Visual Dissociation

Has anyone else ever had the experience of suddenly finding the spelling of a word that is in front of them, like on a projector/computer/tv screen/book etc, totally abnormal and weird? Almost as if you’re seeing the word and it’s spelling for the very first time? The word itself, it’s meaning and context in the surrounding text is all still intact but the spelling of it, visually, suddenly seems totally off.

This happens to me occasionally like most recently it was the word, “sphere”. Right now, typing that, it makes perfect sense. S-P-H-E-R-E. No problem. But when I was reading and seeing this word on the projector, every instance on the screen looked odd to me. It’s hard to explain but like I say the best way of describing it is as if I’m seeing the spelling of it for the first time. It only normally lasts for about 5 minutes or so but those 5 minutes are weird!

Another related thing that happens less often but that is equally striking if not more so is that I can be looking at someone who I’ve seen many times before and suddenly on this occasion I’m arrested by them visually. Their visual quirks will stand out as if luminous and I’ll get an overall sense of them visually that strikes me as new and much more complete even though I’m not strictly speaking seeing anything new or out of the ordinary that I’ve not seen before. Nor am I trying to see something new either, it feels thrust upon me.

I thought maybe with people it was that when I first saw them, I made connections in my mind with regards to very specific elements of these people but that in fact I filtered out a whole lot too. So on these occasions as above it was almost as if the filter broke down.

Have you ever felt these kinds of sudden dissociation, visual or otherwise?