Glitches in the matrix
When glitch perceptions puncture consensus reality
In the film The Matrix, a black cat walks past an open doorway. Then does it again. A character comments that this kind of déjà vu perception signifies a “glitch in the matrix.” The matrix, as presented in the film, is a virtual collective reality in which human beings think they live. Perceptual glitches offer clues that their reality is not what it appears to be.
Here, I will examine three instances of perceptual glitches. While I don’t contend that our shared reality is virtual, I do propose that the everyday physical reality in which we live is neither as solid nor as straightforward as we believe.
My first perceptual glitch
My own first experience of a perceptual glitch occurred at the age of twelve, after I had gone to bed. Often I didn’t feel tired, so I lay there waiting to fall asleep. Eventually, I did. But sometimes I started feeling I was floating inside myself.
Usually, I remained in that floating state for a while, then fell asleep. However, occasionally I felt my awareness float up to the ceiling. I was still aware of my body: I could feel myself lying in bed, blankets over me. But at the same time, I had the perception that my awareness was hovering just below the ceiling, looking down at myself lying in bed. My awareness was bi-located: simultaneously, in bed, and looking down at myself in bed.
No emotion accompanied this perception. I didn’t feel ecstatic. Or uneasy. Nothing about the experience was scary. I felt relaxed and peaceful. After a while — time lost its markers in this state — I realised I was back inside my body and drifted off to sleep.
These floating bi-located perceptions repeated intermittently for a year or so, then tapered off. I never told anyone about them, mainly because they felt so natural I assumed everyone else experienced them, too. Yet no one ever talked about them, so neither did I.
Looking back, it is clear that, in neurological terms, on each of these occasions I entered a hypnagogic state, halfway between waking and sleep. People have reported a range of non-ordinary perceptions when in hypnagogic states, including having visions, vivid dreams, and auditory or tactile sensations — the last involving hearing voices, or being beguiled or creeped out by the sensation of being touched. Neurologists call hypnogogic perceptions hallucinations, because they assume they are entirely subjective and have no objective perceptual pole. In other words, I just imagined I was hovering near the ceiling, looking down at myself in bed. So despite me feeling like the floating sensations had actually happened, according to the scientific view, they didn’t “really” occur at all.
I use quote marks because over the following decade I experienced more perceptual glitches that led me to question the nature of reality and how we experience it. My questioning was stimulated by ingesting psychedelics (primarily LSD), which led me to see the everyday world with a startling intensity very different to our everyday mode, and by my reading of books by Carlos Castaneda and Paul Brunton. My questioning was further reinforced by a number of curious, glitchy experiences I had in India, in my early twenties. (I wrote about these in a previous post, which you can read here:)
Consensus reality and its doubters
The upshot is that through my teens I began to realise that reality is not as solid, nor do we perceive it as straightforwardly, as we think. In particular, I came to appreciate that our assumptions about reality don’t adequately account for its beguiling nature.
Sociologists and anthropologists use the term “consensus reality” to refer to our perception of reality being socially constructed: what “really” exists is collectively agreed via the ideas, attitudes and words we repeatedly use when talking about what is going on in the world around us.
Of course, human beings don’t always agree: it is possible to view reality through a range of different, sometimes contradictory, lenses. A clear example are the opposed lenses of faith-based religion and of scientific naturalism. The first views the world in the context of mythological narratives and uses faith to connect humanity with the divine; the second rejects mythological narratives, denies divinity, accepts only empirically collected sense-based information, and uses rational analysis of that data to identify natural causes.
Adherents of these opposed religious and scientific viewpoints socially group together. This enables them to maintain their collective consensus regarding the nature of reality. Grouping together is also defensive. A group’s consensus forms a bubble, within which members mutually support one another, into which they won’t allow contradictory narratives, data or observations to penetrate. Only information that confirms each group’s constructed outlook is welcomed into their reality bubble.
By my early twenties I had begun to appreciate that no consensus reality is as stable as we imagine. I reached this view as a result of having a mounting number of glitch perceptions that destabilised the scientific, naturalist description of reality which, until then, I had accepted as true.
One memorable glitch experience occurred when my mother invited into our house a woman who foretold futures by reading palms. My mother wanted her to read my future. Interestingly, she refused, saying she didn’t like to do it for young people — I was only fifteen at the time. Instead, she said if I asked a question mentally, she would answer it.
The question I asked — entirely inside my own head — was one I had been thinking about for some time. It was: Should I choose to be a psychologist or a writer? The woman’s answer was not at all what I expected. She said, pretty much in these words: “You should be a writer, because psychologists tend to go as nutty as their patients.”
The psychic’s response was humorously pragmatic. But it was her ability to read my mind so accurately that I found disconcerting. At this time, I was studying physics and chemistry at school, and had wholly adopted the scientific consensus that reality was entirely and only naturalistic. Mind-reading wasn’t included in that consensus. The incident was troubling precisely because it punctured my reality bubble.
Paul Brunton’s mysterious encounter in India
Around this time, I read Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India. In the 1930s Brunton travelled around India. In Mumbai (then Bombay) he encountered Mahmoud Bey, an Egyptian reputed to be a magician, who was staying in the same hotel. Bey had such a sinister reputation that hotel guests broke off their conversations in mid-sentence and stared at him as he walked past. Intrigued, Brunton decided to ask Mahmoud Bey for an interview. What he got was an offer from Bey to show his abilities.
Bey had Brunton write a question on a piece of paper, then fold the paper and hold it in his hand. Bey remained across the other side of the room. The question Brunton wrote was, “Where did I live four years ago?” Bey first told Brunton exactly what his question was, in the words he had written down, then asked Brunton to open the folded paper in his hand. Written under the question, in an unfamiliar writing style, was the name of the place Brunton had lived. Understandably, Brunton found the feat “hardly credible.”
I view Brunton as a valid witness, i.e. I accept he truthfully described what happened to him. What his account meant for me personally was that the mind-reading I had encountered wasn’t a one-off: others had also experienced mind-reading, in Brunton’s case with an added paranormal surprise.
So what’s the upshot? If we seriously accept Brunton’s and my incidents as having occurred, then what does that do to our understanding of reality? Clearly, we need to question our assumptions of what human beings are capable of perceiving and doing. I’ll offer one more example to reinforce this point.
Larry Dossey’s precognitive dream
In his book Reinventing Medicine, Larry Dossey M.D. recounts waking at dawn from a startlingly vivid dream, in which he saw the four-year-old son of one of his medical colleagues shouting and struggling to take off a piece of electronic apparatus. Exasperated, the technician administering the test gave up and left the room. Dossey was busy at the hospital that morning and forgot about the dream. Then, while he was eating lunch with a colleague, his colleague’s wife entered the staff area carrying their son. The boy was upset, having been in the EEG laboratory, where he had refused to allow the technician to attach the brainwave measuring device on his head. In Dorsey’s words, this totally unexpected correlation between his early morning dream and events at the hospital “shook his world.”
Dossey, like me, conceived of reality as existing wholly within the consensus of scientific naturalism. And as far as that consensus is concerned, precognition, like mind-reading, doesn’t occur. Shaken, Dorsey took his colleague aside and told him what had happened. I’ll quote Dossey at this point:
He realised in an instant that if my report was true, his orderly, predictable world had suddenly been rearranged. If one could know the future before it happened, our understanding of physical reality was seriously threatened. He sensed my disturbance, and I sensed his. Our conversation dissipated into silence as we contemplated the implications of these events. (Reinventing Medicine, p 1 ff)
Dorsey observes that he had several similar dreams over the following weeks. Then, as had my night “flying” experiences, they stopped. It was, he writes, “as if the universe, having delivered a message, hung up the phone.”
Which left him, like me, like Paul Brunton, with a crucial question: Once we have such a reality puncturing experience — that isn’t just a glitch, but tears a hole in the reality we think we know — what should we do with it?
Dealing with cognitive dissonance
Brunton and Dossey both commented on the mental shock that followed their experiences. Psychologically, this shock is a state of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we are faced with two items of apparently irreconcilable data: in this case, on the one hand a glitch perception, on the other the idea, grounded in consensus reality, that such perceptions aren’t possible.
Three responses are available to us when we are faced with cognitive dissonance.
First, we can reject the experience as invalid. That leaves our consensually shaped view of reality intact. This is typically the response of those in the scientific community, which rejects such perceptions as hallucinations. Dossey came up against this when he attempted to share his precognitive dream experience with others: they refused to accept it had happened. Many religious people reject consensus-challenging perceptions on the grounds they are delusory, or are even from the Devil. Whatever the rationale, outright rejection of perceptions that challenge the dominant consensus is the first way to quell cognitive dissonance: if you don’t acknowledge that glitch experiences actually occur, there can be no dissonance.
The second way is to set the perception aside as interesting, but not relevant. It’s what I did following my perceptions of floating near the ceiling. At twelve years old I had neither the experiential base to appreciate how unusual this perception was, nor an established conceptual framework which the perception challenged. No one had ever discussed these types of experiences with me, so I had no assumptions regarding them. No dissonance occurred because I had no assumptions for them to butt up against or contradict.
This is the case with most people. In discussion, friends have mentioned their own unusual experiences, including apparent mind-reading, seeing the ghost of a dead relative, and having a strange insight or dream that turned out to be true. But rather than going into it more deeply, they noted it as surprising, interesting, sometimes disturbing, then set it aside. Psychologically, they ringfenced the perception in their memory, so it didn’t interact with their assumptions about the world.
As a result, no cognitive dissonance occurred, and they were free to carry on with their lives. That’s what I did with my memories of floating. I enjoyed them when they occurred, but they didn’t disturb my view of reality. Setting glitch perceptions aside is a pragmatic way of carrying on with our life.
The third way of responding to cognitive dissonance is to take glitch experience seriously. This involves using them to question the assumptions behind the consensus reality to which we ascribe. Doing so leads to a conclusion I find fascinating.
Modelling consensus reality
Being human involves subjectively experiencing the world from birth to death. A vast array of experiences are possible within the timeframe of a single human life. Many experiences are common to us all: eating, drinking, working, sleeping, waking, falling in love, getting ill, grieving. Other experiences we accept as common, but appreciate that not everyone undergoes them. These experiences include having children, becoming wealthy, or winning acclaim. Nonetheless, whether we personally undergo them or not, these are experiences we regard as common to all humanity.
The next set of experiences are nowhere near as common. These are the types of non-ordinary experiences I have been discussing here: feeling our awareness separate from our body, having precognitive dreams, experiencing mind reading, and Brunton’s paranormal interaction with Bey. Other uncommon experiences include interacting with ghosts, remote viewing, ecstatic mystical experiences, near death experiences, and feeling one with nature or God. These experiences may be uncommon, but they are apparently widely undergone, given the extensive literature that describes them. However, they are not experienced by everyone, and even among those who do experience them, they generally do so infrequently. Most traditional communities view many of these uncommon experiences as being quite normal. But in our contemporary world, such experiences stand outside experiential norms, and their occurrence remains contentious.
Beyond these uncommon experiences are extreme, outlier experiences. They are so far beyond the norm that they are widely written off as too fantastical, even impossible. Here we could arguably include levitation, encounters with non-human beings, such as angels, divinities and extraterrestrials, shamanic travelling to the lower and upper worlds, transformation into non-human creatures, and channelling non-embodied entities.
This range of potential human experiences, from the commonly shared, to the uncommon, to outliers, may be pictured in a model. If we envisage the totality of all human experiences as a field, then the vast majority of our perceptions are clustered in the centre of the field. These are our shared everyday experiences. Such experiences occur well within the bounds of consensus reality.
The hard black circle represents the boundary of consensus reality. Within this circle are experiences we unquestionably accept as normal. Beyond this boundary are uncommon experiences that sit outside accepted norms, and so challenge consensus views.
These uncommon experiences sit outside the dark circle, but inside the dotted circle. They represent a band of widely reported experiences — including those I have been discussing here — that I consider deserve serious study. After all, we can’t begin to understand what they involve mentally, emotionally, intellectually and neurologically until we accept they occur. Only then are we in an open position to seriously examine them.
Beyond the dotted circle are profoundly outlier experiences, which, in the context of perceptual norms, just seem bizarre. Yet this is only from the perspective of the reality bubbles in which we live. It we step outside our bubbles, if we are willing to accept the reality of experiences beyond the boundary demarcated by the dark circle … it seems amazing experiences are potentially available.
I am both stimulated and made hopeful by the large number of memoirs, experimental reports and research studies that explore experiences that challenge our assumptions regarding the normative range of human experiences. I will explore the implications of these discoveries in subsequent posts.
I end with a quotation from the great Nicola Tesla, which sums up the break-through in knowledge we will make when, as a culture, we start taking uncommon and outlier experiences seriously.
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. — Nicola Tesla
Ideas in this post are drawn from material first published in Keith Hill’s book, The New Mysticism: How scientific and religious paradigms are being overturned by daring explorers revealing hidden aspects of reality. The book was runner-up for Best Book in New Zealand’s 2017 Ashton Wylie Awards.
