Doubting your perception of reality

[Relish in Chaos]

Have you ever doubted your perception of reality? I made this topic after having watched Shutter Island and Total Recall, and it got me thinking about all that weird shit. Personally, no, I haven't; at least, not visually. I haven't ever had any hallucinations, or believed I'm someone I'm not, or anything like that.

In a more general way, like the way that I view the world and the people within them, maybe. Sometimes I tend to see tasks that I have to do, like filling in a form or some parts of my homework, as bigger than they actually are.

Anyway, what are your thoughts?

 

[Flutterguy]

Well something I ate last weekend lead me to believe I was a mother alien eternally giving birth and that this illusion I had been living was just their way of keeping me productive. Went so far as believing all my friends were dream invaders who actually hated me because they where tasked to my happiness... anyways don't take 'gifts' from friends while constipated. Eternity is a long time.

To be a bit more on topic.. Your perceptions will always change and fade, reality will not. Sometimes some escapism is a good way to break the monotony, everyone does it to their own extent.

 

[mistahzig1]

For me, only in "what if" scenarios I was toying with.

I'd imagine myself living in a different reality then the rest of the world. For instance, I'd be talking to my friend (that exists only to me) and they'd see me talking to a tree of they'd see me sleep always at the same place (middle of a street) but in my reality i'd be sleeping in my bed.


You know, stuff like that but I don't think I've ever genuinely doubted reality in any fundamental way.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Used to do that all the time.

"What if I'm hallucinating and I'm really in public doing something really embarrassing?"

 

[Lieju]

I have the tendency to hallucinate very easily, if I have a fever or have not slept well...

Also I have lucid dreams often, and in general dreams that are very realistic.

I have a thing I do to check if I'm dreaming.
First I pay attention to all the corners of the room if I'm inside. (If I'm in a moving car I'll try to stay still. If it's a dream I can stay where I am while the car moves on without me.)

Then I'll do this thing with my hand that just looks like I'm flexing my muscles, but if it's a dream I can draw this kind of energy thing from my palm.

Or just try to turn into a snake. That's something I can always do if it's a dream. It's actually most reliable way for me to know if I'm awake.

So I'll know at least if I'm dreaming.

As for my memory, I have had people taking advantage of me and convince me my memory isn't working properly. You know what 'gaslighting' is? That.
So I doubt my memory a lot and keep records of everything important.

 

[LaughingAtlas]

I doubt my perceptions constantly.

I think.

Kindof hard to tell, every dream I've ever had having nothing to really distinguish them from "reality" other than the lack of continuity. (waking up where I fell asleep generally seems to mean I'm really awake, cuts and scrapes not appearing or vanishing at random, everything being more or less how one might expect it as before, that sort of thing)

But yes, believing that your understanding of things is definitely the "right" one and that you have a perfectly stable grasp of reality doesn't make much sense to me given how many times I've been sure about things before and been proven (that is, faced with evidence I have great difficulty denying) wrong. Why should I think I've got it right this time, if there is a "right"? It follows that I'm not sure my current way of thinking even makes much sense to anyone else, either, but as I got by for years on irrational thought patterns different from this one, (these ones?) it probably doesn't matter too much. Like shoe weight, incidentally.

 

[happyninja42]

Nope, I don't doubt my perceptions. Even when I was on acid or shrooms, I was aware of what was obviously sensory wackiness from the drugs, and filtered it out as something interesting, but not real.

 

[Chromatic Aberration]

Ha! I do that all the time. Skepticism is how I roll and I always take a severely distrustful stance towards myself and the actions of others - If I've learned one bloody thing in the years I've been alive is that nobody has a bloody clue what the fuck is going on anywhere. We have assumptions and models, some very good to the point where a lot of things can be described by them (we call it science) and we have assumptions that we pulled out of our backsides because we ourselves have decided that we care about them and which can't possibly be wrong (because, say, assuming you can fly and hurling yourself off the next building to do so rarely proves advantageous from a purely pragmatic point of view or because my mother told me so which can't possibly be wrong either).

In other words: it's usually bloody fun to boot!

 

[EHKOS]

Yep, after I played through VTM:B as a Malkavian, I truly had an existential crisis. Although I feel I came out of that with more wisdom than when I went in. I even bought the clanbooks and studied them. They kind of make sense "in a, Tyler Durden sort of way."

Also the time I had a nervous breakdown due to family issues, trust me, that one...that one is NOT fun.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

One very important question.
WHICH Total Recall?

The 1990 Schwarzenegger one (the only one worth bothering to watch).

 

[DanielBrown]

Yeah, when the brilliant doctors decided I needed anti-depressants a few years ago my mind got really fucked up. I begun dreaming really mundane shit about my life. They were usually about the same things I did during the days. Pondering which t-shirt to wear, playing games and talking to people. As I woke up I wasn't sure if it had been a dream or not... The "talking to people"-dreams didn't go well, as you can imagine. In a dream I had a huge fight with a friend, and as I woke up I kept fighting with him. He had no clue what I was talking about and that just made me more angry.

Another thing that happened was that my perception of time went bonkers. An hour could feel like a week and a week could feel like an hour. Was playing WoW with a friend and asked if he wanted to do Trial of the Champion(an instance that was new at the time). He told me he was currently in that instance, but was up for doing others afterwards. Got a bit upset because I needed that one too, and he knew that, but he still did it with another group.
After we did an instance I asked if he wanted to do that particular instance again. When he told me he had just done it I fucking lost it. In my mind three days had past. In real life it was less than an hour... Led to a huge fight.

I stabilised after a few months(however the dreams kept going for at least a year), but the damage had already been done. Pushed away all my friends in fits of anger that they couldn't understand. After the WoW-event I started realising what was going and apologised to him, but my odd behaviour hadn't stopped yet so it did little to help.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

I did that all the time when I was kid. Still do, though much less frequently.
The one I kept coming back to was "the simulated reality". Especially after watching Total recall, eXistenZ, Matrix, Inception..amongst others.

In the end, you are always you. I don't remember the exact words, but even if deceived, you exist AS the deceived.

 

[Sir Boss]

I have, but that was for a thought experiment. I was fiddling around with Rene Descartes' method of doubt, I'm not sold on it his theories. I'm fairly certain that what I'm experiencing is what is commonly referred to as reality, or at least my perception of it, after all, reality is what you make of it.

 

[krazykidd]

No , but part of me wants to . No i'm not romantisizing hallucinations ( i know it could be dangerous at times) but i'm kind of curious. Not all the time , just once.

 

[Doclector]

I ponder it all the time. We're on a ball of rock floating through infinite universal chaos, faced with the vast unknown of outer space, I'd be surprised if what we know as reality now is the same as the sane perception of reality in one hundred years time.

 

[DerpHerpilous]

This is a hard question to answer. I too am a skeptic, but I trust my perceptions for the most part. The only time to stop trusting them is when they stop being reliable. Sure, you could look at an orange and just say "That's just how my brain is perceiving that thing, it's not an orange," but why would you do that? You can still pick that orange up and take a bite into it, it will still taste like an orange in your mouth. If you are going for the whole "I could just be a brain in a vat and not even know it," my response to this is so what? You can't do anything about it if you are just a brain in a vat and you don't have any information saying that you are so why would you even start to believe that? If life as we know it is nothing more than all of us or just one of us being hooked up to the Matrix and not being Neo, then it is impossible to tell the difference between that and reality.

 

[Something Amyss]

Might not be as amusing as some of the folks in here, but this is a very real side effect of emotional abuse. I spent a good chunk of my life doubting my own memories to great extent.

Now, it's less than I don't doubt them and more that I don't care. My senses are the only source of input I have and my memory is the only thing I have to fall back on. I can literally only operate within their confines, so...what difference does it make?