Depends if you can wank off or not - if you can’t that’d be way too frustrating to be entertaining. (Which is the same reason I wouldn’t peek in on couples in bedrooms - well, that and lingering moral qualms.)
And that brings up another question. There weren’t any movies in 1818. When did he start taking an interest? In the '20s? Late '30s? Or just within Meenie’s lifetime? What about live theater? Did he ever skip over to Hartford to see out-of-town tryouts?
Wrong thread
He started watching movies in the 1930s. He watches live theatre sometimes too and did before the movies, but he likes the movies better. He just likes to be around people, even if they can’t talk to him and to share an experience with them, even if they don’t know he’s there.
This is the most bizarre thread I think I have ever read here.
If meenie has something neurological going on, wouldn’t it be manifesting likely in other ways too? What are the odds that it would be a consistent delusion with no other delusions accompanying it? I admit it’s not my area of expertise… does this happen? The truly delusional people I know are thoroughly psychotic, not just about one thing… their whole schema of reality is warped. That’s not the impression I’m getting from meenie, though it’s possible there are a host of other things she perceives as normal that really aren’t, she just hasn’t mentioned them to anyone yet.
So are you actually saying that meenie is pathetic for believing in her ghost friend, or that we who think it would be fun to have a ghost friend are pathetic?
If the latter is what you’re getting at… seriously? Have you never read HHGTG or listened to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody? Did you sit out The Dark Knight? You don’t listen to music, read books or watch movies? What is entertainment besides pure fantasy escapism? I think that stuff is kind of fun. meenie’s story reminds me of the cheap teenie-bopper ghost novels I read in junior high, and brings back a kind of a quaint and pleasant nostalgia. You may not agree, which is fine, but that doesn’t mean you corner the market on maturity (or channeling your sense of wonder into every day life, for that matter.) The fantastic things our minds come up with have a lot to say about reality and human nature. If a large portion of the adult population did not find the suspension of disbelief or pushing the limits of reality compelling, many of our major artistic movements would not exist. A world without surrealism, existentialism, dadaism, impressionism, freakin’ Franz Kafka, Orwell’s 1984, Picasso’s Guernica – that would be the real fucking tragedy.
I dunno that I’d consider Orwell’s 1984 a flight of fancy. It’s a slightly exaggerated satire of the Soviet Union under Stalin. It’s not nearly as far-fetched as, say, Huxley’s Brave New World.
I never read Brave New World. Guernica isn’t a flight of fancy either – those bombs really fell during the Spanish Civil War-- but it, like cubism itself, is a kind of distortion of reality. My point is that invention isn’t just a silly children’s pastime. It does everything from entertain to provoke social change and it is perpetuated quite liberally by adult society. Maturity has got nothing to do with it – the impetus to create is part of the human condition.
Olives is 100% right, of course, fantasy and suspension of disbelief are important components of being human. Tie it in with moral storytelling, and it can change people’s minds, alter perspectives and warm hearts. That’s why art, books and movies are so important.
However, dreaming up a fantasy, and getting lost in it for a short while is different than dreaming up a fantasy and believing it as if it were part of reality. Not just that, but insisting on it to others. In other words, it’s one thing to get lost in the world of the Wizard of Oz, but to believe and insist there are real flying monkeys that hound you on a day to day basis is totally different.
Oh, I agree, but not for the reasons you think.
How do you know she doesn’t have other symptoms? She only has 400 posts, so it’s not like she’s told us her complete life story. Her other symptoms might be boring but related to an underlying neurological problem.
Again, how do you know it’s only about one thing? And her whole schema may be warped, if she truly believes that she is daily hanging out with someone who doesn’t exist. You can be functional in this world but still suffering from delusions. I’ve met people who held onto bizarre beliefs that were delusional, and one sure way they found to maintain their delusions was to find people who either shared their delusions or would humor them. Where did they find such people? On the internet, of course.
I think humoring someone who likely has a serious medical issue because you wish you had an invisible friend is kind of creepy. I wouldn’t liken meenie’s “imagination” with what Orwell or Kafka were doing. They knew they were making shit up, for fun and profit. You believe meenie is not doing that, and we know that we cannot communicate with the dead, so, you’re comparing apples and hand grenades.
She said that she’s had blackouts and fainting spells. She’s also said that she seen other ghosts.
Is it going to do any harm for to make sure she doesn’t have neurogical going on? What’s mor likely, that there’s a medical explanation or that she’s actually talking to a ghost?
There is distinct gulf between reading—or writing—a Kafka novella and asserting that you’re best pals with a giant talking bug.
Regardless of your view on these issues, an appointment with a good neurologist seems like a sensible idea. FWIW and IANAD, fainting spells and blackouts alone would lead me to pick up the telephone, at least.
Olive isn’t doing any of those things. Go back and read the thread.
Yes, instructive, isn’t it, that the ‘invisible friend’ turns out to be as drab, mundane and boring as meenie7 herself.
She’s clearly making this shit up as she goes along, although giving any substance to her fictional creation is proving beyond her powers. Instead we get idiotic stuff about how the ghost likes movies and the theater, etc. ‘It needs no ghost come from beyond the grave’ to tell us this twaddle. The whole thing is beyond parody.
I am being grossly misunderstood here. My first post in this thread was this:
Trunk said these things:
I asked him to clarify whether he was directing that insult at people like me (who think it would be kind of cool to have a ghost friend) or people like meenie (who think that ghost friends really exist), and then I defended my position that the two were not the same thing and there is really nothing wrong with a little bit of whimsical thinking as exhibited by myself, Freudian Slit, Dung Beetle and any others of us out there who thought, “Hmmm… if only…” when meenie told her little tale.
If anyone it was Trunk comparing apples to hand-grenades if in fact he was conflating my playful perspective with an 8-year-long delusional friendship with an imaginary ghost. Rereading the exchange, I’m not so sure he was doing that, though. At any rate, my defense of imagination had nothing to do with delusional thinking, but rather with the tangential discussion about whether or not there is room for imagination and playfulness in mature adult psychology.
Out of basic human decency I’m a little concerned about meenie’s mental health, but only meenie is responsible for her own psychological well-being and I’m not about to say any more than, “You really should get that checked out, dear.” I don’t like to accuse people of lying but it might actually be the preferable of the explanations here since the alternative may have rather serious implications. I did not at any point suggest that I was humoring anyone’s delusions. I know the difference between fantasy and reality and I rather think it’s an important thing to maintain.
Perhaps you got confused by the speculation about neurological disorders and psychosis. That was merely intended as a kind of GQ-within-a-pit-thread. I wanted to know if having one very detailed and extensive delusion but otherwise being normal in all other aspects (as meenie reports that she is, not counting her unexplained physical symptoms) was consistent with a neurological condition. I was not denying that such condition existed, I just wanted to know if it was possible for a human being to believe they have a ghost friend for 8 years, to exhibit no other signs of mental instability, and for such a condition to have a neurologically quantifiable cause. For all we know meenie has a hundred delusions a day and just doesn’t know they aren’t real and never thought to check.
The reason I asked is because all the people I know with psychosis and delusions are very obviously psychotic and deluded. There’s no faking it with them. They have crazy written all over. I was just curious. Not trying to prove or disprove anything, just flat-out, without-an-agenda, innocently, genuinely curious.
I hope that clears things up.
If someone was about to jump off a building because they thought they could fly, I suppose you could opine that it would be “awesome” if people could really fly, but it would be an inane and irrelevant point, and saying you’re “jealous” even more so. It was asinine for you to say you were “jealous” of a person with hallucinations and a possible neurological disorder.
Too bad none of the things listed in your post are happening here, otherwise you might have a point.
So… back to the direct object of the thread… Meenie, are you still there? What’s your reaction to the dice experiment, now that you’ve had a few days to think about it?
Yes it did:
She said it would be “awesome” to really have a ghost friend, which is an inane response to a real person with real hallucination (assumimg meenie is not lying), and then said she was “jealous,” which was extremely ignorant. I can assure her that psychosis is nothing to be “jealous” of.
When, oh when, will you shut up? I took olive’s post as an attempt to interject a lighthearted aside into a 6-page trainwreck. You, however, have used it as another opportunity to take yourself way too seriously.
Besides which, you have no right to call other posters’ suggestions “ignorant” when yours have been even more so. Of course, I may have missed that part of the psychology training that advocates calling someone “crazy” in so many words.