I have an epic dream struggling to convey an idea hard for me to grasp; exhausting! Scene after scene showing by example how describing stuff too precisely, evoking too many details verbally, impairs communication. Because... people mostly don't communicate by words, they just think they do.

Really humans are much like other animals, communicating partly by body language and voice, but largely by a sixth sense experienced as images of what a speaker's visualizing. The words mostly just help attract the attention of intended listeners. If the picture is vivid and clear, just a few words will do--they're like a carrier signal, not supplying much data themselves, just sustaining the data-bearing channel.

It's much like when I look at someone--I'm not so much seeing physical facts as anchoring my attention on you, so I can sense your aura and know how you're feeling through a nonvisual sixth sense. And you all sense this, feel you're being watched, even if I really can't see much--too dark, too far, things in the way. Vision just focuses me so I can smell/feel what your energy's like--structure, "color" (but it isn't color), motion. Castaneda's "luminous egg"! It's not always easy to interpret auras, but for me they're primary. Eyesight is secondary.

Not that this analogy will help you normals much, but then does talk about vision really help a blind person understand its details?

But my dream argues that humans aren't blind; but for most of you, this sense is subliminal. I'm only unusual in that I experience it consciously. Most see only the result, the meaning caught--you don't parse out how much was really linguistic and how much intuitive. Job done, you're happy, psychics are fakes...

Except you are one.

NEXT MORNING

"And then I woke and my grand insight melted in the light of day," right? Wrong. The dream characterizes my autistic senses quite accurately. Since the part I know first-hand is right, I can't chuck out the dream's hypothesis that you non-autistics have these senses too, just not consciously; for you, they're subliminal. Deniable. Mockable!

And why shouldn't I assume you're the unaware ones? As an Aspie, my senses often conflict with social consensus. You're all familiar with gaydar; why not audar? All my life I've had to consciously examine what my senses report; most of you, most of the time, can take your senses for granted; why question the source of your knowledge?

Besides, faith in five senses is so reasonable. So simple and elegant it must be true. Just like Newtonian physics.

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