I am sitting at my desk, alone. But I don’t feel alone. Everything is normal, but everything is different. There are sounds from the birds scrabbling on the roof. They are two metres above me, by the skylight. But they are far, far away. The walls are a pale yellow but their vibrancy seems to grab me. My eyes are sucking in their colour. I am falling back, deep down into myself. I am fuzzed in a fog. I am outside myself and deep within myself all at the same time. I am having a dissociative moment.
Moments like this happen all the time. Sometimes I know what has triggered them; at other times, it’s a complete mystery. I feel myself floating. I feel as if everything around me has become unreal. I feel that I, myself, am unreal. Things that are familiar become unfamiliar. Characteristics, such as colours, or shapes, or the contrast of light against the dark, stand out and grab my attention as if I am looking through a tube at them: everything else fades away, and there is just this one thing, this one mostly irrelevant thing, this life-hanging-on-it one thing and I can’t feel anything else or see anything else or do anything else but have my attention consumed by it.