Ellcrys (
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We went outside for a little walk in the night air, and while walking down the street I got a repeat of that first insight. I had the feeling that instead walking down a real street, I felt as if there was a big spherical screen all around me, with an image of the street projected onto it, and that as I walked the image changed, expanding out in front of me and collapsing back down again behind me. I could look up and see an image of the sky, look down and see my feet pushing the sidewalk backwards. I was stationary, it was the image of the street that was moving. Of course when you think about it, this perceptual 'distortion' is actually more real than the 'normal' perception. My brain, comfortably enthroned in my skull feels nothing of the outside world except through the pattern of activity it receives from the senses. It receives images, sounds, sensations, and pastes each one in its proper place on a sensory sphere that represents the world around me. My perceptual distortion was that instead of seeing the outside world, I was now seeing this sensory sphere, with a sensory image of the world on it. To me this an extremely interesting and exciting insight that I will remember for the rest of my life.
I would see strangers approach along the sidewalk, at first appearing as a little insignificant dot near the expanding focus of my sphere. They would grow and grow until I could see them in great detail before they passed behind and shrank back down to nothing. It was as if each of us posessed his own sensory sphere, and as we approached the spheres would intersect, and I would appear in his sensory world as he appeared in mine. We played a little ritualistic game as we passed, each in turn taking a good look at the other, then politely averting their eyes to allow the other to return the visual examination without making direct eye contact, before hurrying on down the street. It brought to mind an image of dogs presenting themselves in turn for the other to get a good sniff.
We stopped at MacDonalds to get a bite to eat, and never did a big mac taste so good, although it seemed to take an hour to consume it, and I was a little concerned that the other customers might notice the enormous effort I was expending in getting it down. I could feel my tongue and cheeks maneuvering the lumps of food into position on my molars, a few good chomps, then it was pushed down the chute where my esophagus began an elaborate sequence of peristaltic contractions to persuade it down to my stomach. I looked up at my friend between mouthfuls, and his face looked so weird, it is hard to describe. Although visually he looked exactly as he always does, I would become aware of individual components of his face, his nose, his cheek, his eyes, which would trigger a strong response to my senses independant of the rest of the face, so that the impression was somewhat like a cubist painting.
We attempted a few mathematical exercises and found that although we were fundamentally capable, it was difficult to remember which part of the problem you were working on, or to hold interim results in your head. While walking around town I had found it extremely challenging to navigate around the familiar streets of my neighborhood for a similar reason; although I could plan a course, I had some trouble remembering which part of the course we were actually on. We were never in danger of actually getting lost, but we did spend some time discussing where we were and how to proceed. It was a wonderful sensation like exploring a fabled town that you have read about but have never actually visited before.
As the hours rolled on by we spent the time playing with a slinky and one of those electrostatic lightning machines, blissfully absorbed in such simple pursuits like two children playing with toys. Our conversation disintegrated to short meaningless sentences. I would say something like "The quality of light is an etherial essence" to which he might respond "But the meaning of existance is not comprehensive" and I would reply "Yes but it is if you want it to be", and it would go on like this, knowing that he had no idea of what I had meant, which didn't matter at all, since I didn't know myself what I had meant. Often we would just break into paroxisms of mirth, laughing and laughing until our stomachs hurt and the tears flowed in rivers down our cheeks. At one point I noticed a luminescent glow on the slinky that I could not account for. I told him breathlessly of my discovery, thinking it was a new form of mysterious energy, on a par with Newtons discovery of gravitation, and it took us at least ten minutes to discover that it was only the reflection of the lightning machine, which triggered another bout of helpless mirth.
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