I believe I have some insight into the first person phenomenology of insanity. Some time ago, being a bit experimental, I took a generous dose of dextromethorphan, a dissociative with effects similar to ketamine and PCP. During the resulting experience, my perceptions of time, body, and self became profoundly and uncomfortably distorted and I felt as if I was literally losing my mind, that I was literally insane.
Below is an excerpt from a short story I wrote based on the experience. It goes into better detail about the phenomenology of the experience than I could recount now.
****
Gradually I noticed the change. The world took on an increasingly strange and subtly detached quality, as if I were seeing everything through an omnipresent and invisible haze, through a new filtering mechanism erected behind my eyes. Objects retained much of their familiar character in the most objective sense of form and color-- it was rather some attendant and implicit perception of their quality of being and interconnectedness that was becoming increasingly warped well beyond any semblance of familiarity. Where once I took for granted the seamless integrations and distinctions effected by my normally functioning visual faculties, I now appreciated the profound sense in which my mind tacitly constructed the unseen ground that every perception rested upon, the sense in which it made objects appear implicitly natural or absurd, aesthetic or mundane, real or phantasmal-- indeed, the very way it distinguished and demarcated the disorganized stimuli of the visual field as discrete, bounded, independent entities to begin with. I tested my vision upon a shoe lying on my floor and it seemed inordinately small, but not in the sense of being in the far distance. It lay before me with the same size and shape as ever, subtended the same visual angle on my retina as ever; nonetheless, it gave the distinct impression of being smaller than it actually was, a qualitative sense of size in blatantly simultaneous contradiction to how large I knew it should have appeared, and some part of me laughed uneasily as the rest looked on, unmoved. I stared at the paradox in dull disbelief, waiting for it to resolve itself back into logical coherence, but it persisted defiantly, impossibly.
It was not long before my sense of time began to suffer a similar deterioration at the roots. The extended sense of time dilation I experienced was overpowered forcibly by a more troubling apprehension that time itself was beginning to come unglued at the seams, splintering jagged fragments into the mist. I lurched from one temporal island of awareness to the next, as if my brain had forgotten how to reconcile the present as a smooth, flowing continuation of the immediate past. I was shocked to discover that it ever needed to do so in the first place, that perhaps the subjective continuity of time was merely an internal construction, an illusion telling nothing of the true nature of time itself-- if such a thing even existed.
Reality crumbled in my hand like a stale cracker the more desperately I tried to grasp hold of it. I extended my arms out before me and looked at my hands in an effort to remind myself of the order of things, to re-establish some firm footing before I drifted too far off. But I found no solace even in the familiar context of my own embodiment. I had difficulty recognizing my limbs as belonging to myself-- they appeared instead as grotesque mechanical appendages floating disconnected in space, lifeless, no more an extension of my being than the room around me. My body, I now keenly perceived, was no different from the bed I lay upon, or the shoe I had gazed upon; it was a miserable lump of nervous matter, an inert mass to which I was inextricably bounded.
I rose from my bed to see myself in the mirror, to see what I had become, what I was becoming to become. I perceived with intense discomfort the uneasy disorientation of merely standing upright, for it scarcely felt as if I were standing at all, as if any sense of kinesthesia that was not lost to me altogether had been hopelessly distorted. But the act of walking was infinitely worse. Each step was horrifyingly dead and mechanical, zombie-like; I remained capable enough for autonomous movement, but the specific motoric response of my gait was beyond my control, my feet falling with robotic fixedness and rigidity, like clockwork. I was reduced to an infinitesimal jailor shouting orders at the detached and burdensome apparatus of his own deadweight prison.
When I came to the mirror I did not recognize my face. It was only a plastic mask, a false shell that had calcified over me through time, encrusting me, suffocating-- how oddly it hung there, distended and drooping like a leaden curtain from my thoughts, how utterly strange that I could have ever conceived of this thing as ‘me.’ My eyes were huge and blank as if they had undergone shock, seeing themselves to be doorways to an empty husk, showing nothing of what remained of myself. I became possessed by an intense, overbearing feeling that my life to this point, now so utterly and unfathomably remote, had been leading me inexorably to this particular moment, a prolonged string of trivialities and deceptions culminating spectacularly in the violent and inevitable act of their own systematic deconstruction. I felt no connection with my former self, my name, my memories-- they had all been exposed as mere fabrications and illusions, smoke and mirrors devised by the alien I once pretended to be, peddling as truth its vain comedic tragedies so well that it came to believe them, even to defend them with sycophantic guardedness. But I now saw the arbitrariness of it all, that even those things that had once been so concrete that they assumed the guise of an independent and absolute reality were at their heart only contingent, subjective creations. Every notion that is construed in such a way by the mind can thus be construed differently by the mind-- nothing is sacred, no great immutable Truths reveal themselves from outside to the frail evanescent fiction of life-- there is only the convergence of relativities, artificial impositions generating the illusion of coherence, of false unity.
But what, then, was it that remained of me? What was that incompressible core which nonetheless persisted to function and carry on at least this most rudimentary and atomic sense of self, microscopic and constricted as it was? I did not have time to ponder this final mystery-- suddenly I felt the menacing onset of what could only be described as the impending encroachment upon me of death, if I had not died already, a seeping darkness bleeding from the haze and snuffing out the last vestiges of consciousness--
****
(I didn't really pass out like that, I just wrote it in. I did make a conscientious effort to fall asleep, though, to sleep off the experience and wake up 'normal,' as it was so uncomfortable. And I did feel as if I was literally dying.)
The above account doesn't quite capture everything. When I pondered my own self identity, not only did it seem completely false and fabricated and remote, there was actually some element of humor to it. It was so ridiculous as to be funny that I associated anything about me before that time-- name, memories, etc.-- with 'me.' All of that had nothing to do with 'me' during this experience, as if I had shed a costume that I become so accustomed to wearing that I entirely forgot that I was ever wearing it in the first place.
I also at one point dimly felt some sort of massive and imminent presence about me, as if I felt the presence of God dwelling about me, but it was distinctly un-Godlike in its complete dispassionate impersonalness. In retrospect I think this feeling of some dissociated 'presence' must have been related to my own personal dissociation of identity. Whatever part of my brain that is responsible for 'sensing' self-hood and otherness was being thrown for a loop.
