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.

This does not make a hierarchy, only a distinction, and the distinction matters because altered states are not one thing, dreams during sleep are not the same as conscious perceptual events, physiological disruptions are not interchangeable with symbolic narratives, and the body can deviate in many ways without every deviation becoming a hallucination just because a headline wants a dramatic noun.

The real fatigue comes later, not from disagreement itself but from recycled vocabulary, 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 this is why the task is not to enforce one universal dictionary but to recover direct access to the source of one's own terms.

I am not asking for private truth bubbles where every definition is untouchable, because 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.

So the practical method is stubbornly simple and slow: pause before adopting a term, ask what concrete state you are naming, ask what control was present, ask what your body and attention were doing, ask what would falsify your claim, and only then speak, because this small discipline is one of the few ways to reduce symbolic noise without falling into gatekeeping or cynicism.

The distance appears first as style, then as habit, then as culture, and if we do not rebuild our own definitions from lived material the distance keeps growing until language becomes a mirror that reflects only other mirrors. The dis-tance grows.