I’m so sorry that some people in this thread have much worse nightmares than I have. I don’t recall having any nightmares that you might call visually grotesque.
When I was in High School, I apparently discovered that looking at a person signals interest in the person, and that it’s possible to look at something in this way on accident, or at least without conscious planning. From this I concluded into a mild obsession to basically be conscious of what I am looking at at almost every point in time. In hindsight, it feels kind of like the “you are now breathing manually” meme.
This basically only happened with two people, along with it slightly reinforcing my bias against looking at girls, because I’m probably gay anyway, let them not get any ideas.* (this thought is completely stupid in any other way than being moderately considerate. it probably didn’t do anything anyway, because I’m not very socially active and had approximately 1-2 friends.)
The girl who sat on the mirror-opposite side of the room from me in math class, which, If I didn’t change seats on purpose, which I did when possible, basically put her in the center of my default field of view when not looking at the teacher. (Seating and desk arrangements in my country are very exciting.) She was really good at staring back, which is basically why I noticed that people care when they’re being looked at. I don’t really know whether she did this on purpose. I had nothing in common with her that would count as knowing her personally, but we did look pretty similar, so much that some people just told me this without being asked. She’s the only person wearing a tie on one of the photos from graduation. I didn’t feel a legitimate reason to care much, but basically, I cared because of how much I was constantly thinking about not looking at her. To my friend, I expressed myself as being kind of scared of her, though I never really said that I was scared that anyone capable of critisizing me would find out how much space this bullshit took up in my mind sometimes, or misrepresent this as being attracted or something. I also remember believing at some point that she was behind me on my way to school, (in some parts of europe, people bike to school,) as well as just actually seeing her on some paths beyond doubt, and thinking a moderate amount about what path she takes the least, which might just have been all of them, because of how rarely I saw her on the way.
The other guy isn’t really at fault or anything. He’s still really nice to be with now that I’ve gotten over this somewhat, though I see him rarely, which probably contributed to the brainworms spreading.
*(I cultivate an off-internet bonus genre of brainworms where being asexual reinforces my faux-antiquated fear of being perceived as attracted to someone, which may or may not make sense)
I’m so sorry that some people in this thread have much worse nightmares than I have. I don’t recall having any nightmares that you might call visually grotesque.
When I was in High School, I apparently discovered that looking at a person signals interest in the person, and that it’s possible to look at something in this way on accident, or at least without conscious planning. From this I concluded into a mild obsession to basically be conscious of what I am looking at at almost every point in time. In hindsight, it feels kind of like the “you are now breathing manually” meme. This basically only happened with two people, along with it slightly reinforcing my bias against looking at girls, because I’m probably gay anyway, let them not get any ideas.* (this thought is completely stupid in any other way than being moderately considerate. it probably didn’t do anything anyway, because I’m not very socially active and had approximately 1-2 friends.)
*(I cultivate an off-internet bonus genre of brainworms where being asexual reinforces my faux-antiquated fear of being perceived as attracted to someone, which may or may not make sense)