strangereality152

I was seven years old. It was my birthday. My sister bought me my very first proper book. By 'proper', I mean that its ratio of pictures to text was firmly in the latter's favour. It was The Famous Five by Enid Blyton. I read it all in one go, at one sitting.

My childhood birthdays did not feature children's parties. They featured books, which I read.

It was a sunny spring day. I was on the sofa in the living room. I had read this long book all in one go and I had a very adult headache. There was lots about the book that had confused me. For one thing I did not know what a 'grin' was. The characters in the book, especially the child characters, had often grinned at each other, and I didn't know what it meant. I had also never heard of ginger beer. Alas, I was too young to derive amusement from one of the adult characters being called Aunt Fanny.

I recall the next few moments very clearly - they comprise one of the tragically few experiences that anybody can distinctly recall from their childhoods. I had my first experience of reality as strange.

I rolled over onto my back and looked at the ceiling. My mother was out in the kitchen, doing something. All at once I had a sense of myself as a discrete entity in a vast continuum; it felt as though my body was made of wood, or stone, and 'I' was an observer floating inside it. Then it went further. I felt as though I was not in a body at all, but was a disembodied viewpoint floating through a material environment. I had no thoughts or language to re-present this experience to myself at that time; I simply experienced it as experience.

I felt scared and looked down at my infant's torso stretched out on the couch. I slapped my arm to jolt me out of the episode. It worked. I rolled over to look down at the book on the floor. I was 'normal' again.

I was able to recreate the sensation at will for a couple of years thereafter. I lost this seeming ability to wilfully create strangeness in myself at around the age of ten. For a few years, any time I wanted, I could generate the sensation – an actual, palpable sensation, as opposed to an abstract concept or thought experiment – of myself, and reality, and the whole shebang, as being something utterly strange and unknown.

I always had to shake myself out of it - fearing who knows what? What would the consequence have been to that little boy, had he decided to push on, and see what else – if anything – might arise? Perhaps I would have died. Or perhaps I am living the consequences of having gone even that far. Perhaps I will think of an elegant and impressive way to end this.