michael-dean-k/

An otherwise simple walk to catch a train into the city had a dimension that I guess I’ll describe as “apocalyptic wonder.” I don’t mean that in the “end of the world” sense, but in the “unraveling” sense of the word. It was like every phenomenon—a passerby’s limp, a tasteless building, Broadway advertisements—came with a decision: I could see it with my usual categories, almost like through a foggy glass of analysis, or, I can imagine and wholeheartedly believe the most generous and profound interpretation possible. And when you inherit that 2nd option as a lens, it’s like one thing builds off another until there’s a cascade and you just have chills over extremely ordinary things. A grumpy commuter is not someone to judge, but someone deserving of parental love, and you imagine you and them as if you’ve been very close for a lifetime, and just for a second you infer some emotional dimension you would’ve never otherwise known. It very much feels Scroogish, like you’re a deadman with just one evening to remember life from its most charitable angle. I don’t know why I’m feeling this lucidity: could be a new surge of dad hormones, or the frigid weather, or the tie around my neck is too tight, or maybe this new frenzy of spawning new software to wrap around my problems is priming me to believe that I can just spin up my own mental frames to see anything anew, as I please, whenever. 

My friend Andrew, I imagine, would read this and joke that it’s a low-grade form of Claude psychosis. Maybe, but maybe the good kind? I’ve always thought there was something slightly off about seeing normal life with ecstatic wholeness, and that the line between psychosis and mysticism is thin. When LSD was first invented, it took them a decade or so to shift the framing from psychosis—they called it “psycho-mimetic,” a madness simulator—to psychedelic (“mind-manifesting), and eventually mystical, transcendental, entheogenic, etc.

I don’t know what it was, but now that I write this on the train, I’m right back in my regular head. And obviously I love writing, but it makes me think I really need to make sure I have chunks of boredom each day, non-linguistic moments in between things. Infant care sort of produces this feeling too, but it’s different because that is about fusing attention with another being; what I just experienced before was something like full immersion in a chaotic environment. Pure Horus. I guess I’ve found it hard to make time for this because, since time is so limited, there’s a pressure to prioritize and converge in the little time you have: I have a book to launch! (I will be announcing the essay prize winners in early March.)

Anyway I think I’ll post this to Notes. Usually I’d just post a riff like this to a secret corner of my website, but in January I stopped logging, and said I’d try to just use Notes as my public note-taker. So if I want to really remember anything, I have to share it. I think the idea of sabotaging the thing I love—capturing fleeting thoughts in prose—and forcing it through a habit of the thing I’m scared of—public judgment of my every idea through metrics—is a good principle to do more often. It’s weird to take something that really is more like a journal entry and open it up to strangers. I’d basically be okay sharing this with anyone I know, but it make me anxious to think a stranger could find this, and this would be 100% of what they know about me, and they’d have no idea about Essay Architecture or whatever, but I think that kind of disregard is exactly what I’m trying to go for on Notes. If my email essays are on topic and polished and narrative building, then each Note should be its own thing, out of context, unrelated to the last one. And so I’m glad to share something like this after a shipost about snakepit.

Over the weekend I had a +101 fever, and so I was banished to an airbed in the attic to not infect the baby. Wrapped in blankets, I found myself in a sequence of near-identical “fever dreams.” Before this, I hadn’t thought about the phrase much. As a metaphor—"the president’s plan is a fever dream”—it implies a delusional desire, but real fever dreams tap into a different thing: for me, they’re about absurd procedural loops. I found myself deeply concerned with the layers of blankets around me: I had the urge to unfold them, visualize each one as a heat map, extract the cold parts with a boxcutter, restitch them into a new blanket, shape this new perfectly cold blanket into an animal sculpture, and then sell it on Etsy. I can’t remember the sequence exactly—it only made sense on the inside—but it was a cold-side harvesting operation for sure. I’d wake up and realize, oh, this whole scheme is stupid and pointless, and now that I know this I can sleep peacefully. Yet as soon as I went back under, I slipped back into this incoherent non-problem. It’s not uncommon to fall asleep and re-enter the same dream, but with a fever dream, I find that all I can do is return to my miscognitions, 5-10 times, until the fever breaks. It’s not scary, but repetition can be hellish (like the Teletubies DO IT AGAIN! sequences). My guess is that an overheated brain that’s deprived of REM will linger on thoughts it can’t digest. It becomes a type of lucid dream, a lame one with no visuals, where awareness of the loop can’t break the loop. There are probably situations better suited for the fever dream metaphor, but I can’t think of them now. Until then, no takeaways other than don’t get a fever, and if you do stay away from blankets.

10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.

11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?

To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture. 

Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically. 

It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.

Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.

And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.