And then it happened. Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that’s what I would have said I was doing, but the word “tree” was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen or so years since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed to me? Or was it a substance—the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration? I don’t know, because this substance, this residue, was stolidly, imperturbably mute. The interesting thing, some might say alarming, was that when you take away all human attributions—the words, the names of species, the wisps of remembered tree-related poetry, the fables of photosynthesis and capillary action—that when you take all this away, there is still something left.
I snapped out of it soon enough. The faces were reapplied to the heads of my family members; the trees crept back into the woods; we reassembled for the drive home. After what I remember as a muted dinner, probably because I just wasn’t listening, I went up to the bedroom I shared with my sister to assess and regroup. Some fundamental sense of entitlement had been challenged, that much was clear, because surely I deserved—everyone in fact deserved—something better than a world without meaning, and I wasn’t even so sure about a world containing occasional meaning-free patches to stumble on.
That was the deal, wasn’t it? We live out our little lives, then we die, but the payoff was supposed to be some glorious meaning, for anyone clever enough to find it, that would light up the sky, perhaps at the moment of death, like the aurora borealis, and redeem all the trivia and suffering. That’s what “meaning” is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make the most fetid piece of meat seem palatable, even delicious. On my bedside table lay, as usual, The Pocket Book of Verse, with Longfellow reminding me, in a poem I could still recite at the time without irony, that “life is real, life is earnest.” More to my taste was “Ozymandias,” in which Shelley took death and futility head-on and still managed to emerge with human dignity intact. And here was Whitman, page after page of him, tremulous with desire in the lilac-scented night. They were just doing their job, these poets, which is really the job of all of us—to keep applying coat upon coat of human passion and grandiosity to the world around us, trying to cover up whatever it is that lies underneath.
So I decided that evening that whatever I had experienced at the horse show had to be an aberration, like the retinal floaters that sometimes intruded on my vision after being in the car too long on a hot bright day. I hadn’t had enough sleep the night before, no more than three or four hours, that was the problem. A chronic insomniac since grade school, I often read at night until my eyes were too tired to read anymore and then lay there in terror of being caught still awake by the dawn. Sleep deprivation does odd things to the mind, and this must be one of them. It was curious, but so were a lot of other things.
Except that it kept happening, not only when I was overtired, and it gained legitimacy through repetition. I might be in school, concentrating on Latin conjugations or logarithmic tables, and suddenly notice my fingers holding the pencil and realize I was looking at a combination of yellow and pink, of straight and curved, that had never been seen before and never would be seen again by anyone in the universe, not in this precise configuration anyway, and with that realization, all that was familiar would drain out of the world around me. Or I might look up from a book to find a patch of sunlight pulsing on the floor and feel it leap up to challenge the solidity of the entire scene. Sometimes, I wrote:
I am quite sure that this is not real, so sure that I am completely absorbed and come back with difficulty. Then it seems to be unreal simply because it is so improbable. At times like that I am not even real to myself. I don’t know where I am. My own thoughts are like a distant throbbing whisper. It is as if I am only consciousness and not an individual, both a part of and apart from my environment. Strange. Everything looks strange as if I’d never seen it before.
It could happen when I was alone or it could happen with other people, including family and friends. I could be in the midst of a conversation with a friend, for example, when “without warning my sense of reality changed, and her image and voice and presence along with everything else seemed to slip like water off a sheet of glass.”
I struggled to identify precipitating factors, if not physiological, then atmospheric. One thing became clear within a couple of months: Nothing untoward was going to happen at night or if it was raining or the sky was overcast, which meant that for about nine months of the year I was insulated or, as I was also coming to see it, locked out. Why sunlight was so important I still don’t know. I have read that some odd mental states can be triggered by light, although usually by flashing or strobe lights. In my case, no flashes are required. When the sun, especially the afternoon sun, slants at a certain angle or gets refracted through venetian blinds or bounced off walls of bricks—well, there’s not much that I can do but wait quietly and see what’s going to be revealed.
If there was any other pattern to these occurrences it was that they tended to happen at a point of liminality, usually the borderline between absorption in one thing, like Latin verbs, and another, like a pencil. I imagine that everyone has experienced the momentary disorientation that comes from being roused from concentration on a book or a complicated line of thought. Maybe I just had more trouble navigating these transitions than other people, and got stuck in the in-between place, where I would loiter for a moment and look around. Or maybe other people had the same experience exactly and just flicked it away like a fly, because what’s the point of seeing something you can’t say anything about or even trying to recall something that can’t be recalled, that will only come back when it decides to recur?
I had no rubric under which to store these things; even the phrase “altered states of consciousness” would not be invented for another decade, and “mental illness” never entered my mind until a few years later. If I had any literary reference point in that first year, it was Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, whose epileptic fits were preceded by flashes of blinding lucidity, which were intriguing enough but hardly analogous to my experience, seeming to involve, as they did, so many obscure insights into Christianity and Russian nationalism. So I came up with my own explanation, patched together from the fragments of psychology I had picked up at the library, which suggested that the most routine perception requires an impressive creative effort. Photons don’t just stamp a little image on the visual cortex, captioned with a word like “tree.” You have to do some work—comparing one pattern of neuronal firing to another, sifting through the stored images that are your memories until you have a match, and so forth:
It occurred to me in so many words that what constitutes reality are the sensa perceived by our eyes, ears, etc. which are actually made up in the mind or should I say brain? So they are certainly not to be relied upon to any extent. At the time I thought this was a really radical thought and now I find it in books. So it was pretty important especially since I thought it independently. Bertrand Russell says that introspection is just as unreliable so now I don’t know where I am.
So from a scientific perspective, what happened to me was that every now and then I simply stopped doing the work of perception and refused to transform the hail of incoming photons into named and familiar objects. There was plenty of input still pouring in in the form of sounds and colors and lights, but it wasn’t getting sorted and categorized. This was my theory anyway—that I was just falling down on my job as a conscious human being, sort of like going on strike. Instead of attacking, say, trees with all the word power at my disposal, or dismissing them as too routine to merit attention and moving on to the next thing, I had let them run wild and speak for themselves. I, the point of consciousness tasked with organizing sensory data into a coherent reality, had temporarily ceased to exist. And
whatever I saw, or thought I saw, during these episodes was of no more significance than an optical illusion.
But I wasn’t ready to abandon the idea that I had gained a privileged glimpse into some alternative realm or dimension. It wasn’t a “place” of course—a Narnia or Land of Oz—but science fiction and bits of pop science gave the metaphor a degree of plausibility. In sci-fi there were always multiple worlds to travel between by rocket ship or subtler technologies, and science held forth alternative dimensions, folded up and hidden within our own world. So one way to look at what was going on was to imagine another universe, intimately superimposed on our own, normally invisible, but every so often, where the dividing membrane had worn thin, shining through into our own. I was lucky enough to have some intermittent access to this place, though not at my own volition. Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.
Rationality favored the perceptual breakdown theory, but it wasn’t mysticism that pulled me in the other direction. I was adamantly disinclined to anything that smacked of mysticism, unless you want to count my abstract and colorless version of Hinduism. But I was also an empiricist, and empiricism is one of the great pillars of science. You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn’t fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of. I had seen what I had seen—whatever it is that lies under the named world—and I was not going to deny its existence.
There is a word for this, the episodes I was experiencing, though it was not available to me at the time: “dissociation,” described in the psychiatric literature as “feeling unreal,” either that one is unreal or that the world around one is unreal, if those two conditions can even be distinguished. If the episodes of dissociation happen often enough, they achieve the official status of a disease or at least a “disorder”—“dissociative disorder,” a.k.a. “depersonalization” or “derealization disorder,” which may be accompanied by a variety of other symptoms, including emotional numbness, depression, or amnesia, none of which afflicted me. You can find all this in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, where dissociative disorder is described as a general cognitive breakdown, “a disruption in consciousness, memory, identity, or perception. In other words, one of these areas is not working correctly.” More ominously, the current online Encyclopedia of Human Illnesses and Behavioral Health offers the following explanation of schizophrenia, a disorder that, it is said, frequently features dissociation:
Information in the form of electrical signals flows down nerve cells in the brain, triggering the release of neurotransmitters. These chemical messengers transmit information from one nerve cell to another. In healthy people, neurotransmitter traffic usually flows smoothly.…In people with schizophrenia, however, neurotransmitter traffic runs into major roadblocks, unscheduled stops, and unmapped detours to frightening and unreal places. These traffic disruptions result in periods of psychosis, during which people with schizophrenia lose touch with healthy reality and seem to get trapped in alternate realities. With anti-psychotic medication, people with schizophrenia often find their way back to the healthy realities of everyday life.
In other words, “incorrect” perceptions may reveal “frightening,” “unreal,” or unhealthy “alternate” realities, but these can generally be banished with drugs.
I suspected even at the time that my episodes of dissociation in some way constituted a punishable offense. Prince Myshkin ended up back in the sanitarium, didn’t he?—and there was no shortage of mental hospitals in Massachusetts in the 1950s, menacing dark brick buildings to enclose the people who refused to do what was expected of them or who said things that didn’t make sense. This was still a few years before my mother and her sister Jean underwent their stints—voluntary and otherwise—in mental wards, for what we would today call depression and was endemic at the time to women who were full-time homemakers. But I did remember a particularly vacant-looking neighbor in Pittsburgh who, as my mother explained, had been subjected to shock treatment because she hadn’t been making dinner or cleaning the house—tasks that presumably became much more manageable once the neuronal circuitry had been shocked back into submission.
Nothing like that could happen to me, because I did everything that was expected of me and, outside of the housework department, did it fairly well: I set my hair nightly in the skull-denting metal curlers my mother provided me with. I was up every morning with homework completed, appropriately dressed and ready for school. I babysat three or four times a week and spent most of my earnings on records—classical, but intensely romantic, with an occasional venture into jazz—and subscriptions to sci-fi periodicals. But if I never imagined myself qualifying for incarceration, I did worry about committing what amounts to treason where my family was concerned. Whatever was revealed in my dissociative episodes seemed to mock both my mother’s commitment to “realism” and my father’s fascination with the solidity of minerals. Human beings are connected not only by love and loyalty—or, more generally, by neurotic symbiosis and material dependency—but by our joint agreement about the “real.” It’s what we share—the rock there by my foot, that little white cloud in the sky—amounting in sum to the grand project of “empirical reality,” which I was expected to contribute to as a scientist when I grew up. Step outside the borders of what is “real” and collectively agreed upon and you might as well fall right off the planet into a personal orbit of your own.
Hinduism cannot be blamed for luring me into the trackless wilds. Chronologically, my “conversion” came months after the experience of dissociation was well established, and what I wanted most from Hinduism was simply access, a way to get to the “other place” when I wanted, not just when it chose to make itself available, which was not often enough in the long, dark winters of Lowell. I had hoped that the discipline of meditation would achieve this, but reciting “Om” seemed to lead in a different direction, at least as far as I could tell from the Upanishads, since I never could stick to it long enough to find out for myself—toward the numbness of universal perfection, or something closely resembling boredom.
There was one point when I badly wanted to talk about my perceptual excursions. In the fall of 1956, only a few weeks after I had begun to keep the journal, I had an argument with my friend Bernice during one of our Latin tutoring sessions. Bernice was not automatically seen by the school as college material, due to the fact that she lacked the hereditary credentials that I was granted by virtue of my father’s white-collar status. Her parents ran a tiny coffee shop in downtown Lowell, above which the family made their home and where she and I often copped a free doughnut before school. She was good enough company for at least about an hour a day, but we were friends mainly by default, since Lowell high school culture was segregated into the Irish, the “French,” and a tiny handful of Jews, none of whom made me welcome at their lunch tables. This left me with the Greeks, like Bernice, who in their own way were outsiders too, and when she determined to win a place in the “academic track” by mastering Latin—the language of her nation’s ancient Roman conquerors, I couldn’t help noticing—I had offered to help.
How exactly the subject of God came up this time I don’t know, since we had already gone over this ground before and I had thought we could leave it at that. She would tell me it was unnatural not to believe and I would tell her that she was making an unnatural demand. Belief takes effort. Why should I exert the effort required to believe that she, Bernice, was at all times accompanied by an invisible person or personage? A person whose sole attribute was perfection—all goodness, all love, and all reason? Was I supposed to lie and say, “Oh yes, I know who you’re talking about—I can see him there, right over your shoulder, or a
t least the gleam of an impossible radiance”?
Or she would accuse me of immorality, because how could anyone be moral without God to guide and reward them? This I could handle, since I had already determined, after great deliberation, that the things Christians counted as “sins” were not things I would want to do anyway, and that the only principle to go by was kindness—“doing unto others,” etcetera. The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?
Our dispute this time arose over the declension of the Latin word deus, for god, which I emphasized—completely unnecessarily and pedantically, I admit—could be declined. That is, it had a plural as well as a feminine form, so at least to the Romans, “god” was not some singular point of light, but a whole category of beings, none of whom qualified as moral exemplars: Jupiter and his rages, Juno and her petty jealousies, Venus and her vanity. “So?” Bernice retorted unwisely. “The Romans were pagans.” This was of course my opening to point out that the Romans inherited their silly pantheon directly from the ancient Greeks, who were the very inventors of civilization as far as Bernice was concerned. I was not asserting any kind of ethnic superiority here—how could I, knowing that my own ancestors had been painting themselves blue and worshipping oak trees while hers were coming up with the Pythagorean theorem? But I may have needled her a bit here—again, out of sheer intellectual wickedness—for trading in her colorful ancient polytheistic tradition for this ghostly abstraction of a God she wanted me to “believe” in.