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Is the "Fight Club" scenario medically possible?

angryteabag

Bluelighter
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Jan 12, 2010
Messages
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In the movie Fight Club, Tyler Durden is just a hallucination that (His Unnamed alternate self a.k.a) "Cornelius" dreamed up because that just what happened.

My question is, is there a disorder that has that effect? I mean "Cornelius" fully passes out and changes into his altered self Or imagines himself watching himself where he has conversations etc.

I couldnt imagine anyone like that
 
DiTM is not the proper place for this.
I will move it to Film and TV.
 
Multiple personality disorder? Its very very rare ie dissociative identity disorder...or psychosis although I doubt very much a hallucination like that would be consistent. Schizotypal is somewhat similar. Think Dexter, but it wouldn't cover the other personality and those actions.
 
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while i dont think anything like the events shown in fight club would ever occur MPD is a proven disorder. I have worked with mentally disabled people who would go into phases of acting like other people and it was very very hard to 'snap' them out of it (generally those that were victimized imitating the people who victimized them) very sad stuff to see, but they were not diagnosed with MPD.
 
Personally I don't see anyone with acute insomnia functioning that cohesively. Let alone take down major credit card companies.
 
There are cases involving extreme trauma where victims report seeing themselves from the outside, sometimes permanently (like a POV of themselves from the upper corner of a room). It's an interesting phenomena, because it helps to understand what's going on during out of body experiences. The victims seem to use what they see in front of them, their imaginations, and their memory of what's behind them to create a simulated perspective from outside of their bodies (if you hold up a certain number of fingers behind their heads and ask them "how many?" they can only guess correctly within chance -- so there's no evidence their "soul" is actually anywhere outside the body).

A blending of this phenomena, visual hallucinations of people a la paranoid schizophrenia, and multiple personality disorder makes the "Fight Club" scenario possible, but still highly unlikely, especially considering Cornelius also maintained high cognitive functionality -- enough to organize the club and terrorist plots -- during these profound psychological episodes that you'd expect to strongly detract from one's ability to do such things.

EDIT: People who experience meth psychosis also report seeing people; the hallucinations are mostly due to staying up for days, so I suppose insomnia could be responsible for that, too.
 
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Interestingly enough, I have direct experience of an example of this phenomenon.

About 3 1/2 years ago, in October of 2006, a close friend of mine came over to my college campus where i was living at the time and expressed a desire to take a psychedelic. I had recently obtained some 2C-E, which neither of us had ever tried before, and he decided to take some, but I decided not to trip with him because I had an exam the next day. We did some Erowid/PIKHaL research and he decided to take one of the 20mg capsules that had been sold to me (I have since realized that 15mg is a much more reasonable dose of 2C-E). What followed was totally bizarre and to this day probably the most extraordinarily transformational trip I've ever witnessed in another person.

First, some background: my friend was a freshman in college at the time, and had moved to the city where I lived a couple months previous to start school. The previous summer, he had made a series of extremely unpleasant gestures towards many of the friends he had in his hometown (many of whom were friends of mine as well), and he had been almost entirely rejected and ostracized by most of his community of friends because of how much of a dick he was acting. Everyone had noted his general descent into really unpleasant, selfish, careless asshole behavior over the previous year or so, and the summer before he went off to college, it came to a head and he was basically run out on a rail. When he moved to my hometown for college, I was basically his only friend. His recent experiences in his hometown had been weighing pretty heavily on our conversations whenever we hung out and it was clearly still an issue that neither of us really felt closure on. I had also recently introduced him to psychedelics and he had become EXTREMELY enamored of them, and had tripped on mushrooms, acid, and 2C-B a total of probably 4 or 5 times in the two months leading up to this event. He had just tripped on 2C-B for the first time the previous weekend.

So back to the story: my friend took some 2C-E and the two of us walked around my college campus and found a quiet spot to sit and burn a joint. While we were smoking, he noted that he was coming up, but complained that he was not getting any visuals, even though he'd heard that 2C-E was a visual drug. I mentioned that it might help if he closed his eyes. He did, and then immediately jumped up and screamed. I asked him what had happened and he explained that the previous weekend, while he was tripping on 2C-B, he had looked in the mirror and found himself compelled to make a certain evil grinning face, and that he had made this face involuntarily every time he'd looked in a mirror for the entire week since, and that when he had just closed his eyes, he'd seen this face looking at him and talking to him.

This alarmed me, understandably, so I started asking him about it and parsing through his experiences, and over the next couple hours he developed an entirely separate personality that I could talk to independently of the person I was used to talking to when I hung out with him. Furthermore, when I spoke to this separate "evil twin" of his, he had a different voice, different body language, and even different memories, and I could VERY easily distinguish between the two ... it was like night and day. There was no mistaking which one I was talking to at any given time. They talked to each other in front of me as well. The "good" one explained to me that because I was trying so hard to help him emotionally, the "bad" one (which had apparently been guiding him through the recent period of him acting really shitty and unpleasant towards everyone) hated me, and even wanted to kill me. This got to the point where he literally put his hands around my neck, and looked at me with pure hatred in his eyes and said that as much as he wanted to, he couldn't bring himself to actually strangle me (the only thing I could think of to do was sit there and express trust in him, in the hope that he'd be overcome by the good will I was showing and the "bad" side would break down. It seemed to work).

He explained that during the time that the "bad" side of him had been guiding his decisions (a period of several years, apparently ... and the "bad" side of him had apparently existed ever since the trauma of losing his father to cancer at age 10), he would spontaneously black out every so often and wake up with a poem in front of him that he did not remember writing. Since his poetry seemed to be the way that the "good" side of him expressed itself while the "bad" side was "in charge," so to speak, I decided that the best way to deal with the situation was to take my friend to a relatively private place where there was a mirror, and give him a book of poetry ("The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran, an absolute masterpiece) and force him to read it to himself in the mirror. He read the entire book to himself over the course of his comedown, despite intermittent arguments and wrestling matches with his "bad" self, and he came out of the trip having successfully exorcised himself. He woke up the next day and called me to tell me that it was the first morning in years that he had woken up without voices in his head. To this day I believe that he has been far more sane and balanced since that trip than he was beforehand.

I don't know what to think with regards to how "real" the experience was ... maybe the "alternate personality" was just something that happened because he was tripping, and maybe it really had "been there all along" ... honestly, it doesn't matter to me. It was real as shit no matter what. All I know is, my friend split in two that night, and kicked out the half of himself that he didn't want around anymore. It was harrowing but it was extremely healing for him.
 
Personally I don't see anyone with acute insomnia functioning that cohesively. Let alone take down major credit card companies.

Well, if at night time he passes over into being tyler and in the morning he was himself then did he ever sleep? i wouldnt be surprised if he was smoking crack while being tyler explaining why he was awake for so long :p
But obviously he wouldnt be able to blow up the credit card buildings, but its a more possible scenario then the war of the worlds movie which is what makes it such a good movie

Whoa! Good to hear it helped your friend Pan. Helping someone like that would have been totally crazy, that just goes to show that drugs like 2-cb could be reeeally useful for therapy if they were legal.
From what i read, its mainly people who have childhood trauma or PSD or conditions of that kind that cause DID (dissociative identity disorder).
But it really gets me buzzing is, what makes a person a person, Its not as if someone with split identities has two brains so where does the personality come from? Considering that anyone can get DID, could we induce an identity swap in a person? Could we decode how we make thought patterns and create AI? Could you cure insane/paranoid people by replacing their personalities with calmer ones?

Interesting fact: almost all the diagnosis's for DID happen in america with a very small amount happening in the rest of the world

Do you think MDMA could be helpful for the condition?
 
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Interestingly enough, I have direct experience of an example of this phenomenon.

About 3 1/2 years ago, in October of 2006, a close friend of mine came over to my college campus where i was living at the time and expressed a desire to take a psychedelic. I had recently obtained some 2C-E, which neither of us had ever tried before, and he decided to take some, but I decided not to trip with him because I had an exam the next day. We did some Erowid/PIKHaL research and he decided to take one of the 20mg capsules that had been sold to me (I have since realized that 15mg is a much more reasonable dose of 2C-E). What followed was totally bizarre and to this day probably the most extraordinarily transformational trip I've ever witnessed in another person.

First, some background: my friend was a freshman in college at the time, and had moved to the city where I lived a couple months previous to start school. The previous summer, he had made a series of extremely unpleasant gestures towards many of the friends he had in his hometown (many of whom were friends of mine as well), and he had been almost entirely rejected and ostracized by most of his community of friends because of how much of a dick he was acting. Everyone had noted his general descent into really unpleasant, selfish, careless asshole behavior over the previous year or so, and the summer before he went off to college, it came to a head and he was basically run out on a rail. When he moved to my hometown for college, I was basically his only friend. His recent experiences in his hometown had been weighing pretty heavily on our conversations whenever we hung out and it was clearly still an issue that neither of us really felt closure on. I had also recently introduced him to psychedelics and he had become EXTREMELY enamored of them, and had tripped on mushrooms, acid, and 2C-B a total of probably 4 or 5 times in the two months leading up to this event. He had just tripped on 2C-B for the first time the previous weekend.

So back to the story: my friend took some 2C-E and the two of us walked around my college campus and found a quiet spot to sit and burn a joint. While we were smoking, he noted that he was coming up, but complained that he was not getting any visuals, even though he'd heard that 2C-E was a visual drug. I mentioned that it might help if he closed his eyes. He did, and then immediately jumped up and screamed. I asked him what had happened and he explained that the previous weekend, while he was tripping on 2C-B, he had looked in the mirror and found himself compelled to make a certain evil grinning face, and that he had made this face involuntarily every time he'd looked in a mirror for the entire week since, and that when he had just closed his eyes, he'd seen this face looking at him and talking to him.

This alarmed me, understandably, so I started asking him about it and parsing through his experiences, and over the next couple hours he developed an entirely separate personality that I could talk to independently of the person I was used to talking to when I hung out with him. Furthermore, when I spoke to this separate "evil twin" of his, he had a different voice, different body language, and even different memories, and I could VERY easily distinguish between the two ... it was like night and day. There was no mistaking which one I was talking to at any given time. They talked to each other in front of me as well. The "good" one explained to me that because I was trying so hard to help him emotionally, the "bad" one (which had apparently been guiding him through the recent period of him acting really shitty and unpleasant towards everyone) hated me, and even wanted to kill me. This got to the point where he literally put his hands around my neck, and looked at me with pure hatred in his eyes and said that as much as he wanted to, he couldn't bring himself to actually strangle me (the only thing I could think of to do was sit there and express trust in him, in the hope that he'd be overcome by the good will I was showing and the "bad" side would break down. It seemed to work).

He explained that during the time that the "bad" side of him had been guiding his decisions (a period of several years, apparently ... and the "bad" side of him had apparently existed ever since the trauma of losing his father to cancer at age 10), he would spontaneously black out every so often and wake up with a poem in front of him that he did not remember writing. Since his poetry seemed to be the way that the "good" side of him expressed itself while the "bad" side was "in charge," so to speak, I decided that the best way to deal with the situation was to take my friend to a relatively private place where there was a mirror, and give him a book of poetry ("The Prophet" by Khalil Gibran, an absolute masterpiece) and force him to read it to himself in the mirror. He read the entire book to himself over the course of his comedown, despite intermittent arguments and wrestling matches with his "bad" self, and he came out of the trip having successfully exorcised himself. He woke up the next day and called me to tell me that it was the first morning in years that he had woken up without voices in his head. To this day I believe that he has been far more sane and balanced since that trip than he was beforehand.

I don't know what to think with regards to how "real" the experience was ... maybe the "alternate personality" was just something that happened because he was tripping, and maybe it really had "been there all along" ... honestly, it doesn't matter to me. It was real as shit no matter what. All I know is, my friend split in two that night, and kicked out the half of himself that he didn't want around anymore. It was harrowing but it was extremely healing for him.

Cool story, worth reading.
 
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