Hell, or rather my brief experience of it.

[Angrboda]

Yeah, sleep paralysis can be nasty. I've had a few episodes.


We're so used to conceiving of ourselves as rational, thinking creatures that we forget that underneath everything is mood and emotion, bathing your experiences, in dreams, or in waking, in significance you did not choose and which may or may not relate to the conscious content. My chosen forum name here, apophenia, refers to the experience of perceiving otherwise random or senseless data, images, sounds, whatever, as undeniably meaningful. I have had experiences in my life where I've converted to Buddhism for a few weeks at a time. And at the end, I could look back and see, some kind of heightened emotional, meaning sensitivity clicked on suddenly, making me seek my answers in the Buddha's teachings, and then just as suddenly, it clicked off again. Intensely meaningful and motivating thoughts from days before, no longer moved me. The neurologist V.S. Ramachandran had one patient whose so-called "God centers" would be unnaturally stimulated on a regular basis, making him suddenly feel hyper-religious, that everything he saw was God, even that he himself was God. Clearly an emotional cognitive response overpowering the reasoning parts. And things can go the other direction as well. I don't dream much any more, but when I did dream, my dreams frequently had horrific imagery; picking up severed body parts and stuffing them in a mail box, going through the neighborhood gathering up dismembered body parts left by a serial killer, mopping up gallons of blood in a McDonald's restaurant bathroom — but I had no emotional reaction to any of it, I might as well having been folding laundry instead of dead corpses. And we all know the contortion of spirit brought on those whose emotion bath is defective, making them psychopathic or sociopathic, in some sense, more victims of their broken brains, as much as the monsters we think of them as. Emotion will make you do the thing you don't want to do. You can't control it, normal or abnormal. I recently had a mild overdose of haldol, the major side effect of which was an inability to sit still, or feeling that you can't. While I was going through the several hour ordeal that is being admitted to the hospital via the emergency room, I could not sit still for more than 15-25 seconds, tops. I would get up, pace a little, lie down, sit up, walk to the chair, sit down, get up, lie down, over and over and over again. I knew intellectually what was happening to me, but that thought was powerless against the overpowering agitation and unrest. After a couple hours, I was still moving every 10-15 seconds, but I was so exhausted, I couldn't keep my eyes open, and I passed out. I came to a couple hours later, having slept off the bulk of the rest of the akathisia I experienced. You think you chose how you responded to an intense emotional experience based on logical reasoning and deduction. You did not. Your brain cooked you up an emotional cocktail, fed it bullshit religious ideas you already had in your head, and turned you loose like a spinning top. You're an idiot Drich. I don't deny the power of such emotional experiences. I live with them because I have a broken brain. But that you have apparently based your whole life (and how you treat others) on these experiences, because you had a loose wire, a hot, sparking, loose wire in your brain; that's just sad.