Monday, November 26, 2018

strange feeling

I walked into Tulane University, found the psychology department, met with a professor, and asked him about an unusual experience, a strange feeling I got now and then. It was hard to describe. It happened when I was calm. I can remember it happening while I was lying in the back seat of my mother's car taking a nap while she was playing music with some friends. A buzzing would start in my head, a feeling buzzing, not a sound buzzing. There'd be light, a little brightness, a floating feeling. strange time sensations as it increased, then a sense of everything being very fast and then slow and fast and slow at the same time as if one side of time were fast and the other slow, and I'd feel big and small at the same time, and other contradictory sensations. It was a little bit pleasant and a little bit unpleasant. I could stop it at any time by just getting up, shaking myself, and looking around. The professor said the closest he could come to was that sometimes writers, poets, artists express something like that. I said that Sartre described something in Nausea that reminded me a bit of it - how a doorknob would feel and I couldn't think of more to say nor he. - from Freedom Songs, Part XI

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