Kelsey Day on the Dissociative Horrors of Virtual Reality and Social Media

I visited in the winter of 2024, when the Manhattan streets were sickly gray. The front door glittered, glass sprayed with a youthful logo: Virtual Reality Center. I’d heard of VR centers before, but never visited one. I was in the early stages of writing my debut young adult novel, The Spiral Key—in which a teenage girl gets locked inside a deadly VR world controlled by her ex-best friend—and I was ostensibly visiting the center for research.

I paid for sixty minutes in the main game room. The woman at the desk walked me through the safety questions, ticking off the answers on an iPad. Do you have a history of seizures? Vertigo? Any heart conditions? Then, when she found my answers satisfactory, she escorted me into the VR center.

The main game room was about the size of a basketball court, segmented into what looked like miniature obstacle courses. Objects were placed on the ground, set up to complement their respective VR games.

The first game I tried was a “Walk the Plank” simulation where the player walks across a narrow balancing beam. A real balancing beam was placed on the real ground, and when you walk across it wearing your VR goggles, the game makes it feel like you’re walking a plank between two skyscrapers. Wind hisses in your ears. The skyscrapers groan and sway. It felt real enough that my mouth went dry. When my foot slipped off the balancing beam, genuine terror shot through me before I ripped the goggles off.

I tried a few other VR games and struggled to stay in any one of them for more than a few minutes. There was a Jurassic Park-themed rollercoaster, a racetrack, an escape room filled with goblins. I gave each of them a good faith try. But within half an hour, I was throwing up in the bathroom.

It’s not because I felt motion sickness, although that’s a frequent complaint of VR users. My nausea grew out of a panic attack, and my panic attack grew out of a tightening dissociative sensation triggered by the VR.

When you’re in a VR game, you can raise your real hands in the air and see a virtual pair of hands in front of you. The virtual hands follow your real hands’ movement. It registers as quite realistic, right on the edge of real. But there’s still a gap—a slivering space between the VR world and the real world, and something about that gap set me off.

I moved my real hands, and my virtual hands flickered, moved with them. A feeling of dread burned down my back. A nasty suspicion took root: that if I removed my VR goggles, I still wouldn’t be in the real world. That I would have to peel off another pair of goggles, then another. That my hands still wouldn’t be real—like I was a nesting doll of virtual selves, and my real body had gone somewhere I wouldn’t be able to find it again.

This wasn’t a wholly new sensation. Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with a condition called Depersonalization/Derealization Disorder (DPDR). It’s a chronic dissociative disorder that, in my case, creates the sensation of constantly being in a dream. Your environment never feels “real.” Folks living with DP/DR often describe feeling like they’re watching their lives from the third person, or like they’re watching their life as a movie. It’s often a terrifying experience.

Fascinatingly, DPDR is most prevalent today among teenagers and young adults. I was fifteen when my symptoms first appeared. And as a young person who grew up embedded in the modern web of social media and surveillance, I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

Social media provides the dizzying gift and dangerous curse of endless self-perception. It both fractures and balloons the user’s sense of identity. You’re encouraged to craft a visual narrative for yourself to share with your community, and consume other community members’ narratives through photos, memes, and videos. The algorithm controlling your content page latches onto your chosen story and deepens it through an endless catalogue of affirming posts.

You’re an anxious librarian who just moved to France? Here are hundreds of videos made by Americans living in France! Here are hundreds of videos about managing anxiety as a librarian! Here are hundreds of videos about what it’s like being you, inhabiting this particular identity, living in this particular place, right now.

VR seems to have a more escapist goal: the user is teleported out of their life, out of their “self,” and into somewhere else. Similar to social media, it creates the illusion of connection; but instead of simulating connection with other humans, it’s simulating connection with the “outside world”—grand landscapes, thrilling rollercoasters, deep oceans.

You can paraglide over stunning fake mountains. You can watch a neon sun sink down over digital water. You can walk the virtual streets of Paris. VR approximates the sensation of being out in the world, without requiring any of the emotional work of being in relation with that world.

The natural result of both these technologies is disassociation. A disconnect opens between the mind and the body, between the body and the environment. As a writer, I’m fascinated by these points of severance. I’m disturbed by how they’re connected to mass technological surveillance, addictive social media algorithms, and virtual reality games—and, crucially, how these elements warp our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with the environment.

I wanted to write a book that captured the stakes of this disconnection: the hot, crawling claustrophobia of VR, the moment when your brain glitches and you forget, for a moment, where you really are. Who you really are. And, because the insidious effects of technology like this disproportionately affects young people, I wanted to place young people at the center of the narrative. The result was my debut novel, The Spiral Key, which is out now and available anywhere books are sold.

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