pnictogen-wing

The Pnictogen Wing

@pnictogen-wing

  • they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)

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pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

dissociation and the passage of time

I keep coming back to this video clip—it's from the first Heaven's Feel movie, and the moment I first saw it I knew that I'd seen an accurate representation of what a dissociative experience is like.

Emiya Shirou hits an invisible "Bounded Field" (a magical construct) that's been erected round his high school, and he zones out. but more to the point: he does not know that he has zoned out.

there's a bustle of people around Shirou as he hits the field, and then he's glancing around, and his perception seems normal. there's still a sound of bustling people; he sees students walking and stretching, though his glances have a curiously blurred and distorted look about them, like he's got tunnel vision. it seems like only a few moments have passed.

and then suddenly he's interrupted: really Shirou has been standing there frozen for a while, and everyone's gone. his sense of internal time was all wrong; it's not been "a few moments", and now Emiya Shirou's late for school. how did this happen?

"dissociation" is the answer but now my (unanswered) question is why dissociation should produce that sort of dislocation in time. what's actually happening when someone's internal perception of the passage of time is so completely out of whack with their surroundings?

~Chara

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in reply to @pnictogen-wing's post:

IkomaTanomori
@IkomaTanomori

Biographic memory is a fragile thing, and mutable, as we never store all the information of our senses from every moment. The details we retain can become confused in their ordering in many ways, most often just by the passage of time without thinking about the subject. Traumatic dissociation takes the fragile construct and smashes it, and when it gets back together, it can get really, really messy. If an intentionally set up recall structure is a memory palace, I can imagine dissociation as the trauma being a cannon, shelling that castle, which then needs rebuilding and the rubble is all jumbled.

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pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

that makes sense—I mean, the more dissociated you are, the less incoming information you are processing, so it's like you inhabit a simpler and simpler world and one with fewer decisions to make—until you get some sudden reminder of a thing that your fragile awareness can't handle.

there's a thing that happens in the Witches' Labyrinths from "Madoka Magica" where one setting within a labyrinth gives way to another with extreme suddenness, like the world was a mere paper background getting ripped aside and replaced with another. I feel like that's also applicable to the experience of great dissociation.

~Chara

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