Thanks, didn't know this - but from my experience, DMT smoke smelled and tasted kind of plasticky (like when you burn plastic). Did I just interpret the poop-smell differently?
For anyone reading, I think this is the best description of derealization in the thread. The window metaphor is good. I even had a quite literal experience of this "window" kind of effect. I took a strong dose of salvia (known to cause derealization, as a dissociative drug) and actually saw my vision as a small "window" at a distance from my actual "self". It was like being aware of the blackness around my vision.
Later I took a much smaller dose of salvia and I didn't hallucinate but still got the strong feeling of derealization. It's so hard to describe but everything seemed "fake" or "plastic". Like hollow and so lonely. Maybe, I guess, what looking at a scene through VR would look like. The sun didn't feel warm, the grass I was touching had no feeling of comfort with it (?). Ah, I thought I could describe it but it's so hard to describe, I give up.
If you take a small dose of salvia you can understand what it feels like. Definitely don't recommend but as far as I know, it's harmless and (for me) impermanent.
My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older. Thanks for mentioning this in the context of working from home. I feel a little better now.
This reminds me of a part of In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck where Doc Burton talks about large groups, the "group-man".
> ...they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men. A man in a group isn't himself at all; he's a cell in an organism that isn't like him any more than the cells in your body are like you. People have said, 'mobs are crazy, you can't tell what they'll do.' Why don't people look at mobs not as men, but as mobs? A mob nearly always seems to act reasonably, for a mob.
... when group-man wants to move, he makes a standard. 'God wills that we recapture the Holy-Land'; or he says, 'We fight to make the world safe for democracy' ... But the group doesn't care about the Holy Land, or Democracy ... Maybe the group simply wants to move, to fight, and uses these words simply to reassure the brains of individual men. ... You might be an effect as well as a cause, Mac.
I'm trying to learn emacs too - last night I kept ChatGPT open and asked it any questions I had ("what's the hotkey to open up a new window below the current one") and I'm getting better really quickly.
I set the Mac OS dock to auto-hide and it frees up, like, an inch of space. Blows me away when I see people with the default-sized dock always open. Any real reason for this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E