Time passes . . .
. . . and now I'm feeling strangely disconnected from myself. It's not as extreme as it was when I awoke a little while ago, when the person who washed dishes and made phone calls and worried so very much today seemed a stranger in my consciousness. I woke up thinking about the time I got called in for jury duty a few years ago. I remember it all too well—so much fear, anxiety, nearly fainting in the courthouse—but it was like it happened to someone else, like I was recalling another person's ordeal. The feeling spread from there to other memories, right up to today.
I've seen this phenomenon mentioned here before. There's a word for it, which presently escapes me. Some kind of defense mechanism in the mind? Take the victim out of me and stand him over there. The big bad's not so big and bad when it's after someone else; the movie monster's not as scary as the real one under the bed.
I suspect I may feel this way to some degree much of the time. It's hard to say. Detachment from detachment—was that the word?—denial in a dreamscape. This is not my apartment, not my body, not my life. Some other slob was dealt this hand, dug this hole, not me. This couldn't possibly happen to me.
But it did.
I have moments of clarity, moments of now and here, when it all comes together and this is me doing this right here and right now, but those are rare. Seems to happen mostly when I'm driving, particularly when I've not been out for a while. They can come as a bit of a shock sometimes, these sudden flashes. I guess I've been a figment of my own imagination for so long that I take surreality for granted. Any glimpse of objective reality—even the reality of my fantasy of reality—is surprising.
