Categories: uncategorized
Date: 20 December 2005 11:53:15
I discovered a strange form of vertigo.
I was walking on a long distance footpath along a river. There used to be a railway line along the river valley and, since the river zigzagged a lot, so the railway had to cross the river quite frequently. When the line closed they lifted a lot of the bridges, leaving just the stone abutments on either side of the river, with a gap in the centre where the girders would have been. When I passed the first few of these broken bridges I had no problems. But as I passed more I found myself imagining walking along the trackbed towards the abutments, and carrying on oblivious to the fact that the middle of the bridge was missing. I would then imagine how I would cope with falling into the water. Since the river was moving quite fast and I can hardly swim at the best of times, and I had a 15 kilo rucksack on, the outlook wasn't good.
But it was like a dream (or, rather, a nightmare) in that I couldn't stop myself, or turn round; I could only carry on walking onto the bridge. And this sequence of events just ran through my head over and over again.
More recently I had another variant of this experience. I was standing at the top of a mountain on a beautiful day, looking across to another mountain on the other side of the valley. It was so clear that it felt as if I should be able to reach across and touch it, or even step over to it. And that set off the same train of thoughts - I found myself imagining stepping from my mountain across the valley to the other mountain. Since the valley was about a mile wide, and I has half a mile above the loch below, even my legs would not have made it, again with disastrous consequences. But the imagining was so powerful that I feared I might actually try it - the boundary between reality and imagination was getting so blurred.