I am sure that this phenomenon of ecstatic immersion is not unique to autistic people. And I always try to be careful to guard against making autistic people more special and exceptional than they actually are (and they are, actually). I’m sure very many people can recall doing precisely this with favourite music and songs. I can only return to the way autism was explained to me in the briefing I received after diagnosis. Very many people will tick very many of the autistic boxes, leading them to well-meaning statements like ‘we are all somewhere on the spectrum.’ The difference, as it was explained to me, was that autistic people tick more of those boxes than most people, and do so with much greater intensity, “above and beyond the norm.”
I shall simply speak of my own experience in this regard. It was the gift of headphones that served as my gateway into the otherworldly ecstasy that was – and remains – my favourite music. I was slow acquiring a pair of headphones, they seemed an expensive luxury in a family in which money was always tight. I do remember experimenting with my listening experience by placing my head between the speakers as a record played. I found the effect mesmerising. I would be bent over the sideboard for thirty minutes and more as the record played, completely lost in the world the sounds conjured up.
I acquired a pair of headphones at precisely the same time that I left school. It was the first time in my life that I had some money to spend on myself, and I went mad on a record buying spree. I would buy at least a couple of LP records a week, so many that I couldn’t even give a rough estimate – everything I could find by Genesis, Thin Lizzy, Rush, Status Quo, Deep Purple, Rainbow, Marillion, Whitesnake, Gary Moore, Dire Straits, and all manner of others (Snowy White springs to mind). I had left school and was at a loose end. I was less than energetic in finding something to do job wise. I was studying part-time at the local tech. college, so felt I was doing something productive with my time. My days quickly fell into a routine. I would wake late morning, have breakfast, and then retire to the front room, the ‘sitting room’ as we called it, where I would put on a record, put on the headphones, and suitably sit in a comfy chair, drifting away to whatever world the sounds conjured up, in eyes-closed oblivion to time and place. I did it every day unless I had to go out. I could sit for an hour without moving, entirely in the world inside my head, playing with images, creating visions out of sounds. It was a complete sensuous immersion in the imaginal sphere. It was creative, too. I would invent scenarios and place people I knew within them. More often than not, though, I played with moods, atmospheres, and feelings rather than got too entangled in intricate stories.
Which brings me to the song which absorbed my dreams and visions more than any other – “Entangled” by Genesis. The song is slow and gentle, with the most delicate instrumentation, like a music-box slowly winding down. The lyrics, too, have this dream-like quality:
“When you're asleep they may show you
Aerial views of the ground
Freudian slumber empty of sound
Over the rooftops and houses
Lost as it tries to be seen
Fields of incentive covered with green
Mesmerised children are playing
Meant to be seen but not heard
"Stop me from dreaming!"
"Don't be absurd!"
“Madrigal music is playing
Voices can faintly be heard
"Please leave this patient undisturbed."
Sentenced to drift far away now
Nothing is quite what it seems
Sometimes entangled in your own dreams.”
The song ends with an instrumental of two minutes thirty seconds that feels beyond time and place. It felt that way to me. I was entranced. I would play the song again, of course, but such was the intensity of emotion that one play was more than enough. I was hooked on the song but, most of all, I was hooked on this form of musical escape and ecstasy. Entangled in my own dreams, I did this every day for a year, 1983-1984, until the wall separating the sitting room and living room was knocked through to form the one living space shared with others. I was disentangled from my space, but not my dreams, which took up residence elsewhere – ‘in my room.’ But that’s another song with deep meaning.
