08/2010 On Waking...
Last night I went to sleep in a state of near terror that I would have a “mirror encounter”. A mirror encounter is my term of the phenomenon of seeing oneself in a mirror inside a dream, and viewing the reflection as not a distortion of ones physical image but something much more powerful: a doppelganger, a contorted and twisted representation of oneself so similar yet corrupted to ones likeliness that the immediate emotion of “pure evil” is felt from its presence. I am not even close to a religious person, but some of these “mirror encounters” had me, upon waking, convinced I had met an otherworldly sentient entity, as close as my atheistic mind can approach to the devil himself. I reasoned this on two fronts: The emotion was so powerful and so pervasive I could literally not imagine being able to feel it in waking reality, not even when viewing the most vile static images that the most depraved corners of the internet can provide (and that's saying something). Secondly, I understand my dreams and the dream state moderately well, and I am thoroughly convinced that my brain could never be creatively responsible for an image so expertly and professionally contorted into such a disturbing resemblance.
However, my abstract intuition tells me that this is more a case of mathematics than mystical, that with certain parts of my brain shut down or under-powered in a dream state, the attempt to process my own self image in-dream results in a state of data or file corruption so specific to these conditions that the result is unsurprisingly terrifying: an image no man could consciously imagine in the same likeliness as a number no human could calculate. The image was the biological equivalent of a computer malfunction, artefacts from an overheating GPU or a characteristic ‘popping’ or ‘white noise static’ from a malfunctioning sound card; annoyingly common but probably fiendishly difficult to reproduce in a healthily functioning chip. The very reason this self image is terrifying is because it exists outside of normal brain function and process, it is alien in every sense of the term because it has never been experienced in waking life, even when intentionally attempting to simulate terror.
The doppelganger is characterised by facial features bordering on normal but just outside of it; proportions, distances between eyes, nose position departing from the threshold of acceptability, combined with a kind of facial expression only comparable to electrocution or mental retardation: an angry, yet ecstatic grimace of pure contempt and anticipation or excitement combined. I have had many of these encounters before, mostly during lucid dreaming and almost always during dream re-entry. I had been so disturbed by these that I decided to stop practising lucid dreaming about 3 years ago, after a particularly bad encounter.
In any case, my actual dream last night thankfully did not involve any mirror encounters and was largely forgettable but, did involve a time-travel back to an ancient state of my home city Melbourne (I would guess 1920-1940). The main thing I can remember from it was standing outside of some kind of large building: a paper mill, a power plant, a hospital, a tram depot or perhaps even a metropolitan police headquarters. I remember being outside a discrete back entrance, there was a sign indicating rear entry or discrete entry, and something about “mule entrance” or "mule departure zone" or something that told me that this was where smaller horse drawn carts (or in this case, mule or donkey drawn) came in and out, possibly to dispose or deliver dead bodies, remove noxious biological waste or something undesirable or unpleasant in this vein. The predominant emotion was of how the world worked in this era in contrast to now, of how all these bad things could not be simply concealed, zipped up in industrial polyurethane black bags, or piped away in subterranean metallic pipes but had to be physically carted around using biological, non mechanical labour, and that building structure had to reflect this inconvenient reality. I remember wondering (or perhaps remembering) what this building or entrance was used for in the contemporary era, and deciding that it bore no immediate clue as to its prior function and feeling that its current use almost deceptively and sneakily denied its past.
The doppelganger is characterised by facial features bordering on normal but just outside of it; proportions, distances between eyes, nose position departing from the threshold of acceptability, combined with a kind of facial expression only comparable to electrocution or mental retardation: an angry, yet ecstatic grimace of pure contempt and anticipation or excitement combined. I have had many of these encounters before, mostly during lucid dreaming and almost always during dream re-entry. I had been so disturbed by these that I decided to stop practising lucid dreaming about 3 years ago, after a particularly bad encounter.
In any case, my actual dream last night thankfully did not involve any mirror encounters and was largely forgettable but, did involve a time-travel back to an ancient state of my home city Melbourne (I would guess 1920-1940). The main thing I can remember from it was standing outside of some kind of large building: a paper mill, a power plant, a hospital, a tram depot or perhaps even a metropolitan police headquarters. I remember being outside a discrete back entrance, there was a sign indicating rear entry or discrete entry, and something about “mule entrance” or "mule departure zone" or something that told me that this was where smaller horse drawn carts (or in this case, mule or donkey drawn) came in and out, possibly to dispose or deliver dead bodies, remove noxious biological waste or something undesirable or unpleasant in this vein. The predominant emotion was of how the world worked in this era in contrast to now, of how all these bad things could not be simply concealed, zipped up in industrial polyurethane black bags, or piped away in subterranean metallic pipes but had to be physically carted around using biological, non mechanical labour, and that building structure had to reflect this inconvenient reality. I remember wondering (or perhaps remembering) what this building or entrance was used for in the contemporary era, and deciding that it bore no immediate clue as to its prior function and feeling that its current use almost deceptively and sneakily denied its past.
It was both fascinating but strangely disconcerting, I felt a kind of painful empathy for the inconvenience and hostility of the situation combined with a kind of helplessness and inevitability in that it had already been and gone and nothing I could do, or even anyone of the era could do, would have made a damn difference. None the less, it was an emotionally painful sight to behold; the way the old world functioned and went about the arduous task of life using the best resources available and without looking backwards. I am unsure why I did not derive inspiration from this, as would seem logical, to me the image above all empowered in me a definite sense of nihilism and antipathy towards the progression of the human existence, a painful reminder as to the relativity and subjectivity of the notion of “comfort”, “convenience” and “technological advantage” while simultaneously highlighting the fact that any convenience or technology we enjoy now was only a few living memories away from having to be (painfully) done without. This was additionally distressing. Unsurprisingly I consciously slept through my alarm in hope of happier dreams that morning.
[UPDATE]
ReplyDeleteLooking at this somewhat archaic description, I see what was probably going on here...
using Hobsons's AIM model, my cerebral activation was far too low to produce something so complicated as a mirror image of my own face with any accuracy. Perhaps, this is beyond the computations of the Fusiform Face Area in any circumstance: the FFA recognises faces from memory, it does not draw them from memory.
Thus, in a somewhat shambolic attempt to recreate my own face in the dream world, some very poor reverse engineering of what I can only assume are tracts of data accessible through a FFA/hippocampal networks were resurrected via top-down synthesis to produce a very poor facsimile of my face.
...at both innately recognising this as my own face (having come from certified memories of what my face looks like) yet failing to register when fed back into the FFA, this time via bottom-up processing from inputs from my occipital cortex, a terrific incongruence is detected.
My Amygdala, at this point goes haywire. Sheer terror, of utterly religious magnitude. This being, this paradox, both myself and all I am, whilst simultaneously a manifest avatar of all I am not; chaos, dysfunction, signal error embodied and living.
But yes, the whole event becomes markedly less scary and intense when viewed back from the perspective of what was actually going on. I think this was somewhat compounded in my case due to my own facial recognition having a lot of its computations taking place in the neighbouring Inferior Temporal Gyrus.... but thats another theory for another day :)