You Hallucinate. ( But you're used to it by now)

Fog brings out the very worst form of Multiple Personality Disorder in me. At home, sitting on the deck, watching the sun try to burn through thick fog over the pond is heavenly. It’s a spiritual feeling akin to what a Druid might feel in a forest, a writer in a library, or a cat in some secret high place, hidden from view. I’ve always loved coffee and fog in the mornings, and to be able to sit and watch it slowly turn to clear air is something that brings my mind to bear on so many things that it takes some effort of will to return to reality.

For two months and a little more, April and May of this year, 2006, I drove to Fargo in harsh thick smoke, not unlike fog, except as the day wore on it only got more and more worse. We controlled traffic into the smoke, and there were times I knew that other than the local drivers I was pretty much alone on the road. It was still hellish. There were places on the road visibility disappeared and only by slowing down to walking speed could I travel at all. Smoke, when it’s coming from a fire bigger than some New England states, brings with it a fear unlike anything else a human can feel. To be alone, in zero visibility, in the middle of nowhere, without any method of communication has a tendency to narrow the focus quite a bit. The human mind becomes an enemy unto itself, unless given great care and a double shot of espresso.

Fog isn’t as bad, and for having gone willingly into that smoke, arrived on the other side alive and no less sane than I started helps much. But let me explain to you, please, that what you see isn’t all there, and the harder you look, the less you are really seeing. This is a difficult lesson to grasp, mind you, because what I am going to say makes sense when you read it, but doesn’t when you see it in front of you.

If you look straight ahead and use just the lower edges of your vision, there is a blind spot, a tiny area in your field of vision that you cannot see. The reason you don’t see this blind spot is because your mind fills in the dead area as it thinks it ought to be filled in. Scientific American, a great magazine, published an article that included a series of colored graphs. One of them had two yellow bars, but one of the two bars had a gap in it. The reader was so hold the graph up at the edge of vision until both the two yellow bars appeared whole.
I was extremely skeptical of this until I tried it. There, at the edge of my vision, down and to the left of what I was seeing, was the blind spot. The two yellow bars became whole as I sat there stunned at the implications. I was hallucinating. Each and every moment of my life my brain was creating a facade of vision that did not exist in places.

Fog makes this phenomenon worse. As your field of vision fills with blankness, your mind has a problem filling in blankness with more blankness. Have you ever seen a color crayon that is clear? We can see glass, clear water, and other solid transparencies, but the mind has a problem creating these things on its own. The mind has a problem trying to creating nothingness, the government of the United States and cable television as evidence notwithstanding.

Fog gives your mind damn little to fix upon, and all those familiar scenes that it is accustomed to creating are now either totally gone or obscured. Imagine going back and reading a favorite book where the words were rewritten by a stranger. Again and again landmarks loom out of the dense air and your mind, again and again, has to adjust to where you are, and try desperately to recreate the map as it has always been. It’s bad enough that normal vision is hampered in fog, but to have the mind scrambling around trying to recreate reality makes it a dozen times worse.

Without the background scene by which to draw a reference the human mind begins to lose some of its ability to camouflage what it does. Have you ever noticed that “floaters” seem to be more prevalent on foggy drives? Your mind frantically tries to get more information from a blanked out screen, and static appears. Unless you train yourself to look around the cab of your vehicle, and learn to focus and refocus your eyes at the wheel, at mirrors, and at other objects, you can still see, you’re inviting disaster. Left to its own devices, your mind is going to begin to deteriorate in as far as vision goes.

The implications are indeed staggering. Brain injuries, drugs, illness, stress and a host of other causes affect what we think we see. “The other car came out of nowhere” maybe just another way of saying, “ My brain wasn’t filling in the blanks correctly.” Those things that “normal” people don’t see maybe be perfectly visible to those people whose brains fill in the blanks in much different ways that we can imagine. Once we all realize that we are all hallucinating, then it becomes a lot easier to realize that those who are seeing things that aren’t there, are not that far removed from the rest of us.

Take Care,
Mike