Notes on Personal Reality.

I think I mentioned recently that I’m currently watching the DVDs of an old British sitcom called Red Dwarf. It’s about four dysfunctional characters – only one of whom is actually human but they’re all humanoid – trapped together on a space ship travelling pointlessly through the cosmos. The theme music takes the form of a comic song which begins: 

 

It’s cold outside

There’s no kind of atmosphere

I’m all alone

More or less

It only just struck me that this accords quite closely with the way I feel at the moment – alone but not lonely, lifeless but not ill, walking through the days without point or purpose, disengaged from reality as it’s normally perceived but definitely not psychotic.

But then it goes on from there. Lately I keep remembering something the priestess once said to me: ‘Life is just the stories we tell ourselves.’ I sometimes struggled to know exactly what she meant by that, but maybe it relates to another feature of my perception which I’ve already mentioned: the occasional sense that nothing in my life ever happened, that all the feelings and the physical sensations were but constructs of my consciousness which is all I really am. This is a particularly difficult concept to hold down because it invites the obvious question: what about all the other people I’ve encountered and interacted with along the way? Were they merely my personal constructs too, or were we all some kind of communal construct?

So onto the big question: is this the beginning of true knowledge, a relatively minor mental disturbance, or a standard side effect of being reclusive? I very much hope to find out one day. In the meantime, I’ll carry on pretending it’s all real (because I can't think of a credible alternative) and hope to get my sense of humour back soon.