If you’ve ever taken mescaline - the real
stuff, not cut or diluted with other chemicals nor overly raw peyote
extract which is entirely overwhelming - you’ll remember how it enhances
the real world. Unlike LSD where it purposely reforms your perceptions,
mescaline makes things “more clear” - a light shining through a cloud
will have an impressive lens flare effect or colors on a poster will
seem like a vivid neon light - but you’re aware of whats going on.
You’re lucid. You’re not the guy in the DARE videos who goes throwing
himself through closed windows because of a bad trip.
It enhances everything visual while also keeping you aware.
Dysthymia is the reverse, and so is pathological anxiety. Mild derealization in combination with the every-day doldrums creates a perpetual visual soup to walk through. Everything is real, but there is always a cheesecloth or a bridal veil between you and what you feel is there. You can see it and interact with it but you’re waiting for a fuller experience.
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.” said Ahab in Moby Dick - and I feel theres a lot to that statement. The feeling that the unreality goes down so deep that things as they look are not the actual things as they *mean*, Like allegory in a story, the objects are but projections of the will of something else. Foreshadowing. The face value means nothing to what events your brain will connect it to later.
Even considering it will drive you paranoid. Even thinking about it makes you less sane.
As Yukio Mishima put it: “When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.”
I have fits similar to this, largely because I’ve forgotten how to turn off my brain. Its not an issue of anxiety as much as it is an issue of being constantly aware (paranoid?) of my inward perceptions and that not everyone (or even most) see things as any other one person sees them. (Reality is a collective consciousness after all, a lie agreed upon by the living).
When I hit the moments of raw discordance, of cognitive dissonance, its like the overdrive kicking in on a new car. And its often about women.
My inability to separate either my identity or my value from one particular memory seems to have driven me into an endless hole of self-awareness. If perfection is the horizon we can see and never reach, then this girl… this woman is the back-scattered alpenglow haze around it. Perhaps not the horizon of perfection but the red halo around its terminus.
And whats worse is that the closer or longer you look at it, you cannot tell if you’re looking too hard at the same thing for too long or if you’re looking for something you can’t define that you feel is there but cannot describe. That ineffable quality of an unreasoning love gone to grave.
Whats worse: the woman you feel you should have spent your life with married to someone else and she emails you at two in the morning - or being sold on the belief of that, when the reality is she doesn’t give you half a fuck except on every third bank holiday?
It enhances everything visual while also keeping you aware.
Dysthymia is the reverse, and so is pathological anxiety. Mild derealization in combination with the every-day doldrums creates a perpetual visual soup to walk through. Everything is real, but there is always a cheesecloth or a bridal veil between you and what you feel is there. You can see it and interact with it but you’re waiting for a fuller experience.
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.” said Ahab in Moby Dick - and I feel theres a lot to that statement. The feeling that the unreality goes down so deep that things as they look are not the actual things as they *mean*, Like allegory in a story, the objects are but projections of the will of something else. Foreshadowing. The face value means nothing to what events your brain will connect it to later.
Even considering it will drive you paranoid. Even thinking about it makes you less sane.
As Yukio Mishima put it: “When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.”
I have fits similar to this, largely because I’ve forgotten how to turn off my brain. Its not an issue of anxiety as much as it is an issue of being constantly aware (paranoid?) of my inward perceptions and that not everyone (or even most) see things as any other one person sees them. (Reality is a collective consciousness after all, a lie agreed upon by the living).
When I hit the moments of raw discordance, of cognitive dissonance, its like the overdrive kicking in on a new car. And its often about women.
My inability to separate either my identity or my value from one particular memory seems to have driven me into an endless hole of self-awareness. If perfection is the horizon we can see and never reach, then this girl… this woman is the back-scattered alpenglow haze around it. Perhaps not the horizon of perfection but the red halo around its terminus.
And whats worse is that the closer or longer you look at it, you cannot tell if you’re looking too hard at the same thing for too long or if you’re looking for something you can’t define that you feel is there but cannot describe. That ineffable quality of an unreasoning love gone to grave.
Whats worse: the woman you feel you should have spent your life with married to someone else and she emails you at two in the morning - or being sold on the belief of that, when the reality is she doesn’t give you half a fuck except on every third bank holiday?
