Roya’s Story: The DPDR Halloween Special - Finding Comfort In The Strange, Scary & Uncanny
With DPDR the world can oftentimes feel like a flattened and numb place. Halloween is one of my favourite times of year because it’s anything but that. It’s when we embrace oddities and differences, seek out the scary and summon up the courage to face it. We wear absurd costumes and adorn our homes & buildings with all the things we usually shy away from: skulls and skeletons, cobwebs and spiders, tombstones and ghosts. We create memento moris and open the threshold across which lies monsters, liminal beings, and the land of the dead. There are seldom other times, at least on this scale, in the culture I live in where this happens. Halloween allows us to drop the collective facade of normalcy and reach into those hidden corners of the human experience. It’s also a time for change and reflection; a seasonal shift that breaks the monotony of what can otherwise feel like a continuous, two-dimensional environment. Textures change as we walk through crunchy leaves, our colourscape takes on a distinct warm hue, even our food transforms to homely harvest smells and tastes. All of the flux, all of the uncanny, it feels more comfortable than the rest of the year for me.
Strange
The night of Halloween is said to be the moment in which the ‘veil between worlds’ thins. Boundaries between the living and the dead, material and intangible, real and unreal all blur. Between these worlds emerge liminal beings - those who can shift and move across both (fairies, spectres, monsters). The felt experience of not being grounded in the real world, nor somewhere else, just, hovering somewhere in between is something I can relate to and no doubt others reading this blog can too. Most days of the year this sits in the context of distress, of dissociation, of disembodiment and numbness - but during Halloween it’s a state of being which we celebrate. In Halloween all of this strangeness emerges triumphant in a carnivalesque medley of lights, decorations, streets filled with trick or treaters and festivities - we revel in it and so the fear ceases to control us.
Scary & Uncanny
Think of a horror film, a standard genre for this spooky season that I find is often filled with metaphors for the DPDR experience. You’re peering down a long corridor with no visible end as the distance melts into darkness. Shadows glitch through flickering lights but nothing ever quite takes form. Out from the darkness you can just about see a human-like figure emerge, an expressionless, semi- familiar face fixes its gaze directly onto you, words fall out of its mouth but they are unintelligible. You try to move through the space but it feels as though the walls and doors could collapse inward at any moment or your feet will fall into a void. That sense of disquiet, of something that should be normal and just isn't; as someone with DPDR this is a feeling which oftentimes hits me & I have no way to control it. The panic I feel mid conversation when someone suddenly looks off, my surroundings become a lifeless film set, and the familiar becomes alien. When watching horror, though, I choose that - the fantastical creations, the rush of adrenaline and distorted images all contained within the film and outside of it, I am safe.
In DPDR something is disrupted in the unity of our sense of self. The real ceases to be so. Paradoxically, in my experience, it can also be a feeling of the personal and real reaching peak saturation point, so unbearably real that they tip over into something else. In those moments, for me, everything becomes the sum of all its parts and I cannot take anything on face value. It’s exhausting. Not Roya but a biological organism, existing because of the processes and outputs of cellular activity, interacting with the world both bodily and culturally, named so because my parents were born on a piece of land demarcated by man-made borders, and so on. The same goes for the world I would otherwise take for granted. How can something feel so simultaneously divorced from reality and so intensely real? I believe that's where the uncanny comes in. Take the example of a human-like robot, a zombie, a distorted image.
The uncanny is a cornerstone of horror, something otherwise ordinary but the details are just...off. During the month of October we run towards these things. It’s freeing, empowering even. This altogether unique and whimsical time of year softens the daily friction of forcing my mind to conform to a reality I can’t engage with with DPDR - even if I still feel the symptoms, for a few moments here and there in October the world becomes unreal enough that I can drift along with it.
