

I did some research, just to see what psychosis really entails. Interestingly, I found that there's a condition called "psychotic depression". I suppose I knew on some level that depression can come with psychosis. I'd heard it on my diagnosis one time, but they called it "depression with psychotic features," whatever that means. This is what WebMD says about psychotic depression:

People with other mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, also experience psychosis. But those with psychotic depression are usually aware that the thoughts they have aren't true. They may be humiliated or ashamed of the thoughts and try to hide them. Doing so makes this type of depression very difficult to diagnose.

So I'm wondering if the situation with my therapist leaving threw me past depression and into psychotic depression. I've never felt quite this delusional. And yet, I still think to myself: there's a possibility that it's not a delusion and I'm right--it is a dream.

Now I have to figure out where to go from here. And there's no one around to help me.