I
I’m grabbing my coat in a hurry to get me through a bad day of early Estonian summer. I have a train to catch to my first Lindy Hop class, and the station is a 10-minute walk away — 8 if I’m fast, 4 if I run. I don’t know the time, and every minute counts. As I walk down the stairs, I have a flash: “18:05”.
It’s not that I thought “the last time I checked my phone it was 18:00, so by now it should be around 18:05”. No. I saw a digital clock — an alarm clock with a 90s design, white digits made of pointy bars in a black plastic casing, showing 18:05. It was a brief visual hallucination. Not something that took over my field of vision, more like the kind of image you can hold in your mind in great detail.
I check the time, trying not to fall down the stairs: 18:06. Pretty accurate.
Walking home from the class, where I had a good time against all odds (I had to navigate foreign dance moves in a foreign language, “korrata palun, aga rokem aeglane?”), I was spinning up stories to explain what had happened. I concluded that my unconscious brain wanted to hand my consciousness its best guess of the time, but the usual pipeline of “having a thought” was too slow, so it blasted an image I could interpret immediately.
II
Over the next few days, as I spent more time paying attention to my thoughts, I realized this visual hallucination wasn’t an isolated phenomenon. I would think about designing a new interface for a dashboard I was working on, and I could see the buttons and the layout in my mind. Another synthesized visual stimulus. At the same time, my mind was holding words, or short phrases: “clarity”, “make the pipeline state obvious in one look”. As if the words were directions I was trying to morph the visual preview towards.
Of course, all of this was blurry, and most of the time I felt like I was “just thinking”. I was engaging with the meaning of it all, not noticing the nature of the sensation I was spinning up.
If the interface preview is a visual hallucination, what kind of sensation are the words I hold in my mind? As I focused on them more closely, I recognized the feeling: it’s the one I get when I rehearse a sentence before saying it out loud. They were sounds! Just like the inner monologue that pronounces the words I type when I write a post like this. Same voice. My voice.
If they’re sounds produced by my mind’s voice, I thought, then I can change how I pronounce them.
So I played with the syllables: “claaaaaarity”, “make the pipipipipipeline staaaate obviouuuuus”. The thoughts deflated like a balloon. They became a pile of sounds I was having fun with. I could still get their meaning, but now I had a choice: attend to the sounds, or to the meaning they carry. Just like listening to music — you can vibe with the rhythm or pay attention to the lyrics.
III
Over the following weeks and months, as I looked closer at everything I was thinking, my position became more radical: there is no fundamental difference between thoughts and perceptions, and all thoughts are made of sensory hallucinations.
My short experience with psychedelics had already convinced me that what we perceive as reality isn’t so different from a waking dream: perceptions and hallucinations aren’t different in nature. Any attempt to draw a definite boundary between a fake sensation provoked by the substance and a real sensation coming from the outside world is bound to muddy your reasoning. I’d now add that the difference between perception and thought is just as blurry.
Buddhist phenomenology often treats thought as a sixth sense, another channel of perception alongside taste, hearing or sight. But on closer inspection, I’d say thoughts are an agglomerate of the primary sensory channels — sometimes in low resolution, often with layers of meaning attached, as in the dashboard example above.
I found a whole zoo of hallucinated sensations used as thoughts for different purposes. The most common are words as auditory hallucinations. Not a coherent narrator telling the story of my actions, more like a series of words and sentences jotted in a notebook. Single-word thoughts can add a layer of visual hallucination, where I see the word written.
Practical planning often involves proprioception. I can feel my imaginary body moving through the rooms of my apartment to check what’s in the fridge, visually imagining different combinations of ingredients on the table, the images changing in time with short auditory sensations saying “mushroom risotto”, “creamy leek with oregano”, as I switch between meal ideas.
I’m only starting to map this out! What is the nature of complex mathematical thought? Can I choose the modality I think about a problem in? Are there thoughts that can’t be mapped to primary perception channels?
What does your inner world look like? I’d recommend paying closer attention to the contents of your mind.
IV
It’s been a fun exercise that brings magic to mundane moments. It also handed me a lasting de-stressing technique. When I get caught in a loop over a scary problem — “the state will fine me because I paid my taxes late” — I can choose to play with the substrate of the thought instead: “the statatatate will gimme gimme a *distinguished tone* fine…”. From there it becomes easier to spread my awareness into my body, away from my head. Then I can either approach the problem with an open mind, or decide it’s not worth any more of my time.
It feels like unmasking the monster in Scooby-Doo!
If this inspired you, happy unmasking :)
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