Zeke Newbold
Carbon based biped.
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2015
- Messages
- 1,249
This one isn't in any way paranormal. It is more a question of altered perceptions but is `Fortean ` enough, I think, to belong here.
It occured about two weeks ago. I was taking the underground Metro to a class, alone, in the late morning. I was in an introspective mood and was musing - in a slightly self-pitying way - over what a lot of bullshit the past year had subjected me to. I don't just mean the whole pandemic malarkey, but also developments in my personal life. `It's almost as if I'm in a simulation and I'm being played`, I thought to myself.
Just at that moment I was plunged into a sudden feeling that the world was indeed illusory and that, yes, I was in fact in some sort of simulation - like a computer game, maybe.
This sensation/realisation must have lasted maybe half a second or less - and then I was back in the known, comfortable everyday reality. I was as though my mind just couldn't cope with the knowledge and recoiled from it.
The best analogy I can come up with is that of vertigo. Imagine you are standing at a cliff edge and looking down. You get that dizzying, scary but exhilarating feeling and then you take a step back so that there is more comforting terra firma beneath you.
Since that event I have tried to consciously bring the feeling back on by following the same train of thoughts that seem to lead me there in the first place - all to no avail.
Before anyone asks.I was not taking anything or under any medication. I was maybe a bit `under the weather` and had had a few beers the night before - all of which is routine for me.
I should point out that something akin to this has happened to me once before. This time it was about thirty odd years ago when I was a student. I was lying in bed playing a thought experiment about the finite nature of life - trying to acknowledge the fact that I would die (I'm a barrel of laughs me!) when again I was briefly plunged into a sense of the illusoriness of existence - a perception that I was sanwhiched between two nothingnesses of pre-birth and after death. As in the later experience I was not taking any stimulants and as later I would try to bring the feeling back on without any success. (It seems to be something one has no conscious control over).
I am familiar with the ideas of various `existentialist` philosophers who seem to have talked about this sort of thing, maybe. Kierkergaard, I think, talked about `dread` in this context and Heidegger mentioned the experience of something he called `apprehension` (but in his beloved German tongue). Then, of course Jean Paul Sartre termed the same sort of epiphany `nausea` - which gave the title to his best known novel.
I am also familiar with cosmological debates about wherther or not the universe could be a `simulation`. To be frank, such debates have always left me unmoved, even a bit bored. I always thought, I suppose,that even if life were a simulation it wouldn't make one iota of difference to things, because- as Morrisey put it - `everybody's got to live their lives`. However, it's one thing to idly speculate about such ideas - quite another to feel, however fleetingly - that it's true!
I am also dimly aware that there is a psychiatric symptom termed `derealisation` in which people feel as though their lives are fictional shows of some kind.
Am I merely describing a mental health issue?
It occured about two weeks ago. I was taking the underground Metro to a class, alone, in the late morning. I was in an introspective mood and was musing - in a slightly self-pitying way - over what a lot of bullshit the past year had subjected me to. I don't just mean the whole pandemic malarkey, but also developments in my personal life. `It's almost as if I'm in a simulation and I'm being played`, I thought to myself.
Just at that moment I was plunged into a sudden feeling that the world was indeed illusory and that, yes, I was in fact in some sort of simulation - like a computer game, maybe.
This sensation/realisation must have lasted maybe half a second or less - and then I was back in the known, comfortable everyday reality. I was as though my mind just couldn't cope with the knowledge and recoiled from it.
The best analogy I can come up with is that of vertigo. Imagine you are standing at a cliff edge and looking down. You get that dizzying, scary but exhilarating feeling and then you take a step back so that there is more comforting terra firma beneath you.
Since that event I have tried to consciously bring the feeling back on by following the same train of thoughts that seem to lead me there in the first place - all to no avail.
Before anyone asks.I was not taking anything or under any medication. I was maybe a bit `under the weather` and had had a few beers the night before - all of which is routine for me.
I should point out that something akin to this has happened to me once before. This time it was about thirty odd years ago when I was a student. I was lying in bed playing a thought experiment about the finite nature of life - trying to acknowledge the fact that I would die (I'm a barrel of laughs me!) when again I was briefly plunged into a sense of the illusoriness of existence - a perception that I was sanwhiched between two nothingnesses of pre-birth and after death. As in the later experience I was not taking any stimulants and as later I would try to bring the feeling back on without any success. (It seems to be something one has no conscious control over).
I am familiar with the ideas of various `existentialist` philosophers who seem to have talked about this sort of thing, maybe. Kierkergaard, I think, talked about `dread` in this context and Heidegger mentioned the experience of something he called `apprehension` (but in his beloved German tongue). Then, of course Jean Paul Sartre termed the same sort of epiphany `nausea` - which gave the title to his best known novel.
I am also familiar with cosmological debates about wherther or not the universe could be a `simulation`. To be frank, such debates have always left me unmoved, even a bit bored. I always thought, I suppose,that even if life were a simulation it wouldn't make one iota of difference to things, because- as Morrisey put it - `everybody's got to live their lives`. However, it's one thing to idly speculate about such ideas - quite another to feel, however fleetingly - that it's true!
I am also dimly aware that there is a psychiatric symptom termed `derealisation` in which people feel as though their lives are fictional shows of some kind.
Am I merely describing a mental health issue?