(no subject)

Tonight I finished watching lain with my beloved, and it ended better than I expected. I liked the nonlinearity very much, as well as some of the graphics effects and conceits (that managed to capture the spirit, and in some instances, the specifics, of many of my non-self-induced hallucinations). I think it suffered less from the structural problems endemic in most anime (setting the stage brilliantly, then suddenly and unsatisfyingly having a "showdown" towards the end), but didn't escape them entirely. The actual ending was painfully sad to me; it echos one of my deepest fears, actually.

But watching the whole thing, I kept having the feeling that my own experience of "reality" is impoverished. Ideologically, I don't think I'm a mechanist, but I feel like I live in a mechanist world, or at least worldview. I'm not a skeptic, but I do ask the tough questions because I want to know. And yet, when I think back on so much, it just doesn't fit the mechanist model. I hallucinate often, in all senses; I hear conversations sometimes with no one present; I sometimes see with my eyes closed; I have a strange (to me) connection with the sun and weather; I have partial memories of very weird things throughout most portions of my life. I think/suspect that I don't know how to integrate such things into my concept of daily life, and there's certainly no help with the general construct of general 'reality'. At times, it feels like the things I tend to forget about, and at best don't understand and can't integrate, are the kind of things a lot of mystic wannabes long for.