TRIPPY STUFF - some autistic acid.

DeepBlueLake · Posted: Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:55 pm Post subject:

TRIPPY STUFF

How to explain AS to a hippy, or anyone else who's tasted Dr Hofmann's famous patent medicine.

Did you ever trip on acid?

If so, you know what you need to know about Asperger’s Syndrome.

Think about what acid does to you. It doesn't stimulate, it doesn't tranquillise. You remain perfectly conscious during the whole performance. What does go to sleep, however, is the subconscious mind: all the instincts, intuitions and prejudices that form your sense of self, your picture of the world and what it all means. The subconscious dissolves in the acid, until all that's left is pure consciousness, experiencing an unfiltered reality without judgement or prejudice.

Now compare that to Asperger's Syndrome. If Simon Baron-Cohen and friends are correct, the parts of the brain involved in intuition are physically stunted, and work much slower than normal people's. The rational, logical side overdevelops to compensate, and may work much faster than normal. The result of having two sides of your head spinning at different rates, experiencing reality at different speeds, is the endless psychedelic trance that we call autism. Asperger's Syndrome is the mildest form of that lifelong trip.

Don’t think I’m exaggerating here. Although it’s the brain’s stucture that’s out of balance, rather than its chemistry, the result has much in common with an acid trip. An unfiltered, uncensored world, gigabytes and gigabytes of it pouring through your skull every moment, every TV channel on the planet switched on in your head - but with no gut sense of what any of it means.

So it’s unsurprising that we tend to be private and solitary people. If you want to know why we avoid eye contact, remember how grotesque the human face looks when you’re tripping. If we seem strung out and neurotic, think of how on acid, everything seems to happen suddenly. Suddenly, someone’s talking to you. Suddenly the lights go on. The kind of hustle and bustle you could normally take in your stride becomes one long, nerve-shredding BOO!

And as for dealing with people, especially people with no idea what’s going on for you...! You’ll know if you’ve had acid, that a conversation as simple as ordering pizza needs an arse-clenching level of self-control and focus. You can’t keep that up for any length of time without getting very stressed. We sometimes get mini nervous breakdowns from the effort, and have to go and hide somewhere. These are known as meltdowns. Imagine Fat Freddy hiding under the bed from his bad trip. The common description of a bad trip is “falling off the edge of the world”, and that’s what meltdowns feel like.

That’s why we tend to keep ourselves to ourselves. We don’t mind this. Fortunately, we have all kinds of obscure and unusual hobbies to keep us happy. The other side of acid is that, provided nobody’s hassling you, the whole world seems infinitely beautiful and fascinating. Even the most mundane, boring things sparkle and beckon. You see their value and their importance in life.

Of these boring things, the most popular for us are; numbers, systems, machines, words and facts. To the average person they are the dreariest stuff you can talk about, but to an autistic mind they feel like the beach felt to Robinson Crusoe. They’re an island of stability in the ever-melting ocean of the trip. The autistic often become reknowned inventors, scientists and engineers because of this love for the apparently lifeless world of physics. We seldom chat, but we love to lecture, and listen to lectures. An autistic “conversation” isn’t a spontaneous flicking back-and-forth of ideas, but more like a structured debate in which one person gives you their full attention, listens and thinks, then talks at length while you listen to them with equal concentration.

And that's how we cope with Timothy Leary's three-ring circus going on all the time. Solitude, appreciation of nature and learning in all their forms, and the kind of teeth-gritted self control that'd make a Presbyterian minister jealous.

All that effort can make a person look a little spaced-out and disconnected.

The common perception of autism is someone trapped in a world of their own, a dreamworld from which they need rescuing. This isn’t how it seems to many of us. We, on the other side of the looking-glass, see something very different. It’s you who look like you’re dreaming.

When a normal person talks, their body constantly makes little micro-adjustments that convey a sense of what’s going on for them emotionally. The other person’s subconscious picks up on this, and reflects back a mixture of what it’s just noticed and its own emotions. Then, person number one does the same thing and it goes on, back and forth like a tennis game. The actual words spoken may contribute only a little to this interchange, or even be incidental to it. Thus, we get the cliche that “ninety percent of communication is non-verbal”.

And it’s that ninety percent that we don’t get. Our minds hear the literal meaning of the words, but from our tripped-out perspective, everything else just looks like a meaningless ripple of movement across your body. It’s no more readable than the billowing of clouds. We spend a lot of our time staring blankly at people like we’d just had a quick nip-and-tuck at the lobotomy clinic, understanding what they say, but not why they said it.

You’re talking to a mixture of the other person and your own psychic reflection, conveyed through their body language and choice of words. This is what psychologists call a gestalt. Most of them regard gestalt communication as the pinnacle of mental health. But to us, it’s awful. As soon as two people get together, their eyes glaze over and focus on a kind of shimmery magic mirror between them. All they know of each other is the gestalt, the relationship.

Trouble is, the gestalt is an illusion. And it’s very prone to viral infection. Everybody’s gestalt becomes like everybody else’s. And gradually, it becomes more and more like TV. You end up confusing the real world with the world of human society and human relationships. You lose your ability to see the future objectively. You can often get trapped in cycles of pleasure and pain.

There’s a name for this sickly gestalt dream. We call it neurotypicality. Tripping our tits off as we are, we see it as bad vibes, man! And we call it like we see it.

Naturally, this doesn’t make us popular at the frothier kind of cocktail parties. As we sit alone in the corner, watching all of this flash by in timelapse while Philip Glass plays synthesisers in the background, we wonder if you even know you’re dreaming.

We trip, you dream. Funny old world, isn’t it?

And we’re as unlikely to come down as you are to wake up.

Go to go. There’s some wallpaper over there I really want to stare at for a while.

BTW, I'm not recommending you go out and get some LSD. Some people love it, some people find it horrible - aspies included. Check round the forums for people's experiences.