Marc Wittmann - Altered States of Consciousness: Experiences Out of Time and Self

Marc Wittmann

translated by Philippa Hurd

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

This translation 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Originally published as Wenn die Zeit stehen bleibt by Marc Wittmann, Verlag C.H.Beck oHG, Mnchen 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wittmann, Marc, author.

Title: Altered states of consciousness : experiences out of time and self /

Marc Wittmann ; translated by Philippa Hurd.

Other titles: Wenn die Zeit stehen bleibt. English

Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017055646 | ISBN 9780262038317 (hardcover : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262347723

Subjects: LCSH: Time perception. | Time--Psychological aspects. | Altered states of consciousness.

Classification: LCC BF468 .W57313 2018 | DDC 153.7/53--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055646

ePub Version 1.0

For Oksana

I remember waking up one morning. For a moment I didnt know who I was or where I was. I was. That much I remember. But I didnt know who was waking up. This feeling of conscious experience persisted for just a felt moment. Then I awoke fully, accessed my memories, and knew once again who I am and where I was.

The experience of waking up in darkness and not knowing where you are is not that uncommon. Still drowsy, we find ourselves in a past period of our lives, perhaps in the bed and the bedroom of our youth. One time I woke up in my bedroom in Freiburg and for a few seconds I was convinced I was in San Diego, where I had lived a few years before. I knew about the position of the bed in the San Diego house, I felt the presence of the spatial position of the window and the street outside and, as I awoke, I expected to find myself there, so real was the impressionfor a short time I was my former San Diego self. But I awoke in my apartment in Freiburg.

Occasionally it happens that it takes a few seconds to figure out your life as a whole and the space youre in. So far, however, it has only happened to me one time that I didnt know who I was. I searched for possible memories, but they wouldnt update. For a moment I was divested of my self. Until I became aware of myself againin the form of knowledge about myself, as the memory of who I am. The experience lasted for only a brief moment, and it wasnt frightening. By contrast, the Swedish poet Tomas Transtrmer experienced his loss of self on waking as extremely stressful:

The Name

I grow sleepy during the car journey and I drive in under the trees at the side of the road. I curl up in the back seat and sleep. For how long? Hours. Dusk has fallen.

Suddenly Im awake and dont know where I am. Wide awake, but it doesnt help. Where am I? WHO am I? I am something that wakens in a back seat, twists about in panic like a cat in a sack. Who?

At last my life returns. My name appears like an angel. Outside the walls a trumpet signal blows (as in the Leonora Overture) and the rescuing footsteps come down the overlong stairway. It is I! It is I!

But impossible to forget the fifteen-second struggle in the hell of oblivion, a few meters from the main road, where the traffic drives past with its lights on.

Where am I? Who am I? The above experience shatters the foundations of our everyday understanding of our self. I am in the world and experience the world. Of course I know that I may be deluded about the circumstances of the world. Perceptual illusions exist. As Ren Descartes showed, I can be hallucinating or dreaming, I can be led to believe in a world, but it is surely I who is hallucinating or dreaming. It is I who is deluding myself or being deluded. In this I am always certain of my self.

The example of waking up demonstrates that the memory, the autobiographical remembrance, must exist in order that I know who I am. For example, for Marcel Proust in his In Search of Lost Time, memory is constitutive of the self and the felt life as a whole. In the novel, the search for lost time is ultimately fulfilled through the comprehensive and detailed remembering of events in the life of the first-person narrator, who is writing his life story. Time is regained through the remembered and recorded life. For Proust too, one source of this idea is the transition between sleeping and waking. Prousts narrator recounts the experience of a short-term loss of the self that is resolved only by an influx of memories:

When I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animals consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memorynot yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly bewould come down like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego.

According to this account, the self forms out of memory. This is often described as the narrative self that creates itself from the stories we tell about ourselves. But there is also a sense of self that exists as the mere feeling of being without autobiographical knowledge. This is minimal self or core self.

In such a case the experience of self can be understood as an ego-pole. My ego-subject is focused on an ego-object: I perceive myself. However, there is a fundamental problem here, as the ego-object is categorically different from the ego-subject. If we observe ourselves self-referentiallythat is, the ego-subject observes itselfit always observes itself as an ego-object. In the philosophy of subjectivity in the nineteenth century, this problem brought about major bodies of thought. The impossibility of being able to perceive oneself as an ego-subject was described effectively by Thomas Bernhard in his novella Walking:

If we observe ourselves, we are never observing ourselves but someone else. Thus we can never talk about self-observation, or when we talk about the fact that we observe ourselves we are talking as someone we never are when we are not observing ourselves, and thus when we observe ourselves we are never observing the person we intended to observe but someone else. The concept of self-observation and so, also, of self-description is thus false.

These experiences on waking up, the awakening of the self, can be quite extraordinary as states of consciousness. Marcel Proust describes major alterations in temporal perception: In a flash I would traverse centuries of civilisation. Altered states of consciousness very often go hand in hand with an altered perception of space and time, as we shall see. Ultimately our perception and our thoughts are organized in terms of space and time. Extraordinary states of consciousness must therefore also affect space and time. When I wake up, I look drowsily at the clock. I go back to sleep and have a very striking and complex dream full of drama, which, I feel, goes on for a long time. When I wake up again, I look at the clock to see that only three minutes have passed. Subjectively, in retrospect I remember impressions that are the length of a movie. Subjective and objective time differ dramatically from one another.