Smoke & Mirrors

September 14, 2023

Twister is a 1996 blockbuster film produced by Steven Spielberg and co-written by Michael Crichton, which information tells you essentially all you need to know about the movie Twister. It’s a 90s blockbuster, which means its about natural disasters. It’s produced by Steven Spielberg, so you know it features two characters with a complicated relationship that becomes slightly less complicated as the movie goes on, for the reason that they are too busy avoiding death to have a complicated relationship. It’s co-written by Michael Crichton, which means two-thirds of the movie is spent running toward or away from things.

We put on Twister the other night because I needed something comforting to watch. The reason I needed something comforting to watch is because I was having trouble believing that the world was real. Twister is comforting for me because, for whatever reason, my parents have watched it 45 times, and I was there for at least five of those times. I basically know how the story goes. Scenes from the movie are connected with memories from the past. If I have memories of the past, that means I am alive. If I’m alive, there probably exists a reality in which I am alive.

Twister is not necessarily a comforting movie, as my wife soon found out. It’s about people almost getting killed by tornadoes over and over for two hours. When I was a kid, tornadoes weren’t real, because I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. At my school, we had earthquake drills. In 2004, I learned the word “tsunami.” Sometimes, when I feel like it, I worry about earthquakes and tsunamis. I don’t usually worry about tornadoes.

After the first scene of the movie, in which a man is pulled out of a tornado shelter and thrown helplessly into the air by a category 4 tornado, my wife decided to look up whether there are tornadoes in Saskatchewan, the province to which we are likely moving next year. The answer to that inquiry was: yes. She looked at me with wide, soon-to-be-tearful eyes. She grabbed my shoulder. “I don’t want to move anymore.”

Currently, the entire Northwest portion of our continent seems to be on fire. Where we live, this means little more than that smoke intermittently fills the air for days on end. In a relative sense, that’s not so bad. We bought an air purifier.

One response to sitting inside all day with the windows closed, unable to see mountains or even skyscrapers, while the sky transitions between different shades of orange, is to feel a little strange. One starts wondering about things. Eventually, if the conditions are right, and one has a particular kind of psychological make-up, that wonder turns into a sense of anxiety. One begins to worry about things that maybe one didn’t worry about before.

At the end of a long day where my one of my legs wouldn’t stop shaking and none of my breaths felt quite satisfying, the day turned to night. It was dark outside. Sometimes, when it’s dark outside, and all the lights are on inside, I get this funny feeling. I start to feel like darkness means nonexistence. I look into the corner of my living room, and find there’s something odd about it. It’s hard to place. It’s like I’m looking at a film set. I look at my wife. I look into her eyes. Shoot, I think, that is not my beautiful wife. That might be someone else. That might be just about anyone.

I look away. I look at the corner of the room again. That corner is definitely not right. There’s something wrong about it, a something wrong that is also tied to the fact that I feel like someone wants to kill me. My wife says something like, “Are you okay?” I try to respond, but my own voice frightens me a little bit. I trail off. Now I’m sitting on the floor, and I’m definitely about to cry, because I’ve realized that not only is the world not real, and not only am I going to die, but also that both of those things are true because I am living in a nightmare, and that nightmare isn’t one that I can wake up from.

This is when I do something like watch the 1996 film Twister. I mean, what else am I going to do? I’ve got to do something.

When I was young, one of my greatest fears was that I would one day go insane. I was terrified of hallucinations, because I knew that, unlike corporeal entities, there is nothing you can do to make them go away. Even if you know they’re unreal, they’re still there. I had many dreams back then, and many of these many dreams were nightmares. This remains the case today. My dreams turn to nightmares fairly easily. All it takes is for me to start wondering a little about what might be around the corner; all of a sudden, I realize that anything could be around the corner. In my mind, infinite possibility generally means the possibility of something infinitely bad.

To be insane, I thought, was to live in an endless nightmare. I didn’t really understand psychosis or mental health; this is why I conceptualized it as simply “going insane.” It seemed like something that happened all at once, like turning a switch. One moment I’m just me, living in the real world, and then the next moment I am an insane person.

In my experiences, hallucinations are a lot more similar to falling asleep. When you’re asleep, you think you’re awake. You think the asleep world is the real world. However, then it ends, and everything is back to normal. My first ever hallucinations were caused by delirium and lack of hydration during a particularly acute illness. I was around fifteen years old. I was lying on the sofa, and Dora the Explorer had come on the TV. However, when I looked away from the TV, Dora the Explorer was still there. She was on the ceiling, singing. This was not ideal, but it wasn’t the end of the world, either. It was just strange.

Later that day, when I was lying in bed, I thought a rugby practice was happening inside of my bedroom. Rugby balls were flying through the air over my head, threatening to hit me. I could hear my teammates yelling and jeering. All I wanted was to take a sip of water, but I was afraid an errant ball would smash the glass.

Some time later, perhaps years later, I was sick again, and as I lay in bed, I watched myself walk down the hallway to the bathroom. I could see myself enter the bathroom, and I could also see through my eyes as I was entering the bathroom. I could also feel myself lying on the bed, and see through my eyes as I lay in bed. All of these things were happening at once, and it was impossible to tell which was the “truth.”

This was all harmless fun, in the end. It was a little odd, of course, but nothing frightening. Certainly not the terrifying “insanity” of my childhood imaginings. Just a little delirium.

My first episode of what a cursory Google search later termed “derealization” concluded in a panic attack. It started while I was in bed talking to my wife. As in the episode described above, I suddenly found that I couldn’t recognize her. I felt that perhaps an evil spirit had inhabited her body. Her eyes especially terrified me, and I couldn’t look at her face. I kept thinking about the hallway, and what might be in the hallway. I started mumbling about something. I closed my eyes and curled into a shaking ball, in which position I groaned and trembled until my fear reached a crescendo, and then crested like a wave. I opened my eyes. I was on Earth Planet.

I hadn’t known what was going on. Neither of us had known what was going on. She had tried to comfort me, but it’s not particularly comforting being comforted by an entity you don’t believe to be real, and who you think might kill you. My solution, however impractical, of shutting myself off from the world until I no longer wanted to scream, had worked, to a certain extent.

But it had happened: I had gone insane. I had, wide awake and wide aware, substituted a psychological unreality for reality. I had believed well and truly in a fiction of my own mind. And I knew it could happen again.

And it did happen again. And again. For all I know, it will continue to happen for the rest of my life. I have learned to subdue the worst effects. I have learned to do things like watch Twister, or listen to a Neil Young album I like. If I don’t fully buy into the feeling, it only exists as a strange filter over my perception of reality. I can recognize it as a temporary misunderstanding, like when you think someone said something really weird, until you ask them to repeat it and realize that they were just asking you if you wanted a cookie.

I am generally an anxious person. Anxiety is essentially a state of believing terrible things are going to happen, regardless of their actual likelihood. It is substituting reality for a fantasy of fear. In this sense, it’s not that different from my episodes of derealizing panic. It’s a difference of degree, not of kind. Instead of believing I am going to die right now, I believe I am going to die tomorrow, when I go to the job interview.

The question becomes then whether I am ever truly living in reality. I am always substituting reality for imaginary whims. When I’m happy, the world seems shining, and when I’m anxious, the world seems frightening. When it’s dark and it’s night, I feel like I’m alone; when it’s light during the day, I don’t, even though my actual proximity to other people is the same in either case. During the day, I believe that the world is demanding I do something; at night, I believe that the world is giving me a break. But the world has nothing to do with any of this. It’s just me.

What’s really happening when I “derealize” is not that I start believing that the world isn’t real, but that I stop believing that the world is real. I abandon the fantasy that tells me I know for sure what’s going on beyond my windows or in the hallway. I abandon the fantasy that tells me I know what goes on in the mind of this person I live with. I see it all as it is: an unsettling and chaotic amalgam of stimuli. I give up on organizing these stimuli in terms of categories and rules, and instead accept it as unknowable and unpredictable. The truth is that I could die at any moment. The truth is that my wife might not be my wife, and might instead be an alien impersonating my wife. How am I to know? I cruise through my whole life on assumptions and presumptions, as if I know for sure that these rules I’ve invented or imbibed are wholly accurate, when the real truth is that I’ve got no idea what’s the truth!

However, truthful or no, derealization is no way to live a life. It’s like that HP Lovecraft story where the man invents a machine that allows him to hear and see all the cosmic entities that exist unseen and unheard all around us. As you might expect, the man loses his goddamn mind, and rightfully so. We’re probably not meant to know about all that. Similarly, it’s probably best not to spend your entire life sure of the fact that anything is possible, especially when the tendency of one’s mind is to equate “anything” only with the most terrible possibilities inherent in that category.

Thus, sometimes a man must watch the 1996 film Twister, even if it is a little silly, and even if it does frighten his wife a little. After all, her fear of being suddenly whisked away by a tornado is but a product of her own little insanity.