October 3, 2002

  • Just curious to know if anyone other than myself has ever experienced occasions of eidetic overlay?  “Eidetic overlay,” you say, “what the hell’s that?”   Well, yes, I’d best explain since I just coined the term and really am not at all aware if anything like it is recorded in the journals of the psychology of perception.  In all fairness, it may well be that what I term *eidetic overlay* is a common phenomenon otherwise labelled—but that I’ve just simply never myself encountered it in literature or heard anyone else ever speak of it.  For if I were to author two encyclopedias, one of my knowledge and one of my ignorance, the latter would dwarf the former by far!  So my *not having heard something* signifies to me little concerning existence, but much concerning my own possible lack of awareness.  Nonetheless, just in case…


    Eidetic overlay is a memory-induced perceptual state I’ve experienced occasionally in my life where one perception, apprehended eidetically or in a *photographic* sense, is recalled in its still heightened sense when the original object of perception is encountered again anew eidetically (i.e., by *photographic memory*).  The collision of the eidetic recall with the new eidetic apprehension causes the former to overlay the latter thus instantaneously creating yet a newer sequentially framed perception of the object—in this simple case, a “two-frame movie”, so to speak.  Perhaps it’s better if I give you an example of this—something that happened to me yesterday:  I was driving into the city and from 20 miles away I took in a view of the cityscape.  I keyed on the tallest building of the city and that was that.  But later on at lunch time when I sitting on a bench near this building, I happened to gaze up it and that’s when the first “cityscape image” overlaid the then current “looking up” image to make a little movie for me to look at.  I then laid down on the bench, closed my eyes, soaked in some sun, and about ten minutes later just flashed my eyes open again.  I thus took the building in from a slightly different perspective and this became the *third* eidetic image now joined by the previous two-frame to become a three-frame movie.  And then I closed my eyes and played it precisely back: Yes, my brain was constructing eidetic video: three separate, yet all vivid and detailed images, now conjoined into a sequence and now likely waiting to be potentially joined by my next eidetic intake of the perceptual target. 


    Ah, but things can get crazier yet.  One time for me, this sort of sequencing of an object went on everyday for almost a month.  So that by the end of that period, I had a vivid sequence of 20 or more images all chronologically arrayed—and all always triggered and augmented by the very next visual encounter. 


    All of this, let me state, is not just a matter of “remembering and reflecting” upon what something previously perceived was like when encountered again.  Rather, than being a cognitive impression, it’s really a perceptual assault: the object “as seen” is overlaid with the precise vividities with which is was previously seen thus creating and unreeling a realistic hallucination.   Yes, I suppose it is a hallucination, generally speaking, since one has the distinct impression of “seeing” more than is “really” there.  But it’s not a hallucination in the sense that anything’s imagined.  Rather, time is compressed out and what is “seen” is a trans-temporal, multi-faceted distillation of a subject in more fullness and richness. 


    Is this making any sense?  Or haven’t the drugs worn off yet?


    If making sense, then perhaps I’ll soon relate a mutational experience of eidetic overlay where the sequentially-tagged on images were not of the same object as encountered in the moment and dream imagery inserted itself to make the act of perception stranger yet...

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