Reality Breaks

Discombobulation: underrated?

This week, my friend’s daughter confessed to experiencing a sense of unreality that she couldn’t shake. The world, she fears, is just a mirage. It may look real, but maybe it’s not?

Parenting books, alas, do not seem to address best practices for such questions. Our group chat, however, was more than willing. It was in that incorporeal town square that I learned there is a word for this – or at least for the chronic, pathological version: Derealization. A condition in which the world may feel like it’s a movie, or things may appear out of whack somehow, dreamlike.

The pathology of a thing doesn’t mean it’s always a disease. We mostly agreed that in brief moments, we had all experienced something similar. Maybe just once, a passing delirium; or in the form of an existential crisis, or an early confrontation with the concept of mortality. I recalled the way, as a child, my world would slip sideways after getting too engrossed in a fantastical book series. 

Even as an adult, it’s not considered abnormal to sometimes float away for a while. A little minor dissociation, as a treat. 

Putting a word to it sometimes grounds it too much, in my view. Steals the magic away. Don’t worry, Dr. Google informs you: your disorientation has a name and an orderly explanation. Perfectly normal. You can close your laptop, reassured by a false sense of control over your surroundings.

As I’m sure many people do, I often experience that sensation where, the moment I run into a new concept or word, or tune into a pattern, I then begin seeing it everywhere. It’s pleasantly unsettling. It suggests the fabric of the world isn’t permanently etched – that it instead stretches and ripples to accommodate your expanded worldview. Now that you know of this thing, it exists. It exists, and you see it everywhere. Maybe you willed it there. Maybe it’s popping up unnecessarily for your benefit. 

It’s rarely something life-changing. Like the time my phone kept mysteriously autocorrecting “didn’t” to “dint,” until I angrily said aloud “that isn’t even a word!!” I subsequently spent an entire month seeing and hearing the word “dint” in every possible publication, as if being reprimanded by the autocorrect imps for my ignorance. Or the summer when, for a stretch of six solid weeks, every store, office and public building I walked into was playing Barry White. (A phenomenon which ended as abruptly as it began, and to which I still cannot attach any greater meaning.)

The fact that this sensation has a name, even colloquially [the Baader-Meinof phenomenon] is something I find tiresome, pedantic, and downright rude. Let me have my Barry White haunting. Let me bask in the uncanny.

make it make sense! (actually please don’t)

There’s this playground near our house that makes me feel like: maybe the twist is, I’ve been dead this whole time! It’s in the regular rotation of playgrounds my son and I visit together, and reality always glitches out when I go there. Hear me out. One time: every man, woman, and child on the playground was wearing different shades of the same color. One time: it was literally only twins. Every time I thought I saw just a solo child, I would turn around, and there was their identically-clad twin sibling. One time: there were only 3 other families on the playground other than me and my son (Aadi). One by one, I heard the parents call out for their respective kids: Addie, Aidy, and Adi.

If there’s a rational explanation for any of these (and I’m sure there is!), please don’t tell me. I need to go to that place every so often. The vertiginous feeling of your feet leaving the ocean floor when a wave crests, but knowing the earth is right there – once the wave recedes, once you stretch your toe just a little farther to make contact.

This week, I wish you a sense of unreality, distinct enough to be liberating, but brief enough to be assured that it will end. You will return to yourself presently.

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