Developing a Strange Psychosis
For a while I've been playing a visualization game "Rotate a Cow". Basically you picture a cow and spin it around as if it was on a CAD screen.
Over the last year I've been trying a different experiment, and it is backfiring. In this one you place yourself into another person's head, and look at the world from their perspective.
It is purely visual -- you are just trying to see what they would see. You can focus on a passerby in the street and "invade" their eyeballs -- and often see yourself as they walk by.
Of course it's a game. But I've been having a hard time not doing it lately, and especially 'breaking off contact'... and my partner is wondering why I space out all the time. Which made me even more paranoid about the possiblity of getting stuck in someone's head, which is quite ridiculous of course, but somehow does not seem completely impossible.
My partner sounded concerned, and I think I need to write some code. That tends to make me normal and balanced.
Reading the above makes me look like a lunatic, I suppose. But whatevs, I never said I was normal. But I think I will have to come up with a different passtime when in NYC.
Apr 30 · 7 days ago · 👍 norayr, love
8 Comments ↓
Try crushing their heads
👻 darkghost · Apr 30 at 22:02:
Avoid John Malkovich.
🚀 stack [OP] · Apr 30 at 23:12:
Yeah. totally forgot about that movie. There was also a limited series "Through her eyes", I think
I practiced visualization exercises for a bit when I was a young adult after realizing that I'm (moderately) aphantastic. I'm not sure where I came up with the idea, but sometimes I would try to close my eyes and imagine that I was just slightly somewhere else, like on the other side of the couch, or at the other side of the table. I could never do it. I could never imagine with my eyes closed that I had sat down somewhere just slightly different.
I might give your thing a try, somehow it sounds less perplexing.
I think given a long enough timeline, any mind can develop a psychosis of some kind.
why did you start with these visual exercises?
Having grown in a small town and now living in a highly congested area, I often think of the effects population density has on society, psychology, and the general culture / collective mind of various communities.
by communicating online (lets say sharing what is may first for us) we sort of learn to look at the world from the other person's perspective.
🚀 stack [OP] · May 01 at 13:10:
I find myself often waiting in the streets of NY for a family member or something... Having a few minutes to kill is not enough to do deeper thinking about anything, and to avoid worrying about something stupid like a news item or politics, I practice some meditation-like activity.
This one is particularly sticky for me. It started as a pure 'rendering' exercise, but then I started adding more elements - sunglasses, gait, trying to feel the weight of the backpack, etc...
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk · May 01 at 19:08:
This is an amazing idea for a lot of reasons. I imagine it doesn't make you look more normal when you're 'spacing out', but you're beginning to imagine the thing-as-itself rather than the thing-as-you-see-it. I bet those are each one word in German. Ach. We do quite a bit of predictive/imaginative thinking in assuming that parts-of-things exist outside of our sight. It's a correct assumption, but still an assumption based on patterns.