Thursday, March 3, 2011

Oblivion

Somewhere in the quiet, when you forget the sound of your mother's voice, when the face of your spouse seems foreign, the mind finds oblivion. Oblivion, during an average day, is frightening to humans. It sucks in all you have until you are not yourself but have become It. The harder you listen, the less you hear. The further you look, the less you see. Rarely does oblivion visit when it is wanted. It saves its presence for the unwilling so that they might see part of it by not wanting to see it at all.


As a child, when I was focused on one thing so hard I was the only thing left in the world, oblivion spoke to me. It came in the form of many voices unheard before. Deep resounding voices, light voices of children, soothing tones of women, wailing, laughter, rooms full of people in loud conversation. It scared me so much that my head would pop up only for me to find myself taking a vocab test or cleaning my room or doing a puzzle. As I grew up, I experienced these times less and less to almost the point that I had forgotten about them. I had one time when, taking a calculus test, my vision sharpened so that the letters on the page seemed to pop out at me as if I was wearing 3-D glasses. As I looked around at my classmates, I felt as if I could feel the space they took up simply by looking at them. I wondered if I had jumped into the mind of a surrealist painter. Had I bumped my head on something that morning? Was I about to become a painter savant?

Turns out, no. Oblivion wasn't speaking to me and I hadn't developed a mutant gene. I just find it fascinating what the mind contrives during bouts of self induced hypnosis. Please, don't misunderstand me to thinking that I am suggesting I am a psychic. Rather, psychologists estimate that humans go through self-induced hypnosis multiple times a day. When you are staring at nothing and someone waves a hand in front of you to "snap you out of it," you were just under hypnosis. When someone calls your name but you have no recollection of it, you were hypnotized. When we daydream or make plans in our head, we are putting our minds on a track that ignores incoming stimuli signals so that we have better concentration. Also known as being hypnotized.

Hope I didn't begin to worry any of you with my psychobabble at the beginning there, but the inner workings of the mind has many creepy channels for the writer to explore. I just had another one of those "voices speaking to me" moments while cleaning up my room today. Very creepy. Very inspirational.



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