Why I like the strange

When I was in middle school, I would go into unusual, natural, and almost psychedelic episodes. They would occur without warning, and I was catapulted into an area of my mind that I had no control of. I would sit motionless for several hours, my psyche pushed off a diving board and was floating in waters I didn’t understand.

The first time this happened, I was in a bookstore. I had to sit down for an hour until the effects of this spontaneous experience wore off. Once I was finally able to orient myself, I could not explain what had happened, and had been left feeling extremely nauseous. I had been taken though a kaleidoscope of colors, jumbles of words, and old memories I didn’t remember until I was shown them.

When I first attempted to tell someone of this experience, I didn’t have the words for it. I simply said, “It felt like I was falling into myself.”

These episodes, that I had called “spells”, occurred about 20 times within a span of a few months, each time growing weaker and weaker. In the beginning, I had feared them. Their spontaneity, not giving me a chance to choose when I would be thrusted into this state of mind. A state that rendered me powerless. With the frequency slowly becoming less as the weeks went on, I realized that I had come to enjoy them. I begin to feel like I was dreaming while awake, and feelings of powerlessness evaporated…