[JapanUrbanLegend] Gestaltzerfall
Gestaltzerfall
A and B, two college students, began an ordinary experiment. The two friends became curious about a mysterious rumor and decided to ask themselves the same question every day while looking into a mirror: "Who are you?" They asked this question multiple times a day, at various hours. At first, there was no noticeable change, but as time passed, A began to feel something strange. The question started to feel increasingly meaningless, and the doubt about who he was began to surface in his mind. His sense of identity gradually became more and more blurred.
One day, A, feeling anxious, suggested to B that they stop the experiment. Days passed, and when B didn't come to school, A went to his house, worried. Upon arriving, A was shocked to see B's state. B, unable to recognize who he was, stood there confused, staring at his reflection in the mirror. The fear and confusion on his face stunned A.
When A entered B's room, he realized the reason. In the center of the room stood a three-sided mirror. It was the "triangular mirror," the place where they had been conducting their experiment. The triangular mirror surrounded a person and reflected them infinitely, causing the person trapped inside to gradually lose their sense of self. A finally understood the effect of the mirror. Inside the reflection, he was just an endless repetition of images.
From that day onward, A, too, unknowingly began asking himself the same question: "Who am I?" Instead of finding himself within the mirror, he began to feel like he was drifting further away from who he was. In that moment, A suddenly recalled Professor Ehrenfels's research. However, what Ehrenfels had studied—"Gestalt collapse"—was a different matter. Ehrenfels argued that Gestalt collapse was merely a temporary phenomenon, a distortion in perception where familiar things suddenly appear strange. But what A and B were experiencing was much deeper and more disorienting than that.
One day, as A thought about Ehrenfels's research, he was struck by a sudden realization: "Could it be that the Gestalt collapse we're experiencing is happening in a different way?" He could no longer separate the world he saw from the self in the mirror. Now, he didn't know how to explain what he saw in the reflection. He only saw reflected images, unable to recognize himself.
But here’s the key: The phenomenon they were describing, although it might be loosely related to the concept of "Gestalt collapse," was not about a simple distortion of perception. It was something deeper. It was a breakdown of the mind itself, a state where the boundary between reality and dream became impossible to distinguish.
A recalled a conversation with one of Ehrenfels’s patients, who had said, "I can't tell if the world we live in is a dream or reality." A and B understood that statement now. They couldn't recognize themselves in the mirror. Was it a dream, or was it reality?
In the end, A and B could no longer continue the experiment. Asking the question in front of the mirror had become too dangerous. Their minds were slowly unraveling, and there seemed to be no way to reverse it. The experiment was over. But the lesson they learned would never be forgotten. The moment they realized how dangerous it was to ask the question while looking into the mirror—“Who are you?”—they could no longer continue the experiment.
However, A realized one important thing. "Identity is not simply defined by what we see in the mirror." It wasn't the mirror that caused their identity to collapse, but the desire to define themselves that had led to their downfall. And this, A realized, was a phenomenon that could be explained as a "Gestalt collapse."
