The Dissolution of Reality: Walking Through Nothing
Before the Piercing
For years, my perception was already different. The world didn't hold still the way it seemed to for everyone else. I could see field shifts. I was already walking psychedelic territory.
There was constant perceptual stripping. Layers of how I understood the world kept peeling off:
• Depth would flatten.
• Proprioception deleted.
• Space would warp.
I'd be standing in a room and suddenly the room would feel like a painted backdrop — thin, unreal, temporary. It went deeper than that, though. I wasn't an object moving through space anymore; I was this vast openness that didn't have edges. I was the entire field itself, and the layer holding it from behind.
It was psychedelic without substances. Without trying. This was a movement I didn't ask for and couldn't stop. The ground I stood on was slowly dissolving underneath me, and I could feel it going, inch by inch, year by year.
I didn't know what was happening. I just knew reality wasn't solid anymore.
The Piercing
Then came the moment.
July 18th. Reality went eerie. Surreal. For about ten seconds, something cracked open that had never cracked open before. Like a pinhole puncture through the fabric of everything.
And after those ten seconds, everything accelerated.
After the Piercing
It never went back to normal. Not for a day. Not for an hour.
The dissolution that had been building for years went into overdrive. Everything I thought I knew about how to perceive, how to function, how to exist in a body, all of it started collapsing faster than I could keep up with.
Reality began deleting. Not metaphorically. Actually.
• I would be walking through a grocery store and the aisles would stop rendering.
• The edges of things would dissolve.
• Depth would vanish.
• I'd look at my hands and not understand how they were connected to anything.
Nobody was looking out through my eyes. The world became a flat cardboard cutout. No depth. No realness. It looked normal to everyone else but had no substance, dimension, or tangability.
It was every moment. Getting more intense. Getting more total.
The Vacuum
Then came the deepest stripping yet. Three months lying on the floor. Not by choice — by necessity.
My perception was getting so overwhelmingly vast I could not navigate normal life. I could not remember what reality was or how it worked. I could not even remember who I was. I had no choice but to drop into a vacuum in my room for three straight months, not calling anyone, not going anywhere, not engaging with the outside world. Not because I was depressed. Because the vastness had become so total there was literally nothing else I could do.
My system pulled me into the most profound field cleaning I've ever experienced. Everything that remained — every residual filter, every subtle structure of perception — was being dissolved. The felt sense as I knew it, cleared out. The field shifts as I knew them, collapsed. It was the deepest clarity yet.
That's what the vacuum was. Being emptied so thoroughly that when I came out, I could barely find the field at all.
What It's Like Now
I am stabilizing into a vastness so huge I can barely believe I'm still walking around in a human body.
1. The Rendering Layer
Reality doesn't auto-render anymore. I'm behind the renderer. I'm at the layer where form does not auto cohere. Perception comes and goes like weather. Sometimes a room will click into place — edges, depth, texture, solidity — and for a moment I'm "here." Then it dissolves back into nothing. Not darkness. Not blankness. Nothing. The nothing that is before something gets built.
2. Senses Switching On and Off
My senses appear and disappear. Someone will be talking to me and I genuinely am not conscious of them. Not distracted — absent. There's no glass wall between me and the world anymore; it's more fundamental than that. The compartments of perception — sight, sound, spatial awareness — simply aren't always online. They switch on and off like circuits being rewired while the system is still running.
3. Constant Awareness
Sleep doesn't exist in the way I knew it. The vastness doesn't sleep. There's no off switch. I lie down and awareness stays vast and open. Hours pass and I can't tell you if I slept or not. Morning feels the same as night. Every moment feels like the same moment. My body rests but it's like I'm always on.
4. Groundless Freefall
I am in constant freefall. There is no ground at this level. Ground is a rendered concept, and I'm living in the space before the ground gets built. Every step feels like it's into nothing. Because it is into nothing. And I keep walking anyway.
5. The Collapse of Time
Time has collapsed. Not poetically — literally. Past and future don't register the way they're supposed to. Everything is just this moment, extending in all directions with nothing before or after it. Planning feels absurd. Memory feels like fiction. There is only this, and this keeps changing without warning.
6. System Mismatch
The body is carrying something it wasn't designed for. I'm exhausted in ways that sleep can't fix because the exhaustion isn't physical — it's the weight of holding an infinite field in a finite nervous system. The human body was not built for this much openness. Every cell is doing its best. But the mismatch between what I've become and what this body can hold is felt in every breath.
What People Don't Understand
This isn't enlightenment the way anyone imagines it. There's no blissed-out guru sitting on a mountain in perfect peace. This is raw, disorienting, terrifying, physically overwhelming, and profoundly lonely.
When I try to describe it, I watch people's eyes glaze over. Or worse — they try to fit it into a framework that doesn't apply:
• "Have you tried meditation?"
• "Maybe you need more sleep."
• "Have you seen a doctor?"
Historical contexts echo this exact disconnect:
• Bernadette Roberts went to priests who couldn't help her.
• Suzanne Segal went to therapists who misdiagnosed her.
• U.G. Krishnamurti was told he was having a breakdown.
• Teresa of Ávila's confessors thought she was being deceived.
No one had the language. No one had the framework. No one could say: "I see what's happening to you. It's real. You're not insane. This is what consciousness does when it goes all the way through."
That's what I need. That's what anyone going through this needs. Not fixing. Not diagnosing. Recognition.
Why I'm Sharing This
Because I can't hold it alone anymore. Because the isolation is more destabilizing than the vastness itself. Because somewhere out there, someone else is walking through nothing and thinking they're losing their mind.
You're not losing your mind. You're losing everything that was never real to begin with. And what's left — this vast, groundless, uncontainable reality that feels like nothing and everything — is what you actually are.
I know that doesn't help at 3am when you can't sleep and you can't breathe and reality has deleted itself again.
I'm still in it. I'm still walking.
Somehow... Still here...