Imagination

I used to take everything people said to me at face value, because I didn't have enough understanding of psychology, social norms, etiquettes, indirect expression, euphemisms, head games, hierarchies, all those complexities.

This literal approach kept me comfortable. I wasn't over-burdened with paranoia. If the joke was on me, so what? I had better things to think about. And so the joke was really on them. At any rate, I was benignly oblivious to other people's passive aggressive bullshit.

Then I gradually learned things, ways people communicate, other than plain english. An overwhelming amount of information, learned the hard way, sobering up after revealing drug-fueled nights, sick revelations, when it dawns on me what the truth of the situation was, is.

After enough of this gnosis, I've gotten hubristic about it. I've started to think my understanding has arrived at a level where I can deduce the unsaid implications of every fragment of conversation. The assumption isn't questioned. In social situations, which are tense to begin with, my reaction to language is colored by my mental state at the time. Could be anything from outrageously negative to pathetically gregarious.

I ask someone at a party what his email address is. He says he doesn’t have one. I immediately assume he’s just not telling me what it is, shunting me off, locking me out. My brain tells me that I know the ugly reality of things now, the way people convey their dislike of me, letting me crack the code myself, to confirm my failure. The negative thought, enabled by the hard-won social analyzer in my brain, gives rise to the emotion, which takes over. Even if I can correct the thought, the emotional damage has been done, souring future interaction.

Every paranoia that's confirmed requires a dozen unambiguously good dealings with society to counter-balance. Thus, it's several steps back every time.

A few days ago I took dramamine and had conversations with people who weren't there. It was interesting. I think it gave me an insight into what some mental conditions, which fall under the unwieldy umbrella "schizophrenia", are like. I was in a bit of a haze, the fringes of delirium, but still functioning normally, I thought. Sitting alone at the table, under the Gyro gazebo at dawn with my MP3 player, dissociated, barely feeling my body. I was seeing peripheral hallucinations so constantly that I was ignoring them now. Cars coming at me, people, animals that turned out to be trees, fire hydrants, whatever. It was all fairly pedestrian.

I guess when I sat down, stopped walking, the sedentary position severed me from reality without my knowing. I started having one of those one-way conversations that I get into when I’m by myself, and working out some idea, or problem with a de-personalized facsimile of someone I know – but at some point, that turned into me having a two-way conversation with T, who was sitting on the other side of the table, talking back – which seemed perfectly normal to me. This went on for some impossible to determine period (time can get weird in those twilight states), before I snapped out of it, and realized there was nobody there.

So at some point, the “idea” of talking to T carried over to the audio sense, which then encompassed the visual sense – so by then, you’re talking full blown hallucination – a bonafide benchmark. But senses are so slippery and it happens so subtly that even when you’re bracing for the hallucination, you miss it! It is like a waking dream. It was the mundane minutia, the patterns, with a bit of mental flotsam, fragments. Strange, and surreal, I guess, but not big, bright archetypes, like a Dali painting. But it’s that limbo that fascinates me, the twilight state, where you can drift out of touch with reality, completely, then come back a little, enough to recall what happened, what you were seeing, talking to, that wasn’t there.

It was notable for me, because until then, I never really had an intuitive sense of what it was like, for the imagination to replace reality, partially. And totally? I’m not sure if I want to know what that’s like, although I figure if I did three times the dose, I would know.