Inner Landscape

Let it Go
In a recent email thread between Phillip Montgomery (another recent atheist) and a Christian of a decidedly mystical slant, the Christian suggested that Phil was obsessing far too much with demolishing the ideas of the Christian right. 'Let it go, man' said the Christian. And indeed, I believe that I ought to do the same thing here. The edifice of Christianity has been torn down now and it is time for me to build myself in its stead.

The first place that I will start then is with a long-standing vice of mine. This is, after all, a blog (also known as one of the most well-known forms of public narcissism the Internet has to offer).

It is odd that I should maintain a blog about my experience with autism without giving some description of the kinds of thoughts that I have. After all, autism is characterized by a high degree of self absorption within, coupled with a general air of pathological mystery without. A lot of the fantasizing and thinking that I do centres around a system I like to call dramatic associative imagery (DAI). I will spend this post then discussing the salient aspects of that system.

Its Origin
DAI has a three-fold origin. It has, in some form or another, existed throughout much of my life. When I was very young I would fantasize that my entire body was a kind of machine, populated by persons responsible for maintaining and 'piloting' it. I also enjoyed constructing fantasies around films I saw – Star Wars being a major one.

The second part of the origin of DAI comes from my time being assisted by various teachers and special needs workers. I would take their methodologies in counseling me and internalize them and then perform a kind of auto-counseling. Indeed, even to this day I do this.

Finally, the third part of DAI's origin comes from my time as a Christian. By the end of grade eight I had given up as demonic my fantasies about being a machine populated by 'micro-humans.' After all, pretending that you have imaginary friends inside of you helping you out is clearly a sign that a demon is influencing you.

When I was a Christian I was imminently aware of the threatening nature of sexuality. The Christian is to be on guard against his sexual urges at all times (sexuality in any form outside of marriage is a sin and I should not find it surprising if God has also decreed sinful anything other than missionary position sex).

Thus, I performed a legalistic back-flip around the Bible and built an elaborate narrative framework around the battle between myself and my sexual urges, personifying the latter as an evil horde of horrifying monsters and the former as an elite military force sent to stop them. One might see parallels between this and James Cameron's cult hit Aliens. I suppose this behaviour was similar to that of William Stillman's patient Vic, described in the former's recent book (see my earlier review), who integrated the character of Nosmo King from a television show into his common parlance in order to produce a coherent narrative of his anxieties and fears (Stillman, p. 137). However, unlike Vic, I never actually told anyone of my fantasies, believing that others would see them as unacceptable and would otherwise tell me to stop having them.

This is not to say that I consciously decided one day, “I'm going to make up a metaphorical world in which soldiers fight aliens and have it represent every young man's battle.” Instead, the idea to do this arose from the fact that since 1996 such worlds tended to spring up of their own accord without my consciously wanting them to do so, despite my earlier having consigned to hell the demonic micro-humans. I enjoyed imagining the worlds (they are quite entertaining) and so there they were. DAI is really just a kind of application of structure to something that was already there, rather like science is the application of structure to nature, which is already there.

By 1998, I had developed something like DAI as it is now. I had in place a metaphorical conception of myself as a nation (at the time I called this metaphorical nationalism) and an allegorical world in which my life situations could be played out as stories. I viewed my relationships with other people, for example, on the stage of international relations and diplomacy. As I entered university and learned about data structures, DAI began to take on more interesting features, to which I will turn now.

Its Structure
DAI is composed of two major parts. The first is the consultant and the second is the construct. The consultant is a person signifying some part or aspect of myself. The construct is the actual world in which the consultant resides. I call the people in the metaphorical worlds consultants because I often watch them having discussions amongst themselves about whatever particular problem I might be trying to solve. The term also hearkens back to the special needs workers discussed earlier in this post.

DAI constructs themselves are then able to work in tandem like parallel universes. For example, the DAI I had going for dealing with sex ended up having about four different virtual worlds by the time I was in my first year of university. I cannot quite recall all of them now, but I believe the F-22 Raptor featured in one of them. I ended up visualizing the worlds as flat planes stacked on top of one another. This stack-like structure I referred to as a cube (a la Borg). The cube itself is an example of a meta-construct. Meta-constructs are constructs that encompass one or more constructs. In computer science terms, a meta-construct is like a data structure for storing the DAI constructs.

More recently, I have created self-referential constructs. For example, in one of my worlds there is a large university with a computer science department that itself houses a super computer that stores several DAI constructs. There are also consultants called architects that have special powers over certain aspects of the reality within the DAI construct.

Its Application
Apart from making the life more interesting, I like to use DAI as a motivating mechanism. For example, I like to use it to entertain myself with my progress as I complete a given project.

Now with this post I don't intend to say that my thinking is always this way. Rather, I tend to use the structure of DAI to further entertain myself when I am imagining things. When I'm right in the thick of things at work, for example, I rarely have the time to build something like DAI and use it.