Aura of Significance: The Phenomenology of Meaning

[Unwary Traveller]

1. Introduction​

Listening to the Weird Studies podcast, one of the underlying themes that emerges is the subjective experience of the weird; a feeling of deep significance hinting at strange hidden realms of reality, expressing the radical mystery of existence.

“Some conception of the divine… some kind of ultimate source of meaning… some kind of inherent font of meaningfulness that makes the world religious again.” (J.F. Martel, Weird Studies, episode 97).

A good example of an experience that illustrates this concept can be found in the introduction to Albert Hofmann’s LSD: My Problem Child. Although the book is obviously about LSD, this was a non-psychedelic childhood experience:

There are experiences that most of us are hesitant to speak about, because they do not conform to everyday reality and defy rational explanation. These are not particular external occurrences, but rather events of our inner lives, which are generally dismissed as figments of the imagination and barred from our memory. Suddenly, the familiar view of our surroundings is transformed in a strange, delightful, or alarming way: it appears to us in a new light, takes on a special meaning. Such an experience can be as light and fleeting as a breath of air, or it can imprint itself deeply upon our minds.

One enchantment of that kind, which I experienced in childhood, has remained remarkably vivid in my memory ever since. It happened on a May morning… on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden, Switzerland. As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with birdsong and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light. Was this something I had simply failed to notice before? Was I suddenly discovering the spring forest as it actually looked? It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sense of joy, oneness, and blissful security.

This type of event could be summed up as a mystical experience, but it also has the hallmarks of the weird – the sense of enchantment, and the potential to be “strange, delightful, or alarming.” A key phrase that I want to focus on is “takes on a special meaning.” In Hofmann’s description, we can note his “indescribable sense of joy” and place it somewhere on a familiar continuum of mood, from pain and despair to happiness and ecstasy. This spectrum of mood is sometimes referred to as valence – the ‘hedonic tone’ of feelings as positive or negative.

The theme of this essay is that, unlike the case of mood, we lack a similar widely used concept that we can use to think about shifts in our perceived sense of meaningfulness, such as the kind of moment described above where “reality takes on a special meaning.” For this purpose, I propose borrowing an existing term from psychology; that of salience. Without going into technical details, a general definition of salience from Wikipedia is satisfactory – “The term is widely used in the study of perception and cognition to refer to any aspect of a stimulus that, for any of many reasons, stands out from the rest.”

As a simple example, imagine you are standing near the edge of a forest when a tiger emerges from the trees. The tiger stands out, or perhaps leaps out, as being highly significant—the etymology of salience is related to the Greek word for leaping. The moment is suddenly charged with meaning – of awe, danger, and the need to get to safety. Now imagine the same emotion of significance, meaningfulness, heightened salience, without any obvious stimulus. You are standing near the edge of a forest. There is no tiger, no reason to anticipate danger, there are only trees. Yet perhaps you experience the same kind of enchantment as Hofmann describes. Or perhaps you get a deep sense of foreboding that feels like a portent of doom.

A real-life example is mentioned by Phil Ford on the Weird Studies Podcast, describing a walk home in which the world looked much the same as usual “but with an inexpressively different significance or an overtone to everything” (Episode 124, 38 min). Co-host J.F. Martel recognizes this state and describes it as “a mood in the eldritch sense.”

This is the emotional range (or affect, in the sense of a subjective feeling) that I would propose to define as salience; the felt sense of meaningfulness and significance which may or may not be linked to some external stimulus that is causing it. We can also see that the emotion of salience (significance) combined with valence (positive or negative feelings) gives contrasting emotions of heightened salience – positive emotions of enchantment can be contrasted with negative states of foreboding.

2. The Numinous
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I started with an example of a mystical experience, and the examples of salience that interest me are those that “do not conform to everyday reality” to quote Albert Hofmann again. We can imagine that our sense of salience may have evolved in a way that helps us pay attention to significant aspects of our surroundings that will help us survive – sources of food, sources of danger, the presence of animals, changes in the environment or weather, the behavior of other people and so on – but it extends well beyond this into the realm of the weird.My earlier example of a tiger may have suggested itself from having this oft-quoted passage by C.S. Lewis in the back of my mind:

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told "There is a ghost in the next room," and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is "uncanny" rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous. Now suppose that you were told simply "There is a mighty spirit in the room," and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare's words "Under it my genius is rebuked." This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.

I suggest that the apprehension of the numinous, as a felt experience, relies on sensations of heightened salience. C.S. Lewis is assuming that there is “an object which excites” our feeling of awe, and in the absence of anyone telling us about a ghost or “mighty spirit,” we are reliant on our experience of heightened salience, amounting to a deep sense of awe in this case, to sense its presence.

We may well infer such a presence (rightly or wrongly) precisely because of those feelings arising out of nowhere; a mysterious emotion of awe that appears to center on a room that should be empty.In this way, the feeling of heightened salience during a numinous experience takes on the role of a sense or faculty posited by William James:

It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call “something there,” more deep and more general than any of the special and particular “senses” by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.

An example of this feeling can be seen in sleep paralysis. In contrast to a “bad dream” that can be quickly brushed off and forgotten, episodes of sleep paralysis may leave the person who experiences them with a deeply disturbing sense that they encountered an objective presence that cannot be dismissed as a dream or hallucination. As an aside, heightened salience is also a strong candidate for Colin Wilson’s “sense of reality” of “Faculty X.”

3. Psychedelics
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Mystical experiences under the influence of psychedelic drugs (such as mushrooms or LSD) are not unusual. Without wishing to explore this topic too deeply here, I would argue (based on personal experience) that the onset of these mystical states is directly related to the deep sense of significance that ratchets up at high doses, where the room seems so saturated with meaning that it condenses on the glowing walls in the form of mysterious glyphs. The potency of these feelings gives rise to a powerful and awe-inspiring sense of the numinous; a conviction that there must be some supernatural, godlike, or alien external force present to cause the overwhelming sensations of awe and supernatural dread.My initial impression of the chaos of trips at higher doses was that “everything is coming in sideways.” In addition to changes in mood you have this simultaneous sideways shift into both dissociation and feelings of heightened significance and meaningfulness. There is a quickening, a rapturous feeling of secrets unveiled, the discovery of hidden things and hidden meanings, to feel the significance of everything around, your surroundings freighted with meaning, as the revelations and visions come at last.

4. Psychosis
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It is reasonable to doubt whether numinous experiences resulting from high doses of psychedelic drugs are to be entirely trusted as having a supernatural external cause, rather than an internal psychological origin. Returning to the idea of the felt sense of significance as a type of affect, a good demonstration of this idea can be seen in the section on the “truth-taking stare” in chapter 2 of Louis Sass’s work on schizophrenia Madness and Modernism. This has been discussed in episode 120 of Weird Studies (29 mins). A related concept is German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad’s trema — “a term of theatrical slang referring to the stage fright an actor feels before the performance begins” —experienced during the preliminary stage of schizophrenia. This quote is from an article on Conrad’s work:

In Conrad’s stage model, there is often a prodromal delusional mood prior to the onset of the delusions. This may last for days, months, or even years. During this period, the patient experiences an increasingly oppressive tension, ‘‘a feeling of nonfinality’’ or expectation. The individual describes that something is ‘‘in the air’’ but is unable to say what has changed. Although the experience may be varied, the subject experiences a marked change of ‘‘emotional–motivational’’ state. At first, this is associated with the most salient experiences but eventually spreads to pervade the patient’s entire experiential field. The patient may feel not only excitement, ‘‘intoxicated’’ anticipation, but also suspiciousness, fear, depressive inhibition, guilt, a feeling of separation from others, and often a combination of these. She or he may perform abrupt, seemingly meaningless actions.

Conrad calls this initial expectational phase ‘‘Trema’’ (stage fright) as the patient has the feeling that something very important is about to happen. Attention is drawn toward irrelevant stimuli, thoughts, and associative connections, which are distressing and unpredictable: ‘‘The perceptual background acquires entirely new characteristics. Everything that lies in the periphery to one’s attention, what is behind, or not part of the current thematic focus’’ becomes a potential threat. The perceptual background, which remained unnoticed, now takes on a character of its own. The sense of threat (or whatever the predominant quality of the delusion happens to be) spreads to the entire perceptual field.

This means that what is not yet noticed in a potential perceptual gestalt takes on ‘‘saliency even before the patient orients to it, i.e., before becoming the focus of attention.’’ The patient’s changed internal motivational–emotional state, the delusional mood, imbues the entire field of experience with a transformed ‘‘physiognomic’’ quality (i.e. a sense of potential revelation/threat accompanied by affective tension due presumably to underlying neurobiological changes). Nevertheless, the subject (like the anosognosic neurological patient) does not attribute the changes to his/her own state but externalizes them to some, yet to be understood process in the world.

As explained above, the main reason for relating this stage of schizophrenia to ‘stage fright’ is the patient’s sense that something very important is about to happen; a feeling of tension, expectation and imminent revelation. The description of this state clearly shows drastic changes to the normal experience of significance in the patient’s surroundings. Pervasive feelings of heightened salience are interpreted as a change in the external environment, as though the world has become a forest of symbols from which threats or answers are about to emerge at any moment.

This relationship between salience and schizophrenia has not gone unnoticed, and scientists later developed an “aberrant salience hypothesis of schizophrenia” in which it is suggested that “symptoms of schizophrenia may arise out of the aberrant assignment of salience to external objects and internal representations” (Wikipedia). In Madness and Modernism, Sass is more concerned with the internal experience of schizophrenia than its potential causes, but he does briefly mention this theory (note 111, p379) where he uses the term “hypersalience” (and also “hyposalience” as its opposite). Hypersalience is a useful term for the pathological heightening of feelings of salience in psychosis, to distinguish this from other less extreme forms of heightened salience.

Sass breaks down the concept of the “truth-taking stare” into four elements – Unreality, Mere Being, Fragmentation, and Apophany, and relates them to the experiences described in “The Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl by a patient known as “Renee”.

5. Unreality
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For me, madness was definitely not a condition of illness; I did not believe that I was ill. It was rather a country, opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light, blinding, leaving no place for shadow; an immense space without boundary, limitless, flat; a mineral, lunar country, 'cold as the wastes of the North Pole. In this stretching emptiness, all is unchangeable, immobile, congealed, crystallized. Objects are stage trappings, placed here and there, geometric cubes without meaning.


People turn weirdly about, they make gestures, movements without sense; they are phantoms whirling on an infinite plain, crushed by the pitiless electric light. And I—I am lost in it, isolated, cold, stripped, purposeless under the light. A wall of glass separates me from everybody and everything... This was it; this was madness, the Enlightenment was the perception of Unreality. Madness was finding oneself permanently in an all-embracing Unreality. (Sass 29)

This description shows a disconnection or dissociation from a reality which has become devoid of meaning and sense. I have been writing about sensations of heightened salience and meaningfulness, and this is an appropriate moment to consider what a reduction in salience (“negative salience” or hyposalience) would look like. If salience was the X-axis of a graph (with valence forming the Y-axis of positive or negative mood) then something with zero salience could be thought of as trivial or insignificant; barely noticed. Moving into an experience of negative salience would involve the hollowing out of meaning normally present.

While this may be difficult to conceive, Renee’s description above gives a good sense of the dissociation this would entail. In fact, I would define the experience of negative salience (or hyposalience) as a type of dissociation.

Sass also relates this idea of “unreality” to a decidedly Ligottian perception of other people:

In other descriptions of so-called Unreality, Renee places less emphasis on the feeling of illuminated emptiness, strangeness, or devitalization and more on some flimsy, false, or doubled quality inherent in things. At these moments, objects could take on the look of "stage accessories" or "pasteboard scenery," and people seemed mere "puppets," "mannikins," or "automatons," or else somehow "in disguise." (Sass 29)

6. Mere Being
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Renee describes the way she experienced everyday objects during schizophrenia:

When, for example, I looked at a chair or a jug, I thought not of their use or function-- a jug not as something to hold water and milk, a chair not as something to sit in-- but as having lost their names, their functions and meanings; they became "things" and began to take on life, to exist."

Their existence accounted for my great fear. In the unreal scene, in the murky quiet of my perception, suddenly "the thing" sprang up. The stone jar, decorated with blue flowers, was there facing me, defying me with its presence, with its existence. To conquer my fear I looked away. My eyes met a chair, then a table; they were alive, too asserting their presence. I attempted to escape their hold by calling out their names. I said, "chair, jug, table, it is a chair." But the word echoed hollowly, deprived of all meaning; it had left the object, was divorced from it, so much so that on one hand it was a living, mocking thing, on the other, a name, robbed of sense, an envelope emptied of content. (Sass 30)

In this description there is a mixture of dissociation (hyposalience / negative salience) and hypersalience. Normal objects are being emptied of meaning, a form of dissociation and derealization continuing the theme of unreality, of negative salience, discussed previously. However, this is succeeded or accompanied by a feeling of hypersalience as the objects assert their presence. Their mere existence, now devoid of their functional role, causes a sense of alarm or gives off a palpable hostility. Note the term “sprang up” which is directly related to the “leaping” etymology of the word salience. Objects in the visual field seem ready to leap out, not based on their normal functional use, but as repositories of some independent existence. Their meaningfulness as normal functional objects recedes, at the same time as an unpleasant sense of significance from their independent existence is growing to replace it.

Not everything in this passage (or in schizophrenia as a condition) relates directly to salience; there is a breakdown of normal categories here in the assignment of some sort of agency and independent existence to objects. Schizophrenia can involve complex breakdowns in the distinctions between internal and external, self and other, the everyday “theory of other minds” that allows us to judge approximately what other people are feeling, based on their actions, gestures, expressions and what they say.

While the “mere being” of objects seems like a strange and abstract concept, similar effects can be observed under the influence of psychedelics. A personal experience of this started with a subtle sense that something about the wardrobe was “off” and drawing my attention, that elements of the room had “an uneasy presence about them.” A note made later in the experience describes how “the furniture glows with a surprising ferocity.” It is the sense that a room is not just passively existing as a room, it is actively asserting itself at you as a hostile presence. A description of a similar event concerning a radiator (during a panic attack) was described by J.F. Martel in a Weird Studies episode.

7. Fragmentation
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Another schizophrenic likened his vision of Fragmentation to being "surrounded by a multitude of meaningless details." "I did not see things as a whole," he said, "I only saw fragments... They did not stand together in an overall context, and I saw them as meaningless details."

… Fragmentation, where details or parts overwhelm the synthetic whole: each of these phases or aspects of the Trema challenges the capacity of words and concepts to capture lived experience.
...language and the world shed their normal symbol-referent relationship; objects seem to be stripped of the usual meanings by which they are unified and placed in the human world (in Sartre's vocabulary, essences recede while existence obtrudes). To speak of things as "alive" was Renee's way of capturing the fact that objects no longer seemed to have the subservience of tools, as if they were rebelling against their normal role as dutiful exemplars of the various categories of human thought and language. And, at the same time, words and syllables themselves will come to seem objectlike: no longer the transparent signifiers of meanings lying beyond themselves, they may turn opaque or come alive-- flaunting their immanence and independence, demanding to be paid attention to for their own sake. (Sass 31-32)

The general idea of the fragmentation of the self, or the sense of the world as a coherent whole being replaced by meaningless fragmentary details, can be seen as a continuation of the general theme of dissociation, as the world and the self is emptied of meaning. The comments here about language are interesting, showing the possibility that words themselves can lose meaning in the same way as the objects they refer to, while asserting some sort of independent existence.

Again, this is an odd idea, part of the thought disorder of schizophrenia, but it can also be experienced with psychedelics. This is a short entry from a trip journal showing that the words used to describe a psychedelic visual can themselves be caught up in the dissociation of the trip:

“A burgundy that means nothing. What kind of word is burgundy? I see it nonetheless. I question why I am seeing this; and the word used to describe it. Maroon would be safer. And less disturbing.”

Here the word burgundy (not a word I would normally use) pops into my head to describe a color I am seeing with my eyes closed, but the word itself seems to be lacking in meaning and somehow suspicious.

8. Apophany
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Wikipedia gives a useful definition of this term:

The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein)) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia. He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".

…In contrast to an epiphany, an apophany (i.e., an instance of apophenia) does not provide insight into the nature of reality nor its interconnectedness, but is a "process of repetitively and monotonously experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire surrounding experiential field".

Sass talks about the “apophany” as a common feature of the early stages of a psychotic break in Madness and Modernism:

...an abnormally heightened awareness of meaningfulness or significance that has been termed the apophanous mood (from the Greek word apophany, meaning "to become manifest").

…Once conventional meanings have faded away (Unreality) and new details or aspects of the world have been thrust into awareness (Fragmentation, Mere Being), there often emerges an inchoate sense of the as yet unarticulated significances of these newly emergent phenomena. In this "mood,"... the world resonates with a fugitive significance. Every detail and event takes on an excruciating distinctness... -- some definite meaning that always lies just out of reach, eluding all attempts to grasp or specify it.

“Every single thing ‘means’ something,” said one patient of this mood of “delusional tension.” …”I have a sense that everything is vivid and more important… There is a connection to everything that happens—no coincidences.” So freighted with the feeling of meaning, yet so devoid of any particular, specifiable meaning, the symbols experienced during the Apophany might be called "symbol symbols": ubiquitous semiotic pointers whose sole referent is the sheer sense of meaningfulness itself.

This a direct statement of the idea of “hypersalience” that I have been discussing, where the world “resonates with a fugitive significance.” Salience, as I am using the term, could well be defined as “the sheer presence of meaningfulness itself.” If, as previously suggested, we expand the meaning of salience to include negative salience (subtraction of meaningfulness, understood as dissociation) then many features of the truth-taking stare can be interpreted as experiences of drastic changes to the salience of everyday scenes and occurrences. Hypersalience results in the “apophany” described above, while hyposalience can result in profound and disturbing levels of meaninglessness (rather than mere insignificance) via dissociation.

Sass remarks that the overall mood of the truth-taking stare (known by the untranslatable term stimmung) is closely tied to the delusions of schizophrenia:

“the 'stimmung' is a key symptom of schizophrenia… and, in addition, seems a pivotal foundation or source for other, better-known symptoms, such as delusions or ideas of reference (the latter involving the belief or sense that one is somehow the center of attention, the object of all gazes and messages.)

…To patients in this state of mind, the world is stripped of its usual meanings and sense of coherence, and therefore defies any standard description. Everything bristles with a new and overwhelming quality of definiteness and significance…” (27-28)

Returning to Conrad, the hypersalience of Sass’s “apophany” feeds directly into the formation of delusions as the psychotic break progresses:

The delusions appear suddenly as an ‘‘aha experience’’ (‘‘Aha-Erlebnis’’ or ‘‘revelation’’) concerning what had been perplexing during delusional mood and often bring relief.

A delusion may be internally experienced as an “epiphany” in the sense of “a sudden and striking realization” or noetic insight. The delusion arrives as a moment of realization or revelation (the word epiphany has connotations of divine insight) with a strong internal sense of self-evidence and irrefutability, however bizarre the idea might seem to others.

To conclude these remarks on schizophrenia, it is probably futile to attempt to explain or describe this condition using a single concept such as salience. Schizophrenia involves complicated and deeply embedded forms of thought disorder that encompass other elements such as the relationship between the self and other, or between internal and external (e.g. to understand a concept such as ”thought broadcasting.”.

The concept of hypersalience also has relevance to the understanding of psychosis in a mood disorder such as bipolar disorder. Here the elevated mood and racing thoughts during states of mania can be accompanied by hypersalience to such a degree that it creates powerful feelings of the numinous that can culminate in the delusional revelations of a “spiritual psychosis.” This process also has an obvious similarity with the effects of strong doses of psychedelics, which may lead to powerful spiritual or delusional experiences which are accompanied by vastly elevated feelings of significance.

Linked in the notes are two YouTube videos that illustrate the relationship between spiritual / mystical states and psychosis, providing a demonstration of the Joseph Campbell quote that "The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight."

Regardless of speculations on the causes of psychosis, the main reason for focusing on the aspects of schizophrenia outlined by Sass is to flesh out a vivid picture of the experience of drastically heightened salience (hypersalience), along with the depths of dissociation experienced during negative salience.

9. Salience – Recap
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To recap the general idea of salience as a felt sense of meaningfulness, consider some examples of the experience of music. An experience of heightened salience while listening to music would be a scenario where you are not merely enjoying a piece of music, but it resonates at an emotional level, has some personal sense of significance or relevance to your life. Nothing especially strange or uncommon is happening, but the music conveys a sense of meaningfulness through the emotions it generates. An example of neutral salience (the zero point on the X-axis if you were plotting salience on a graph) while listening to music would be something insignificant, perhaps some muzak or pop music in the background that you barely notice playing in a shopping mall.

On the other hand, experiencing negative salience while listening to music would be disturbing, not merely a lack of enjoyment of a favorite piece of music, but a sense that it has become unrecognizable as music. I once experienced this type of dissociation under the influence of psychedelics while listening to “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” by Count Basie, which happened to shuffle onto my playlist. An upbeat 1930s jazz piece which has been described (according to Wikipedia) as “a definition of swing,” it would seem an unlikely candidate to disturb anyone, but its familiarity was absent—it was almost unrecognizable as music despite knowing that I’d enjoyed listening to it before. It produced a disturbing feeling that my mind had drifted to a point where I could no longer relate to the world that had produced this completely alien collection of discordant sounds.

Like the examples from schizophrenia, this is another example where dissociation and lack of meaning (negative salience) is accompanied by feelings of heightened salience – the fact that I no longer seemed to belong to the world that had created the music seemed highly significant and disturbing, a portent of a trip that was starting to go out of control and turn nasty.

Another example of a range of sensations of meaningfulness experienced on psychedelics comes from Terence McKenna. At the beginning of True Hallucinations he describes a brief mushroom experience in which “Things stood out with a new presence or significance.” This sums up an important component of the psychedelic experience; the state of heightened salience. In direct contrast, the horror of meaninglessness, of negative salience combined with a negative mood (valence) in powerful states of dissociation, is expressed in a reference to a much later mushroom trip by Terence McKenna in which “he saw the cosmos or multiverse in the stark, horrifying light of ‘a lack of all meaning.’” (Matt Cardin, What the Daemon Said 315).

10. Sehnsucht
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Many of the examples given or quoted of changes to the feeling of salience are somewhat outré, coming from experiences of psychosis or psychedelics. Likewise, the type of sober mystical experience described by Albert Hofmann is not necessarily a universal or commonplace event. A more relatable example is perhaps the concept of “sehnsucht,” a flickering sense of enchantment that creates a sense of longing for something we can’t quite place, a feeling that something numinous is just beyond our grasp. This is described by Matt Cardin in a piece on Autumn Longing.

I think the experience of sehnsucht fits into the concept of heightened salience. The sense of anticipation, the fleeting sensation that “something is in the air” is reminiscent of the initial stages of the “trema” discussed earlier, but in the case of sehnsucht the mood is positive as well as being more delicate; the feeling is one of wistful nostalgia for something that is enchanting and mysterious.

11. Synchronicity
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Another more relatable example of heightened salience can be seen in Jung’s concept of synchronicity, in which the sense of meaningfulness is an essential component. Without delving too deeply into this topic, synchronicity could perhaps be defined as a co-incidence which is accompanied by a feeling of heightened salience.

The docu-series “Hellier” (covered by Weird Studies in Episode 67) relies heavily on synchronicities and a narrative emphasis on the building-up of a sense of significance to tie together its disparate elements into an investigation of some mysterious and elusive “phenomenon.” A perceptive YouTube comment observed that “Whether you believe they’re really onto something or not, what this series really is, is a kind of cinema verité about people seeking meaning.” To take this idea further, I would suggest that the “phenomenon” being sought (or actively stimulated) is precisely the sense of heightened significance that is under discussion, an internal psychological quest as much as a paranormal one.

12. Salience in Literature - Introduction
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Another reason for developing the idea of salience to describe changes to our felt sense of significance, is as a way of expressing a key element, an “eldritch mood,” of weird literature.

Although I am focusing on weird literature below, the same emotion of heightened salience is evoked in other media such as film and music. A good example is the “moon monolith” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The monolith itself is a black rectangle, something you might walk past with little thought if it was a granite monument or piece of abstract sculpture encountered in a city park. But in this film sequence it is charged with significance, an emotion re-enforced by the eerie music of Ligeti’s Requiem that itself has an unsettling numinous quality.

2001: A Space Odyssey - The Monolith On The Moon
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU4Rk0NATNs[/ame]

Even if we aren’t regularly experiencing noteworthy or drastic changes to our sense of salience during everyday life, a good weird story can provide a frisson of elevated salience that echoes the emotions of awe and wonder that would be experienced by the protagonist encountering the weird directly.

13. Dunsany
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Lord Dunsany was a writer gifted at creating a sense of enchantment and a hint of the numinous in his work. While Lovecraft initially described Dunsany as a “cosmic” writer, I think the main reason for his influence on Lovecraft is the sense of heightened salience that comes through strongly in the best of Dunsany’s work. With his dream cities, Dunsany provides a vision of places that would satisfy the longings of sehnsucht. Not only that, but the writing itself, with its numinous rhythms suggestive of resonant passages of scripture, gives off an aura of enchantment, as though by visualizing these places we are somehow bringing them to life inside us. One such dream city is Sardathrion, from “Time and the Gods” (the first story in the collection of the same name).

… the gods dreamed marble dreams. And with domes and pinnacles the dreams arose and stood up proudly between the river and the sky, all shimmering white to the morning. In the city’s midst the gleaming marble of a thousand steps climbed to the citadel where arose four pinnacles beckoning to heaven, and midmost between the pinnacles there stood the dome, vast, as the gods had dreamed it.

…Only to those to whom in lonely passes in the night the gods have spoken, leaning through the stars, to those that have heard the voices of the gods above the morning or seen Their faces bending above the sea, only to those hath it been given to see Sardathrion, to stand where her pinnacles gathered together in the night fresh from the dreams of gods. For round the valley a great desert lies through which no common traveller may come, but those whom the gods have chosen feel suddenly a great longing at heart, and crossing the mountains that divide the desert from the world, set out across it driven by the gods, till hidden in the desert’s midst they find the valley at last and look with eyes upon Sardathrion.

In “The Relenting of Sardinac” a character expresses the longing for a sense of enchantment that could be seen as a statement of the effect (or affect) that Dunsany seeks in his writing:

‘O gods, rob not the earth of the dim hush that hangs round all Your temples, bereave not all the world of old romance, take not the glamour from the moonlight nor tear the wonder out of the white mists in every land; for, O ye gods of the childhood of the world, when You have left the earth you shall have taken the mystery from the sea and all its glory from antiquity, and You shall have wrenched out hope from the dim future. There shall be no strange cries at night time half understood, nor songs in the twilight, and the whole of the wonder shall have died with last year’s flowers in little gardens or hill-slopes leaning south; for with the gods must go the enchantment of the plains and all the magic of dark woods, and something shall be lacking from the quiet of early dawn.

The emotional tone of these passages is positive in the sense that they evoke wonder and enchantment rather than terror or horror. Partly for this reason, Dunsany is typically associated with fantasy more than horror, but this sense of enchantment has its place in the weird tale, where the effect sought is often closer to awe and wonder than outright terror. Dunsany also wrote some more unsettling stories that have a frisson of the weird, such as “The Loot of Loma.”

From either end of that narrow, terrible ledge the third night was closing in; it was dropping down on them from the heights of the mountain and slipping up to them out of the abyss, the third night since Loma blazed and they had left it. Three more days of tramping should bring them in triumph home, and yet their instincts said that all was scarcely well.

… Though in the heights the fleecy clouds were idle, yet the wind was stirring mournfully in the abyss and moaning as it stirred, unhappily at first and full of sorrow; but as day turned away from that awful path a very definite menace entered its voice which fast grew louder and louder, and night came on with a long howl.

… It seemed that the wind was saying something over and over again, and that that thing was evil. They prayed again to their totems, and no sign came. And then they knew that there was some power that night that was prevailing against the pleasant carvings on painted poles of wood with the firelight on their faces so far away. Now it was clear that the wind was saying something, some very, very dreadful thing in a tongue that they did not know.

… Till midnight they plodded on and would not sleep; grimmer and grimmer grew the look of the night, and the wind more full of meaning…

Despite its brevity (less than four pages) and the whimsical tone of a traveler’s tale, there is the structure of an effective weird tale, with a sense of menace from portents of doom that are clear both to the reader and to the protagonists who sense that “all was scarcely well.” In the quoted passages the wind functions as this portent of doom, full of menace, saying something evil. The relationship of this to salience is captured in the phrase “the wind more full of meaning.” The sense of an intangible looming threat suggested through descriptions that evoke a sense of heightened salience (to both the characters in the story and the reader) is an important element of the classic weird tale, such as Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.”

14. Lovecraft​

The development of heightened salience as a component of the weird tale can be seen in Lovecraft. He sought to combine the enchantment of Dunsany, the sense of “adventurous expectancy,” with elements of supernatural horror. This can be seen in early tales such as “The Nameless City” which has echoes of Dunsany’s Sardathrion. In Dunsany’s story the city is in “a great desert… through which no common traveller may come” while Lovecraft’s nameless city is “remote in the desert of Araby… the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man.”

One of my favourite Lovecraft tales is the prose-poem “Nyarlathotep.” A sense of heightened salience is introduced in the first few lines, a background of societal paranoia to the unfolding events:

The general tension was horrible …a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night.

This passage recalls the “oppressive tension” of Conrad’s trema. The protagonist is eager to see Nyarlathotep, to experience “the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations.” However, instead of awe and wonder, he experiences terrifying cosmic horror.

Nyarlathotep drave us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We sware to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive…

At this point in the narrative, the narrator doubts that the city is the same. Instead of familiarity, there is a stark sense of dissociation, of unreality, expressed by the city’s visual transformation into a ruin of the future. Instead of the initial sense of heightened salience culminating in some sort of revelation, we get a city that has been emptied of meaning, a cosmic void or “sightless vortex” of negative salience. Yet for the reader, the sense of the numinous only increases as we read Lovecraft’s breathless description of this changed landscape:

My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls.

There are curious parallels with Renee’s description of the element of “unreality” from Sass, quoted above:

For me, madness was definitely not a condition of illness; I did not believe that I was ill. It was rather a country, opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light, blinding, leaving no place for shadow; an immense space without boundary, limitless, flat; a mineral, lunar country, 'cold as the wastes of the North Pole.

… People turn weirdly about, they make gestures, movements without sense; they are phantoms whirling on an infinite plain (Sass 29)

This description of the people also has an echo in Lovecraft’s story, where the people “laughed at the queer faces we made… we drifted into curious involuntary formations.”

Lovecraft is sometimes mocked as a writer on the grounds of his florid descriptions and characters that go mad at the slightest provocation, but I think the connection of his stories and writing style to madness is more profound. The lurid descriptions bristle with a manic intensity, and his stories are themselves sometimes structured like a psychosis. In “The Call of Cthulhu” we have the build-up of heightened salience via the implications of various happenings, the brooding apophanous apprehension of the trema culminating in dreadful revelations of impending doom.

The famous quote from this story about “the piecing together of dissociated knowledge” which “will open up such terrifying vistas of reality” describes one facet of salience in Lovecraft’s tales. An initial sense of foreboding (heightened salience) is incremented by further discoveries culminating in a dreadful revelation. This can be compared to a paranoid delusion about reality itself, the essence of which could be summed up as “You have uncovered a terrifying secret about reality. There is no escape from the nightmare.”

Another use of salience in Lovecraft’s tales works in the opposite direction, as already seen in “Nyarlathotep.” Here, the “dissociated knowledge” results in a literal dissociation from reality, a screaming cosmic void of unreality that engulfs the protagonists. As Ligotti has observed, “the supernatural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity.”

15. Ligotti
​

The general tone of Ligotti’s work evokes the earlier comments of Sass on “unreality” in schizophrenia:

At these moments, objects could take on the look of "stage accessories" or "pasteboard scenery," and people seemed mere "puppets," "mannikins," or "automatons," or else somehow "in disguise."

As in Lovecraft’s “Nyarlathotep,” a Ligottian character may initially be drawn to the “impelling fascination and allurement” of some promised revelation, but the result is more likely to be a plunge into a void of absolute meaninglessness, a condition of radical negative salience. There is no culmination of the apophany through a meaningful revelation, however awful in nature. In a Ligotti story, any type of revelation is unlikely to “bring relief” or provide satisfying answers to those who seek fascination and allurement from esoteric sources. There is only a gaping abyss of meaninglessness, a negative revelation.

The relationship between Ligotti’s fiction and the concept of salience is explored in detail in a separate essay: Ligotti’s Wasteland of Abstraction: The “Dissociative Gothic” of Noctuary

Conclusion​

The concept of salience discussed in this essay, as the felt experience of meaning, could perhaps be interpreted as an attempt to “psychologize” meaning into “a chimera of your own mentations” (to quote J.F. Martel from Weird Studies episode 120, where he strongly disagrees with any such attempt). However, most experiences of heightened salience are perfectly normal, such as the feelings of significance that accompany major life events. The idea of salience I am presenting is more about how we experience meaningfulness and significance as a sensation, concentrating on its stranger manifestations, rather than a claim about the philosophical nature of meaning itself.

The experience of heightened or drastically reduced significance gets more interesting in the realm of the weird. My suggestion is that the experience of meaningfulness is a form of “affect” that can shift in the same way as mood, and like mood it is not always an accurate representation of how things stand in “reality.” If you are abducted by aliens (assuming you get over the shock) you would naturally experience it as a highly significant event triggering sensations of massively heightened salience, but equally we have the possibility that you think you’ve been abducted by aliens because you are having sensations of massively heightened salience combined with hallucinations during an episode of acute psychosis or sleep paralysis. The same applies to experiences of the numinous – as psychedelics show, an experience of the numinous is not always a reliable guide to the existence or true nature of some metaphysical reality behind or beyond it.

To return to the topic of psychedelics briefly, they help illuminate this range of states and take us sideways into the weird, allowing us to experience something analogous to the dissociative unreality and mere being of the schizophrenic “trema,” along with the heightened salience of apophany, the numinous and the mystical.

My aim has been to suggest that this concept of heightened salience (and negative salience as a form of dissociation) is a useful way of conceiving a continuum of different subjective sensations through their shared relation to significance and meaningfulness, that otherwise have no straightforward concept to link them.

Sources / Bibliography:
​

Albert Hofmann| LSD, My Problem Child [MAPS 2023 edition]

https://www.teemingbrain.com/2006/10/16/autumn-longing-cs-lewis/

William James | The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). [Penguin Classics, 1985 edition]

Klaus Conrad (1905–1961): Delusional Mood, Psychosis, and Beginning Schizophrenia
(Schizophrenia Bulletin vol. 36 no. 1 pp. 9–13, 2010)

Louis Sass | Madness and Modernism (1992)[revised edition, 2017]

For some extracts from Madness and Modernism see:
http://ahistoryofthepresentananthol.../madness-and-modernism-insanity-in-light.html

Matt Cardin | What the Daemon Said – Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy
(Hippocampus Press 2022)

Ligotti interview: https://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=420

BEING JESUS - a Cheeky Little Mental Health Documentary about the Psychosis (Channel: Mind Wick)

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cB3L8pbm2F8[/ame]

Kundalini Awakening, Mystical Experience, and Psychosis (Channel: MindMastery)
[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DekQboEn8O8[/ame]

 

[matt cardin]

I'm looking forward to setting aside time to read this in detail. Upon a scan, it's quite engaging.