Negative Hallucination

Salvador Dali, in his surreal Autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, states that one of his most relevant discoveries is that of the Negative Hallucination.  Hallucination is the act of seeing something which is not there, a creation of the mind; a projection.  I have seen people experiencing full blown hallucination, and it always leaves me a little shaken.  They are truly observing another entire reality, and no amount of explaining will “bring them back.”  Hallucinations are as real to the subject experiencing them as commonplace reality is to you or me.  This is not a point which I take lightly.  The mind is a powerful thing.  Dali defines his phenomena, negative hallucination, as NOT seeing something which is there, the unspoken ally of the positive or standard hallucination experience.  In order to enter a fictional world, you first have to block out the real. 

On the same note, I would like to analyze another (perhaps related) phenomenon.  To do so, let me tell you something which happened to me today.  Bear with me.

I am the co-owner of a Chevrolet Silverado truck.  My girlfriend drives it to work every day, and we both take time to maintain it and keep it clean.  Today, after waking up, I looked at the truck and noticed something I had never seen before, for the life of me.  It was a tiny square plastic box, to the right of the trailer hitch, which upon further inspection contained a keyhole.  We are unsure the purpose of it, as the vehicle did not come with a manual.  I was about to shrug off the odd feeling which this gave me, the feeling that reality had changed. (Because that’s crazy, says the rational mind)  But wait.  My girlfriend was watching me react to this truck accoutrement with great interest.  Without any prompting on my part she said, “I noticed that today too, I’ve never seen it before.”

The rational materialistic analysis states that reality can’t change, that the world is made of things, and that these things exist with or without our observation of them.

The alternative, observer-based universe states that our observation has an effect on reality itself.  It posits that objects are perhaps just information, or wave forms, awaiting our projective “observation.” 

Are our preconceived notions about reality preventing us from seeing reality change?  Is there an internal circuit of the brain that causes us to accept any and all such reality changes by justifying that they have always been there? 

Now obviously, this little keyhole is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.  I don’t even know (or care) what it’s for.  But let’s say that my brain was presented with another, larger, more relevant cognitive incongruity.  What would it do? 

Let’s recap. 

I have owned this truck for a year. 

I clean it all the time.

I take great interest in this vehicle.

My girlfriend does the same.

We both, on the same day, noticed a “new thing” which we had never seen before.

I have had this experience before.  When I was little, I observed a bush that had never, to my knowledge, been there before, just in front of my Grandparents farmhouse.  I waited for the school bus there every morning for years and years.  And I know this sounds crazy, but this experience is one I remember to this day.  I was convinced that the stupid bush had never been there before.  Seeing this bush, filled me with an odd sense of wonder, and I asked my Mother and my Grandmother if they had ever seen it before.  I received the “It’s always been there” response, combined with extensive hairy eyeball.

An attempt at explanation:

What if there are different parallel realities, cohabited by parallel me’s?  If, for whatever reason, and for a brief moment, I switched places with another me, this would explain such an incongruity.  Perhaps parallel realities are “placed” in an orderly fashion, stacked beside, so to speak, nearby realities which are similar to them.  The only differentiation between nearby realities could be a single hair out of place.  Perhaps when parallel realities are so similar, so close, a virtual bleed-through phenomenon presents itself.  This “observer-swapping-phenomena,” (inelegant, I know) which is experienced as mildly dissonant confusion, or déjà-vu type hesitation in understanding, could be a very real aspect of the nature of reality.

Returning to the Salvador Dali connection, I have another explanation.  I may have been experiencing the bush, and the truck box/keyhole, as negative hallucinations.  Through repeated, lulling experience, a familiar object might be self-hypnotized into non existence.  This could cause you to literally not be able to see something which is right in front of your eyes.

So which is it?  Mind as reality-producing projection-device, or slippery parallel universes flip flopping back and forth?

The world may never know.