Bad acid trip

At the climax of “Contact” Jodie Foster goes into a space trip in an alien designed vessel, to have the very first contact with an extraterrestrial species in the documented history of mankind. The alien, turns out, looks and sounds exactly like his father. The surroundings resemble a Florida beach at night.

The alien tells her that they searched in her brain for familiar images and decided to introduce themselves using those icons in order to avoid shocking and scaring the hell out of her. That was Carl Sagan’s extra clever way of getting away with portraying a conversation with an alien species without elucidating about their looks.

Now, I recalled this scene because a very smart friend of mine told me the other night, as we were dipping in a delicious plate of Ethiopian food, a story about a bad acid trip. After dropping the acid, she immediately noticed something wrong and proceeded to lock herself in the washroom. Probably it was bad acid. There, she started to get scared, thinking only “please stop this, please stop this”. She would have gone into panic, but then she started to trip about going to the hospital (let me clarify this, she never left the washroom, going to the hospital was part of the acid trip) and telling a doctor how she felt. The doctor calmly reassured her: “It’s only a bad acid trip, there is nothing you can do, just let it flow, it will go away with time”.

The icons are obvious: the hospital and the doctor represent authority, someone who is in control and takes care of you when you feel bad. But what’s more interesting is that She, and only She, choose those symbols. And She did that because She new that it would calm Her, because Herself would have gone into panic otherwise.

Freud and others have made good guesses about the existence of multiple layers of personality: conscious, subconscious, ego, super ego, etc… Each and all of them are “the real” yourself. But which one is “the main” yourself. In this case, was “the main” herself the one about going into panic, that needed reassurance, the one that needed protection? Or was the “main” herself the one that came into the rescue with a soothing image of a doctor in a hospital?

Perhaps I will never know for sure… or should I use We to refer to me?