Ask HN: Perspective Shifting and how to stop it?
What I've found personally is that when it happens I am completely lost. First time it happened as a child I woke up and felt like everything had shifted a few inches. This sounds small but it made everything look completely different - my room, parents. It drove me nuts.
Later when visiting my mother at her complex I was driven through a different entrance and was lost in a place I'd grown up in. I couldn't find friends' houses. I was called a liar and told I was being melodramatic when I asked for directions somewhere.
My parents added it to one more 'weird' thing I did (I have OCD which wasn't well-understood in the early 80s- I had to have things even/symmetrical, had to rub my hands together when excited, blink every time a light post passed my peripheral, then was forced to stop that but I still had to notice them and felt them passing, etc). When Poirot stepped in crap to have it on both shoes- I teared up at that, someone understood- not Poirot obviously, but Agatha Christie.
Anyways I've found that sometimes if I enter a familiar parking lot from a different direction I'm completely lost until I think about entering from a different direction again and aligning my perspective to that, if that makes sense. Suddenly I know where I am and how to get where I need to go, but this gets exhausting. Legit stores all around I've been to several times, yet I don't recognize them, it's just a starbucks, a Taco Bell.
It feels like it's happening more often so I'm wondering if any of y'all have experience with this, and if you found a way to stop it, or at least mitigate the effects?
I wonder if this is what happens when people get dementia and can't recognize anything. If someone who doesn't look like themselves to you insists they are who they are what do you do?