Sometimes when I’m driving through a long tunnel, and it takes more than 5 or 10 minutes, I get an eery feeling that I’ve spent my whole life driving through a tunnel.
Has anyone else gotten this feeling?
I don’t want you driving through tunnels. You know what that symbolizes.
[/Mrs. Skinner]
BTW, where do you commonly drive through 5-10 minute tunnels? That sounds pretty cool.
Uh, duh, in Brazil84, of course.
We don’t have any tunnels like that here, but it’s a fascinating and eerie idea. I do seem to recall having a possibly similar nagging feeling that I’d lost track of time after (what turned out to be) short periods of very repetitive manual tasks.
I think the longest tunnel I’ve driven through is the Mont Blanc tunnel, but I didn’t really get into that trance-like state as I was too busy getting terrified by lunatic French and Italian drivers switching lanes randomly, regardless of whether the lane they wanted to enter was occupied… :eek:
No, but when driving to or from New Jersey, we frequently feel as if we’re spending forever driving through Connecticut.
We call Connecticut “The Tardis State”. I’ve driven all the way across Wyoming three times, and I’ll swear Connecticut feels longer.
We went through some train tunnels in Switzerland that took 10 or 15 minutes IIRC. I didn’t feel like I’d “spent my whole life” in the tunnel, but I guess that sort of feeling is just the human mind adjusting to the current environment.
I don’t get the feeling that I’ve been driving through a tunnel forever, but I do experience a similarly eerie thought (and it only happens in tunnels): I sometimes feel as though “none of this is real” - that everything that is being reported to me by my senses is erroneous, an illusion - and if I were to, for instance, put my hand out the window, it would pass right through the car next to me with no ill effects.
Consciously, of course, I understand that this is nonsense, so I simply keep driving until I emerge from the tunnel into the “real” world, where I can trust my senses implicitly.
Then, I sometimes have lunch.
Here’s one to try (and you don’t even need to be in a tunnel):
Next time you’ve been in a car for a while, convince yourself that you’ve forgotten how to walk, and that when you finally get to your destination, get out, and stand up, you’ll promptly fall over like a sack of shit.
I used to amuse myself with this as a kid.