I walk a lot everyday, and so I sometimes get bored looking at the same sights and sounds. (To me, looking at sounds is as normal as looking at sights. That’s the wonderful thing about having my type of synaesthesia).
In order to amuse myself, I put on music, not just to listen but also to see.
Today I walked home from my brother’s house. It was dark, and cold, but there was plenty of life about the streets. The music I listened to helped me to block out the uncertain sounds and movements of drunk people outside bars, and cars flying past. Once I pass beyond the bustle the road goes quiet again, that’s when I let my mind wander. It’s better in the dark, when the cloudy, purple-black sky is more like a blank canvas.
I turn the music on my phone up loud, and then watch to see what happens when I look around, and relax. The road is now a forest. Green ivy is shooting up around the house fronts until they are almost obscured. Foxes dart in and out of the huge roots of ancient trees. Shadows that passing cars cast on walls become soaring birds, or even dragons. The road becomes a river, and the sky is now the ceiling of the forest. I watch in wonder as the entire street grows out of control, wild and enchanted; it moves according to the chords of the music.
In some ways I can control it. I’ve learned that if I just relax and let my subconscious (or whatever you want to call it) take over, then little suggestions can change neon lights into old gas lamps, or shop fronts into caves. I have no control over the colours – the sound dictates that. Things happen in front of my eyes that I have absolutely no conscious control over. They just appear and disappear and sometimes take dark turns. Sometimes there are monsters. But I know they are just figments of my imagination, created when my brain decides to make sense of the sounds I hear through visual imagery.
A friend once told me, that the way I described my synaesthetic experiences sounded a lot to him like when he took LSD, or some other hallucinogen. I suppose it must do to a “normal” brain, what mine does automatically. Only I’m lucky because I don’t feel beholden to my hallucinations. I know there are no dragons in the street. But these illusions are always there, in one form or another. Luckily for me, I never ‘come down.’
I don’t always chose to indulge in these fairy tale scenes. I have spent a lot of my adult life learning to control the hallucinations. Sometimes I need to concentrate – it’s hard to negotiate traffic when for a second I feel like I’m actually walking through water, not on tarmac, so I learn how to tone it down, or partially to block it, if I can. Usually I just hit pause on my music player. Then the street will become filled with new, more familiar and prosaic images. Harsh, bouncing geometric shapes (car horns), clouds of red and brown (smells from their exhausts), little black and white boxes (rain on the pavement).
Having synaesthesia has taught me a lot about the nature of reality. It’s shown me that the world isn’t just separated into two realms, the tangible, and the intangible, but that there are shades in between. When I was walking through the street-forest tonight (created by Sia’s Million Bullets song from her new album This Is Acting) occasionally I would brush past the branches of one of my imaginary trees, but as I brushed past I could feel it touch me. I didn’t feel it in the way a person feels a touch upon their skin, rather I saw the pattern the sensation of touch would make, were I to touch something. My mind created the pattern in anticipation of a touch that never happened.
My reality is not like other peoples. I live simultaneously in two different worlds, one real, one imaginary, both as tangible and intangible as each other. On sad days I console myself with the fact that, in my own head at least, I am a magician. I can create illusions, and dispel them, and no one would ever know, unless I told them.
Everyday Synaesthesia 