The Distance Grows

The argument started with one ordinary word and immediately split into three different worlds: one person said hallucination, another meant dream, a third meant a state of mind they could still observe while conscious, and by the time we reached definitions everyone was speaking fluently while nobody was standing on the same ground.

I keep returning to one practical anchor because it protects me from decorative language: in lived experience, hallucination feels uncontrollable in the moment, as if the distance from conscious steering has widened beyond the point where "I decide" still works, and once control is present from the beginning the event may still be intense, vivid, or strange, but it has already moved toward imagination, illusion, or crafted inner imagery.

The distinction matters because altered states are not one thing, dreams during sleep differ from conscious perceptual events, physiological disruptions differ from symbolic narratives, and the body can deviate in many ways without every deviation becoming a hallucination just because a headline wants a dramatic noun.

We were still in the kitchen when someone opened a dictionary app and read a definition aloud; the screen glow made the word look finished, and the room went quiet in that particular way that means everyone has decided the argument is over even though nobody's body has changed.

The real fatigue comes later, when recycled vocabulary arrives faster than observation, because mass media keeps flattening terms into portable slogans and people inherit these finished packets instead of building definitions from their own observations, then LLM chat windows amplify the same habit with a smoother tone so "someone said" becomes "chatbot said" and surrogate language starts circulating faster than experience.

That circulation creates an ethical gap before it creates an epistemic one, since words we never forged with our own effort are easy to deploy and easy to abandon, while words we had to test against memory, body, and consequence stay heavier in the mouth and demand accountability, and I keep trying to recover direct access to the source of my own terms without pretending I can do it alone.

Collective language is still necessary and official definitions still have operational use, yet without personal work they become external scaffolding with no inner structure, and when that happens discussions loop endlessly on borrowed substrate, each cycle sounding informed while remaining emotionally and conceptually shallow.

I still pause before adopting a term and ask what concrete state I am naming, what control was present, what my body and attention were doing, what would falsify the claim, and I do not know whether that habit reduces symbolic noise or only slows me down while the packets keep circulating.

The distance appears first as style, then as habit, then as culture, and I notice it in my own mouth when a borrowed word arrives ready-made and I cannot yet say whether I mean it or only remember having heard it. The dis-tance grows.