Have you ever been disoriented? For how long? Were you frightened? Did you ever figure out what caused it?

My one serious disorientation was when I was pre-menopausal.  I remember walking home from the subway and after walking a couple of blocks, nothing seemed to be familiar.  I walked another block and thought, "When did that building go up?"  I thought perhaps I had gotten off at the wrong stop.  At that point, I felt very uneasy until I got to a corner and saw the street signs and knew I was on the block which would take me to my own apartment building.  Once I saw that, I knew I was in the right place, but for those few minutes, it was as though I had been transported to another dimension.  It turns out that disorientation can be one symptom of pre-menopause and menopause.  That was the only time it happened to me, but it was some scary thing at the time.   

Hmmm. I have had the very occasional flash of seeing a familiar location as if anew, but I wonder if that might simply be a matter of familiarity tending to make you miss details over time, and the brain refreshing its memory.

I used to make a regular weekend journey whose 60-mile return on a late Sunday evening was mainly 20 miles of open countryside, a fairly large town, then another rural 20 miles. One Winter night I arrived home from the 60-mile night drive, and thought, "I don't remember driving through Yeovil" - the town in the middle, with a brightly-lit main road through it. I realised habit had made me drive on a sort of auto-pilot, and fearing this meant I was not concentrating, I frequently varied my route thereafter. In fact I had probably had been concentrating knowingly on the driving, but only subconsciously on the locations.

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Strictly speaking "senile" means simply "old" - same root as "senior", and opposite to "juvenile"; but I do have a friend whose Alzheimer's or similar dementia is now quite advanced; and I don't regard him as particularly old. He's about 67, only months older than me, really late middle-age these days; though I don't know if his illness will bring his death forwards. When I tried to learn about dementia the material seemed to say it does, but also appeared to be only about people in their 80s.

I don't know if he becomes disorientated, but he does become very restless, and visiting him in his care home sometimes becomes a slow-motion circular tour of the downstairs rooms. He has lost his power of speech though - he tries to speak but can only string together three words at best, the rest being incoherent babble even his wife cannot understand. Comparing visits, she and I agree we have no idea what he can understand of his surroundings, but he does not seem disorientated.

Some dementia sufferers may well be disorientated. I don't know very much about it but there are different forms, and I imagine they also affect people in individual ways. 

Thank you Rosie. I have not seen him since May, while I recover from a knee replacement, but I had the impression on my last few visits he was struggling to remember me. His brother and sister-in-law took him out to an event nearby one day, but he'd forgotten only three days later when his wife asked him about it.

He used to greet with a smile but now his expression is more often a strange, haunted look. His wife says she sees the same thing.

Dementia (not senility) is like any disease in that developing it is very much a matter of chance, though it is more likely in old age. Sometimes you hear people talking about it becoming more common, but if so that reflects both rising population anyway, and living beyond or protected from illnesses that in the past would have been terminal or would have encouraged fatal complications like pneumonia.