It’s a reference to the 1938 play Gas Light (and subsequent 1944 film Gaslight) in which a husband tries to convince his wife that she’s going mad, i.e. he’s moving pictures and other objects around and when she comments, he pretends that she must be hallucinating The title comes from another of his tricks - changing the intensity of the house’s gaslights and then pretending nothing is wrong, making her doubt her perceptions.
In general terms, to “gaslight” someone is to play mind games with them in the hope of making them doubt their own sanity. In this specific case, I gather Orr is wondering why parents would tell children something they know or suspect to be false, just to screw with them or indoctrinate them to the parent’s general belief system.
Thanks, Bryan. That’s in the general direction of what I’m asking, but I’m hoping someone can flesh out the motivations for such child-rearing behavior a bit further.
Probably, my question should be formulated as a GQ OP.
It’s not a cold read. You’ve as much as said that your parents (or one of them - mother I’m guessing) from your prospective humiliated you, made you feel stupid, and commited you to a mental institution, on completely specious grounds. I’m just pointing out that your issues with the ‘God Voice’ and religion are stemming from your parental issues.
Mayhaps I’m mistaken, but haven’t you said that you were (mis)diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder but cured yourself?
The concept was not understood, but any idiot could recognise that things fall to the ground and that celestial bodies move around each other in some manner. The problem was quantifying these phenomena, recording the evidence with enough precision to work out how fast things fall, or map out the relative paths of the Sun, Moon and stars.
With psychics, the problem is not understanding the evidence, it’s obtaining evidence when the psychic’s ability to cheat has been removed.
Funny how it’s supposedly supposed to be more obvious when there’s less surveillance and technology, though, isn’t it? Heck, if you go back to biblical times you have pillars of fire and resurrection going on - talk about pyrokinesis and psychic healing!
The trick to any good fiction, or worldview, is that it must be consistent with as many of the presented or available facts as possible. In a fiction story I’m currently writing, I posit that the mechanism by which psychic powers occur uses biologically generated electromagnetic patterns as an intermediary, which I figure neatly explains the spiritualism/technology disconnect due to signal interference. Not that I believe for a moment that this is occurring in real life - but why can’t spiritualists and True Believers at least go through the minimal effort to construct plausible explanations like that for the holes in their mythos?
Because the moment you concoct a putative mechanism to explain a supernatural phenomenon you open it up to falsification. As long as you remain deliberately vague about what exactly you believe in, you always have some way to wriggle out of the nasty empirical traps set by the skeptics.
Newton didn’t actually coin the term “gravity”, did he? I was under the impression his breakthrough contribution was that everything attracts everything else in accordance to a consistent universal law, rather than all objects just like to get closer to Earth.
Yep, I’m 100% cured. In fact, according to the sudden flood of emails in my inbox, looks like I’m going make the spaceship after all…if you’re paying attention to who I really am, and not my specious “crazy” label, you are welcome to come aboard, watch my star rise. The only fare required is that you are willing to invest and share your time and energy (especially those near Porn Valley) – I’ve already Shot The Moon, made First Contact, and now I just have to sit back and enjoy the high-speed train ride. Are you willing to share the experience? PMs are welcome.
The reasons they don’t get any sleep have more to do with the traffic in and out of the room (staff and visitors), being awakened for medication, nursing checks, testing, fire alarms, the overhead paging system announcing codes etc. etc.
If there were voices of the dead, they’d be drowned out by all the noise.
Actually, maybe there are voices of the dead, only they’re not dead. It used to be that people feared premature burial (since in the old days establishing death was not as scientifically based) and would have contraptions built into their coffins so they could set off alarms or break out in case of accidentally being buried while still alive.
They don’t have those devices anymore (overconfidence if you ask me), so maybe what you’re hearing is the prematurely entombed calling for help. I wouldn’t worry about it though.
Hypnagogia is such a fascinating phenomenon. It’s frequently associated with temporal lobe epilepsy, and for whatever it’s worth, I do have (medically diagnosed) TLE and I have hypnagogic experiences VERY regularly. The meds don’t seem to have much effect on them. Some are auditory, but not very complicated, generally just one word or a strange noise. And I’m not so sure I would exactly call a lot of them “hallucinations” (thinking I literally see someone sitting on the edge of the bed, etc.), although some are. The most common ones for me are weird alterations in my perception of space, size, and shape. Very hard to explain, especially the experience of having them almost every night, as people with TLE often do. Actually, it’s pretty cool stuff! But I’ve never had any reason to think of them as “voices of the dead,” I must say.
I do not have TLE, or any other significant brain issue, but I also experience hypnagogia nearly every night. In my experience, the “voices” I “hear” are the voices of people I had spoken to through the course of the day or thought of recently. In fact, I can somewhat manipulate what voices I hear by intentionally thinking of a person. The content of speech is never anything ominous, like “beware the Ides of March”, but rather an echo of my own thoughts or nonsense. This leads me to believe hypnagogia is merely an artifact of the brain processing information from the day or something similar.
If hypongogia is the manifestation of the voices of the dead, this makes no sense. My friends and family would be dead thousands of times over, and my attempts to manipulate the voices would be in vain. What evidence do you have that leads you to believe these are any more significant than a common benign phenomenon already documented by reliable sources?
Sinusoidal, are you talking to the original author of the thread? Because I definitely don’t think hypnagogia has anything to do with ‘voices of the dead’! I will say that I doubt it’s an artifact of the brain processing the day’s information, simply because it is so much more common and usually so much more varied in TLE folks. I think it’s more likely to represent something pretty complicated going on the brain, but as to what that might be, I really don’t know (yet! I see a research project!!) I’d definitely like to understand more about what goes on in my brain!
yah, talking to a Buddhist the other day… there is in you that which produces the words… the Voice… and there is an Eye that witnesses this. So, there are two parts of ‘you’ right there.
It is a long story… ultimately ‘you’ is a rather confused construct, and there is no good reason why the deads’ voices couldn’t communicate with ‘you’, sans body and all that.
Ultimately it is an identity complex, that is, if your identity is immortal, then is it the same for others? Or if you are mortal, are others nonetheless immortal ?!?
Anyway, the complex mental experiences associated with TLE include the set of things that have been called hypnagogic experiences, but also go way beyond them. So it may not necessarily be as easy as it seems to say if we’re even talking about the same things or not-- if others who don’t have TLE are really having the same experiences that I’m thinking of when I talk about “hypnagogic” phenomena. For instance, “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” is a big TLE symptom (I love that name!), and I have to say that I haven’t heard of people experiencing that unless they have either TLE or frontal lobe epilepsy. However, I would call it hypnagogic because of when it always happens for me (before going to sleep, which is when it happens for everyone else who has it too.)
So the point, I guess, is that I’m not sure anyone has actually defined what hypnagogic experiences really even are.
In fact, according to the sudden flood of emails in my inbox, looks like I’m going make the spaceship after all…if you’re paying attention to who I really am, and not my specious “crazy” label, you are welcome to come aboard, watch my star rise. The only fare required is that you are willing to invest and share your time and energy (especially those near Porn Valley) – I’ve already Shot The Moon, made First Contact, and now I just have to sit back and enjoy the high-speed train ride. Are you willing to share the experience? PMs are welcome. 
