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Delusions, OCD and Other Mental Quirks
This topic was partly inspired by the movie "A Beuatiful Mind", a topic I just read on a different forum and my own childhood memories.
Anyway, firstly I was wondering if any of you have ever seen or heard anything that wasn't there? As in, not just seeing something out of the corner of your eye and wondering "did I just see that?" but actually experiencing something that you were convinced of to the point where you didn't even have to consider whether it was real or not, but now looking back you realise that it probably wasn't?
Confused? I'll give you two examples.
The first was when I was playing in my sandpit at home (I was 17 at this stage...... no, just kidding, I was about 4 I think) having just heard my dad talk about slugs as being "a farmer's nightmare", taking that to mean, somehow, that slugs were evil things that enjoy attacking people. Of course I understand now that he was talking about things from an economic standpoint (as slugs collectively are prone to eating large amounts of crops I suppose) but I didn't understand that at the time, being 4 as I was. Anyhow, there I was, playing in my sandpit, probably a bit nervous about what my dad had said, when I saw it: a massive slug, probably a foot long, bright purple. Needless to say, I lost it. I ran screaming inside, telling my parents what I'd just saw. Of course, when they went over to investigate, they didn't see anything but I was so shaken and so convinced by what I'd seen, that I didn't return to that sandpit for weeks. My parents tried to explain that slugs like the one I'd seen didn't exist, and therefore I couldn't have seen it, but even to this day I can remember how I felt. I didn't just think I'd seen a slug, I knew I'd actually seen it. When you experience something so vividly, it's very difficult to tell yourself that it never actually existed, especially at that young age. It wasn't until much later that I realised that the slug was a "delusion" or "a manifestation of my fears" if you like.
Another example (more poignant perhaps) comes from when I was a tad younger. When I went to bed, I would hear a banging noise, which at the time (I can't remember exactly how it sounded now) I likened to "someone banging a sheet of corregated iron with a piece of wood". I assumed, at first, that it was someone next door making the noise, though, of course when I looked out the window I couldn't see anyone and the noise continued regardless. After a few nights of enduring this "banging noise" I mentioned to my parents that someone, in the middle of the night, was outside banging a large piece of metal and that it was keeping me awake. My parents hadn't heard anything (obviously) so my mum ended up staying in my room for a couple of nights to see if she could understand what I was talking about.
Now what I do remember about this sound, is the fact that it would variate between fairly quiet (as if someone were banging a sheet of metal a fair way away) to disturbingly loud (as though someone were smacking a sheet of metal as hard as they possibly could in the yard nextdoor) and it would always at the same, constant tempo: "Dang, Dang, Dang, Dang, Dang, Dang". Anyway, with my mum there, she told me to point it out to her whenever I could hear the sound so that she could identify it.
I think we must have both fallen asleep in the end, but I can remember being there - at some point in the middle of the night - hearing the sound faintly. I told my mum (I can't remember if she'd fallen asleep or not) and she couldn't hear anything, so I assumed that I was merely being more perceptive than her so I turned over and went back to sleep. But then the pounding got louder, loud enough, I assumed, for my mum to hear it. I mentioned it to her again: "can't you hear that?". She listened intently, but couldn't. Once again, I merely assumed that I was more perceptive and let it pass, with the banging sound continuing in my ears. Both my mum and dad - on subsequent nights - had a go at identifying what I could hear, but neither could hear what I was. I think their synopsis, in the end, was that I could hear possums on our roof (that they couldn't), but obviously that wasn't the sort of sound that I was hearing. Eventually I stopped hearing this banging, but it wasn't until much later that I realised that the sound must have been a figment of my imagination - and it's never easy telling yourself that something you've experienced never happened at all. For what was probably weeks in the end, I could hear someone banging a piece of metal with some wood and to realise that I'd just been "hearing things" the entire time - when I was so sure that I'd actually been hearing something real - was a fairly disconcerting experience.
On a similar note, at this age I used to become fixated on things, and this is where the Beautiful Mind/OCD reference comes in. For those who have seen it, remember the part where he gets called into the government headquarters (or whatever it was) and is shown the screen full of numbers, that he is told is "Soviet Code" and he ends up standing there for hours making sense of it. He ends up "highlighting" different numbers in the code and convincing himself of a pattern, which he then takes to be co-ordinates of future nuclear strikes on the US. Now I'm not about to suggest that I thought exactly like that, but even now I can identify times in my life where I have thought in a similar manner: fixating myself on numbers and being unable to break that train of thought.
For instance, we have a home video made by my dad's uncle (who is now dead for what it is worth) from when I was about 4, which in one part films me watching television. I had a small blackboard next to the television, which I was writing on (I had previously used it to show off my spelling skills until they started taking the piss and asking me to spell words I'd never even heard of - bastards  ). Now I can't remember exactly what was running through my mind at that stage, but my dad's uncle had continued to film me without my realising it and it showed me watching the television, standing up in front of my black-board and periodically writing numbers on the blackboard, doing a couple of quick jumps, and then going back to watching TV. And he probably only filmed me for 30 seconds, but it clearly shows me watching TV, turning around and writing a number on the blackboard and then doing a couple of quick jumps and turning back around to the TV to start the process over.
Now it's impossible to really explain how I used to think then, but basically I used to associate numbers with different things. I used to see something and think "number 7" or see the number 7 and then think of something that I had come to associate it with. Even to this day, in some very distant, almost forgotten way, I still feel better about some numbers than I do about others. Now as I say, it's impossible to properly explain how I thought then (or how I think now in a much more diluted way) but it's almost as if - and these feelings were much more vivid back then than they are now - some numbers felt good and calmed me, whereas others made me feel "uneasy" for want of a better phrase. It was never a feeling that was too overwhelming, but this was how I thought and it was completely inescapable. When I look back on it now, having just read about some of the symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (see this page) I'm starting to think that it's a disorder I probably had back then, and may have partially retained to this day.
Think back to kindergarten, how you would periodically be set up with an easel and be told to paint - what exactly did you paint? Houses? People? I painted letters and numbers. Instead of coming home with mum in the car with a picture of her holding a flower, I would come home with a big sheet of paper covered 1's 7's and B's. It wasn't as though I couldn't draw anything else (I have pictures from that time that prove it) but I was just so fixated on that way of thinking, that given the choice I'd rather just stand there and paint random alphanumerics than anything else. Even recently (after having taken ecstacy that night admittedly) I went to bed at about 8am, still feeling alert, and in a semi-conscious dream state started memorising PLU codes.
To fill you all in, I'd just started a job at a service station, where not every product - or combination of products in the case of combo deals - can simply be "scanned" via its barcode when purchased, and is thus assigned a special code that needs to be entered in manually by the cashier to be registered on the console. For instance, the "2 2L Cokes for $5" deal may have been assigned the PLU Code "99214", meaning that any time the combo was purchased, I would have had to enter this code into the console. Being new and unfamiliar with all these codes, I was always anxious whenever someone would bring me something that required the entering of a PLU code as it would require the consultation of a sheet listing all the codes, and would thus take up prescious time when I was already slow enough as it was (these were the days when I used to give a shit about the customer's time  ).
So here I was then, in a drug-addled semi-conscious haze memorizing PLU codes that - in hindsight - I now realise I had made up on the spot. I would just think of a product, invent a code to assign to it, and then memorise it. Having done that, I'd think of a new product, invent a new code, memorize that and then ensure I'd memorised both of them simultaneously. And this just kept on - I must have been in this state of mind for the best part of an hour - and I just started assigning codes to things like mopping the floor or stocking the fridge. I was just taking anything and assigning it a number, then doing my best to memorise the number. Looking back I realise that I wasn't really remembering anything (because that would have necessitated memorising several dozen codes, something which I'm quite sure is beyond me) but I was just so fixated upon learning these codes, that I convinced myself that I was remembering them without actually realising the mindstate I was in. It took me, as I say, the best part of an hour to snap out of it and realise what I was doing. Even then, it was only by sitting up and staring at the wall for about 5 minutes that allowed me to break that mindset.
Anyway, I'm sure I've got my point across by now. There's a couple of other things that I want to mention, but it's getting late, so I'll leave my stories there for now.
Anyway, the entire point of this thread is for me to ask if any of you have any mental quirks like that. Have you ever seen anything that wasn't there? Have you ever been overly fixated upon anything and been unable to break this fixation? Is there anything about the way you think, at all, that strikes you as strange?
Over to you.....
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