In my mind, knowledge was more than a library of words.
It was information, diagrams and symbols: dense structures stretching beyond anything I could easily describe. I imagined shelves extending to the horizon, forests of data and concepts moving across the sky like shooting stars.
The mindscape was alive with movement. Blocks of colour ran alongside me and past me. Symbols joined, multiplied and formed structures containing more symbols within them. There were systems diagrams and unfamiliar blueprints, patterns that seemed to continue without an end.
This was not how a page of writing looked. It was closer to travelling through a world.
Writing a program
When I faced a programming task, I could close my eyes and find shapes, colours and lines assembling into a structure I could only vaguely feel at first.
Over several days, the pattern might become more definite. Then it would click into clarity.
When I began typing, the structure was like a map. I went first to the part that felt easiest and filled in its details, then moved to another part. I continued until the whole map was filled out. I did not necessarily write the procedures in their final order: I might write one, jump to the sixteenth, then return to the second. The structure connected them before the sequence of words had been placed on the screen.
I felt as though I was giving expression to a program already present inside me. That feeling of completeness was part of the experience; it was not a substitute for finding out whether the written program worked.
Feeling a structure
A mechanical-engineering example could become another kind of inner construction.
Reading about tensile stress, I imagined twisting the metal bar. I could feel the strain as though the bar were part of my hand. The variables became a connected system: changing one altered how the whole thing felt.
The equations were one representation of the problem. My mind was making another.
During polytechnic, I could work with these imaginary objects while still struggling with real ones. To compare a physical object with my inner model, I first had to translate it into an abstract internal form. Without three-dimensional perception, that translation went wrong. An object already presented in abstract form did not have that problem.
The problem was not that physical sensations were necessarily faint. They could be vivid without coming together coherently. I could know the name “cat”, know that cats meow, and remember the furry sensation of touching one. Yet these remained separate fragments, loosely linked by facts and mental associations. The integrated experience of a cat – its “cat-ness” – did not appear.
To an observer, I could appear to be functioning normally. I scored highly in language-comprehension tests. Those marks were critical in offsetting what I lost in the Chinese vocabulary sections, which I often failed. Yet producing the correct answers did not give me the same direct, coherent experience of comprehension that other people seemed to have. The performance could conceal the difference in how I understood.
My inner modelling and my difficulty with the physical world were not opposites. The missing connection was between them.
Turning a mug in imagined space
I once read about transformations of three-dimensional objects through a fourth dimension. Looking at the diagrams, I tried to move the shapes in my imagination.
Then I looked at the mug on my table.
In that inner space, I imagined reaching into it, drawing it out, reversing it and returning it. It seemed to yield like rubber while I moved it, then become solid again. Keeping both versions in mind required concentration, so I reversed it once more.
Music reaching into the mindscape
Harmonious, joyful or holy music could set a beautiful movie moving in my mind. Sometimes there were complex spirals and abstract patterns; sometimes there were metaphoric scenes, such as a cow in construction clothes jumping over the moon.
Even when much of bodily pleasure felt distant, certain soulful music could partly break through the sense of separation. It offered a route into experience that was not available in the same way through everything else.
My later sensory development changed that wider situation. The musical imagery matters in its own right too: my inner life contained delight as well as difficulty.
More inside than I could explain
I felt an enormous distance between these possibilities and the limitations of ordinary life. Human tools and languages seemed crude beside what I wanted to express.
The inner activity was a source of delight, exploration and ways of approaching problems, even when I could not make its possibilities work outside my mind.