Anyone want to talk about epilepsy and time travel?

[Epilepsy]

Prompted by the trailer for the new Time Traveller's wife series (I love that book) where he says "time travel is a disability not a super power". It has made me think...

I have epilepsy and after a (tonic clinic) seizure I'm either unsure when/where I am, or convinced I am at another place/time in my life - if that makes sense! For example, last time I was convinced I lived in my old house and my DC would be late for nursery if I didn't get up. Said DC are actually at university now  The feelings are absolutely real though, and very detailed - I "see" my old house in my mind eg the book I am reading on my bedside table, the particular lipstick on my bathroom cabinet and for example, a postcard from a friend. (20 years later I wouldn't have a clue normally when/where my friend had been or what lipstick I was wearing in 2003, so these are genuine memories that are being "thrown up"). It really is like time travel, I'm genuinely in my old house and my DC are really nursery age.

These periods aren't like a dream, or even lucid dreaming, it's different. Sometimes it's frightening, a couple of times I have come round and genuinely not known where I am, or who I live with, I see the bedroom door but have no idea where it leads and what's behind it IYSWIM.

My neurologist has told me about "jamais vu" - the opposite to deja vu, so things that are familiar, appear that they aren't. People can also experience this by saying a word over and over until it's meaningless, or if you stare at your face in the mirror for long enough, it seems unfamiliar.

The most annoying thing is that I actually have a poor working/short term memory due to either the epilepsy or meds, so I can't tell you what I did five minutes ago! I also have big holes in my memories day to day, for example I don't remember big events or things with the DC that they/DH remembers. So it's really strange to go back in time like that to certain things so clearly. Maybe it is as close to time travel as you can get...mentally not physically? Brains are so weird....

Does anyone else have anything similar (it's definitely not like having "normal" dreams even realistic ones) or does anyone just find it interesting to think about?

I wish I could time travel to before the fucking MN update! Where are my emojis and formatting?!

Sorry, I have no experience of this (other than words seeming weird after a while), but it's fascinating. I just spent the last half staring blankly out the window, thinking about it!

Not the same, but my dad has dementia and poor sight, so when he moved we set up his living room exactly the same as in his old house, everything in the same place, in a very similar shaped room. So most of the time he thought he was still "home". Which was great, but then how weird for him to leave the room and find he was in a totally different place to where he thought. It helped him settle in but now having read the OP I wonder if we also really freaked him out several times a day...

My epileptic mother used to (she's not dead she's actually not had a seizure since menopause) loose memories AND regain memories as a result of seizures.

For many years she for eg had nothing to tell me about me starting school. THEN one day she phoned me uo to talk about memories of me starting school. They were very detailed. She said it was as though she'd just woken up and it was yesterday.

*she knew it wasn't but her memories of say the previous week had gone but this stuff from 25- 30 (?) years had come back to her.

She's always described it as seizures blocking then reconnecting memories in her brain. But that she sort of relives them, rather than just a feeling of a memory.

My mum also has problems with her working memory, though again less so since menopause.

Sorry you're experiencing very jarring changes of reality. My mother's seizures were usually only at night and her diagnosis was nighttime epilepsy. But once she was very poorly with some virus and she had seizures during the day. We found her car keys in the neighbours flower bed. The neighbour said she'd my mum put them there and weed their garden. She then realised she thought she'd had a dream helping her mum in her garden. Our neighbours garden did look a bit like our grans garden.

It's so weird isn't it? I hadn't thought of the dementia similarities @DogfordCats. I think though you did a good thing for your Dad as he had that familiar space which would have been comforting, rather than no familiar space, if that makes sense?

That's interesting about your mother @Onlyforcake - mine is sleeping/waking epilepsy too. It's definitely more a " reliving" thing rather than just "remembering" Let's hope the menopause does the same for me!

I wonder how medical science will have moved on in say 500 years, there is so much we don't know about brains now. Maybe it is a form of mental time travel (I wish I was more intelligent )

@DogfordCats I also keep an up to date photo of my DCs by my bed so I can see how old they are, in an attempt to "get back to normal" and orientate myself. It's very strange not recognising them sometimes, occasionally I think one of my DDs is me! One thing that helps is looking back at my last recent texts to bring memories back. I usually have a sleep and then am more normal when I wake again.

i get something a bit similar while seizing / coming round. It’s hard to explain and not as clear as your description but i will feel like i am “in” some place / event from my past, very vividly like i’m there but it will only last a short time (or i only remember it lasting a short time when I’m fully conscious)

I can be a bit confused on coming round too, eg if someone told me i was 18 I wouldn’t be shocked!

I’m epileptic and I completely get what you mean! I have TC and absence seizures. I was diagnosed at 26, never had it as a child. My first ever seizure I came around and my bedroom was full of people, I’d had a fit in my sleep and my ex called and ambulance but the first people on the scene were fireman! I remember being really cross and insisting I was 19, still lived with my mum and even tried to show them my mums bedroom…by opening the airing cupboard! I remember even now how cross and convinced I was and how surprised I was to open “my mums bedroom” door only to get greeted by a pile of towels and sheets! Even more so when I was reminded I had four children asleep in the house! As I came round more and more my memories came back and it happens almost every time I have a seizure now (3/4 times a month) . I come around very confused and cross. Fortunately my TC seizures tend to be at night in bed, my now dh finds it very distressing but I don’t really know much about it until I wake up to see him looming over me concerned! But I almost always insist I’m several years younger or my dc are younger or I’m in a different house. I had no idea it was a common thing after a seizure!

My (now deceased) husband used to wake up after a seizure, and frequently thought he was
A) in hospital, and called me "nurse" or
B) asked if he'd just come home from hospital-even if his last admission was years before.
We reckoned his brain had some sort of short-circuit. And his short term memory was hopeless, too.

Very interesting. I suffer from something similar when I'm stressed or tired or hungover, I wake and don't know where I am or I wake and I'm somewhere in my past and it is a genuine shock when I realise I am not really there. Exactly like op I can see tiny details, the colour of my toothbrush etc but I also have a very poor general memory (but excellent super short term, I could learn a Shakespeare play word for word and recite it but then completely forget about it)

I've had the word thing happen, was talking to DS about it earlier!

But a couple of weeks ago I had Covid, and I was feeling very ill. Temp had shot up, but I was feeling freezing. Sat down on the sofa with the heated blanket on (stupid, I know! But I really wasn't able to make good decisions). My cat, who loves the heated blanket, came and sat on my lap, and very suddenly, I was 7/8, ill with chickenpox, in my childhood home, on the old orange and brown sofa with my old cat who's been dead for 20 years.

Ended up back in the now, tears streaming down my face because I desperately wanted my old cat.

It was very strange, and didn't feel like a flashback, which I've had. I assume it must have been similar though, triggered a memory where I was feeling very ill, on a sofa, with a cat.

I get jamais vu in my simple partial seizures. It doesn't make my think I'm in another time, but it does make me think I'm living out the same imagined scenario , over and over again (up to 20 seizures in one day: fortunately the days are rare!). In each seizure, I recognise the scenario as being the same one in the last seizure. After each one, I've no idea what the scenario was. I think epilepsy teleports me to another place rather than to another time, and leaves me feeling rather confused! 🙃
I also lose chunks of memory each time, usually long-term loss. I temporarily forget vocabulary which means for a week or two, my conversations are amusing, as I intersperse random words throughout, unintentionally.

My mum died due to epilepsy. This discussion around memory might explain something that happened to her many years ago.

I'm surprised how many replies and similar experiences there are here! It's good (although actually shit for all of us to be in this situation obvs!) to hear other people understand what I mean, as it's so hard to describe.

Yes I lose my words too, and a lot of my SPaG knowledge seems to have gone permanently (this has upset me and it fucking infuriates me when I see MNers correcting the SPaG in peoples' posts)

@Prettybubblesintheair my DH finds it distressing, my onset sounds very similar, I had a seizure out of the blue one night which obviously terrified DH as he didn't know what was happening and I don't think that fear has left him really. I've had CV recently and been groggy/sleeping a lot and I can tell when I wake up, he is looking at me trying to see if I have had a seizure or am just sleepy. (I also have form for being distressed when I wake from seizures and told my DC to fuck off and let me sleep once )

I’ve no experience of epilepsy but thank you for explaining this so clearly.

Oh yes. My mum definitely lost words at times. That would be compounded by struggling to speak as she often bit her tongue or lips during a seizure.

OP, your experiences with Epilepsy should so similar to mine!!
I've had some bizarre Jamais Vu experiences before. I will look at people I know well, they look so familiar and I know I know them. But they look different, even though they look the same. They feel like strangers, but I know they're not.
Once being in a queue in a shop, and then it was almost like I came too (no tonic clonic) and thought why the hell am I here? How did I get here? What am I meant to be doing? I knew it was a shop and I recognised the shop, but it looked odd and unfamiliar.
De ja vous happen alot also.
Neurology and I have recently come to realise that I'm having partial seizures. Something which I have had for yeeeears, but because they're sometimes so brief I didn't mention things or it was put down to my already poor mental health. My tonic clonics started when I was about 26/7, just out of the blue one day. It was terrifying, home alone. I'm sure I have PTSD from it as during the aura (I didn't know it was that at the time) I thought I was having a stroke, I collapsed at the top of the stairs and the last thing I remember was feeling my head hit the wall and thinking this is it, over. Horrible.
It's nice to read yours and others messages. I've not spoken to another person/people with Epilepsy before and it's comforting to know others know what I'm trying to explain happens.

I don't have epilepsy but I have something very similar when I am falling asleep.

I am thinking about something (anything really) and then I will be suddenly transported to the most random of memories, not even ones that are important. Mundane incredibly detailed memories.

E.g, yesterday I was dropping off and suddenly my brain took me to a hair salon that I visited once in another city 19 years ago. I could see the tape on the steps walking upstairs, could see the wella posters on the wall and smell amonia.

Another time it was a caravan site toilet- one I'd visited once when I was 8, but the memory was clear as day, I had neon clackers in my hand Billy Joel was playing on a radio.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think our brains record everything. For ever. But we don't access those memories regularly. And that's why you saw the lipstick and postcard. Because your brain recorded it and locked it away for 20 years.

I wonder if there is something alike brain-wise when you are dropping off to sleep and when you have a seizure.

I'm epileptic and after having a seizure get annoyed with my husband for fussing as for a few minutes I don't realise I've had a seizure. Until the headache and usual pain of biting my tongue kicks in. Also have a crap short term memory- very annoying as people often think I haven't been listening or am just a bit dippy. Unsure if it's meds or years of whacking my
Head?!

I've only ever had one tonic clonic sezure but have been through phases of having 'funny turns' which were thought likely to be epilepsy. I can generally carry on as normal with whatever I'm doing and no one around me would know that anything is going on but I would feel distant and like something about my surroundings wasn't right whilst knowing that it was. When I was a student (approx 20 years ago) I would get them whilst in the kitchen of my student house. I'd look out the window and knew that what I was seeing was what was supposed to be there but I would be expecting to see something else - a view of the same building every time but not a building I knew. I now think the view I was expecting to see was a building I can see from my current kitchen window. The building wasn't there when I first moved here but the building that was has been replaced with what I think is the building I was expecting to see 20 odd years ago! That would mean when I was having those funny turns/seizures I was getting a glimpse of something from my future!

Apologies if I'm missing posts, the app kept saying "Thread deleted" when I click on this, it's only just come back now! I'm also sure I read a post, that doesn't seem to be here now, from someone who had never spoken about their epilepsy before? I don't know what's more glitchy, our brains or the new MN update 

If that post did exist, I wanted to say there are epilepsy forums out there but I've actually found MN most helpful, especially for medication queries as well as people sharing experiences. More responses in Chat/AIBU than health but that's the way it is these days! I think the mainstream topics are also useful anyway for posters like @Maytodecember to find out more about stuff like this - I just always (ashamed to say this now!) assumed people with epilepsy had seizures but just got on with normal day to day life, I had no idea of all the ramifications IYSWIM? People I know in RL find the time travel/memory thing really interesting too.

Brains really are a mystery aren't they. I imagine in 100s of years time all this will be explained and the current treatments will be looked back on like we look back on cupping and other historical practices!

That's a really good insight. Dp's dd has severe epilepsy and severe ld's as a result but can remember things from 25 years ago despite still not remembering my name (been together 3 years) or what she's done since the last time we saw her (typically 2 weeks). She has U.K. to 2 dozen seizures a day though