In Comfortably Numb, towards the end, it goes “When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse, out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone,…”.
When this song came out, my friends and I agreed this line articulated a phenomenon we experienced as kids: for a very brief moment there was something very profound just out of my field of vision and upon making an effort to actually see it, it and that profound feeling would disappear. It wasn’t just a sight thing. It was almost like a lucid dream or hypnagogic state but more awake, brief, and intense. Is there a term for these teeny-bopper fleeting glimpses of bliss or whatever the hell that was?
That’s what we thought the line meant anyway.
And something tells me this has been asked before.
I don’t know what it is called but it is a widely reported phenomenon. Many people report seeing cats out of the corner of their eye but other things are common as well.
Weird. One of the examples is from C.S. Lewis - “That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, . . .”
Some of us feel an overwhelming sense of unity and completeness instead - a feeling we want to last forever. I feel this when I step off my back porch in the middle of the night and look into the ‘lovely woods, dark and deep’ heavy with smell of organic decay.
I once experienced this when hiking in a Southwest canyon. I was suffering from heat exhaustion, migraine, extreme fatigue, and other problems. I saw and heard people walking to my left and right, but they disappeared when I tried to look at them.
I occasionally experience this with one of my cats . . . never with the other one.
Peripheral vision is more illusion than actual data, anyway. The ability to see clearly and recognize what’s happening in just peripheral vision is weak and the brain makes up for it by filling in the gaps.
And so, we have a part of the brain running a subroutine, as it were, always filling in the gaps of peripheral vision to give us the illusion of clear and accurate sight in a wide field of vision… and things can go wrong. Several pop eye-teasers play on that optical illusion going wrong. And it can go wrong on it’s own.
This drives me absolutely batty. I attribute it to my brain damage. This is going to be hard to explain and might not make sense but as you may or may not know, most mental processing happens well below the level of conscious awareness.
My theory is that in a whole, properly functioning brain, processing can bubble up from those lower levels to the conscious level in a variety of ways - a little like the scientist who discovered benzene’s ring structure when he dreamed of 6 snakes in a ring biting each others tails - or something like that (might check wiki if I’m not too lazy). He had puzzled over it for a very long time and on some level had made the connection but this is how he had to “see” it.
I “see” things like this all of the time but can seldom make the necessary connections and it pisses me the fuck off. Sometimes it turns out that I’m simply trippin’ yo. Other times I find out what the connection is and end up kicking myself. 99% of the time I never find out.
This was an early teens thing for you? The “when I was a child” segments of the song always made me envision a kid of maybe 6 or 8, and so did your post, up until this line.
This phenomena seems to me to also be related to the conceit that the world we experience is something like an illusion or construct, and that if you could just ‘turn around’ quick enough you’d get a look behind the curtain and see the world’s real workings. I’d also bet it’s related to the more or less vague feeling some have that one is some kind of imposter or fake (for me, it’s that I was literally an alien) and the world is an elaborate stage upon which they act or are studied or whatever.
Also, didn’t Plato basically think that babies are born with perfect knowledge of all things (or maybe just of the Forms) and that life’s experiences kind of beat that knowledge out of you?
I’ve been reading *Hallucinations *by Oliver Sacks, and in one chapter on hemianopia (loss of sight in one-half of the field of vision), describes how people keep hallucinating stuff in the nonfunctioning half-field. The brain has a way of filling in what it expects to get, but isn’t getting, from sensory input. Maybe in the outer edge of the field of vision, the brain is expecting something that happens to be just out of reach of ocular perception, and just makes up something.
