Making Yourself Invisible

*warning* This is a post about weird stuff, not science, as such, and I thought, essentially, that I'd plagiarise Dizzy's post on ayahuasca type drugs. Incidentally I wonder if he has read Graham Hancock?

This idea came up in a conversation at the weekend (I was sober, so were my interlocutors). My friend said that someone they knew had actually made themselves invisible: through power of thought, or through some other process, and had avoided her friends looking for her. As if she had been watching the scene unfold on a television, or so it seemed to me. I wasn't sure if it was intentional or not, but the implication was that it had just happened, there and then, like a thought coming to you out of nowhere. Crime & Punishment aside, the question is, not how (we'll leave that for a moment) but why? In the context of the story it was not as though the person had ceased to exist: they were thinking, and standing, and watching. They just had no corporeal existence. They couldn't influence or change anything ("it's all too late," etc etc - see TD posts passim) but were somehow there and not there. So it's not really being Godlike - more like being Christlike I suppose - but a momentary fact, one you accept and enter into. I don't remember in the story the person being scared or wishing to return to sight although they did, eventually. I can see it or read it (hmmm, visual metaphors for an auditory experience) as a kind of death-wish: as one of those ghastly Joy Division loving teenagers I would stare into a mirror for minutes at a time and imagine that I was flipping or zipping out of existence for a moment; sometimes it seemed real enough until I moved, or coughed, or something. but it was something to be desired - not to not be noticed, or anything so shallow, but to be literally unphysical: soul, maybe. So perhaps it's not a death-wish after all but a desire to return to religious or spiritual roots - a satire on materialism, even (what would happen if I divested myself of all belongings, including my body, but continued to exist? aha, but you can't...).

Unfortunately at the time of the conversation I was able only to nod and hmmm a bit. It has been too long since I've actually had real conversations with real human beings about things other than work, mathematics and New Labour.

None of this post is to be taken as "uh ho, TD has gone off the deep end", if you don't mind, dear reader. I haven't gone off the deep end, though anyone who has regularly read this blog should know that I stand on it by my own volition, unable to believe that the limited perceptions of a flawed and inconsistent being can be in any way true to what I hope is the infinite majesty of creation.