What does TAPS mean? -> TAPS stands for Temporal Alignment Permeation Syndrome. It started popping up ~2019 when Fourcast began messing around with the SPORE device. Though I'm not the only one to have TAPS, I imagine it's pretty rare - I've yet to meet anyone else with it in-person.
What does TAPS do? -> As the name suggests, my connection to the current time and reality my physical body exists in can be kind of tenuous, leading me to experience other realities and futures. Episodes are random and unpredictable, but thankfully mostly happen when I'm asleep (waking episodes can be pretty disruptive to my day, especially when the glimpses I get aren't the most cheerful :( ).
How do you know you're not just dreaming? -> For one, I sometimes experience episodes while completely awake (I have no prior medical history of anything that would cause similar experiences to TAPS), and I can very clearly differentiate between the feeling of being in a dream and being in a TAPS episode. On top of that, Fourcast Lab has been researching TAPS since it started to affect people around 2019 and has confirmed its existence as a legitimate phenomena.
How does TAPS affect you? -> It's very much a coin toss. Because it's random and I have no control over what I see, I can go a few weeks without experiencing any episodes, to having some pleasant/neutral experiences during an episode while asleep every couple of days, to dealing with some really harrowing visions during the day. There's good and bad in it, and I hope understanding more about TAPS will help me deal with day-to-day life with it.
How do you deal with TAPS? -> Therapy has been very helpful for me. TAPS can bring on some pretty heavy, existential questions, so having someone to talk to about it has been really important. In a way, interning at Fourcast Lab brings about its own sense of assurance; I know TAPS is taken seriously there and my experiences as someone who is both living with TAPS and trying to research it is unique and helpful when it comes to understanding it better. 4CL people get weird time stuff, so I've found a lot of support and understanding amongst my coworkers. My feelings about 4CL are kind of complicated as a whole, since, as far as theories go, their handling of SPORE is what led to people developing TAPS. I feel conflicted, in a way - as far as we know, developing TAPS is a freak accident, so I can't really be mad at 4CL because it's not like they were malicious, but at the same time...TAPS can be rough.
Why do you want to research TAPS? -> Culmination of a few points from above: it's a relatively new and rare condition with little known about it, and I hope understanding TAPS better will help me, and other people living with TAPS, deal with it. Research into TAPS hasn't been that extensive, so I really want to help figure out the why/how/when of TAPS.
What is one of your favorite experiences with TAPS? -> I've seen a lot of beautiful worlds through TAPS - in a lot of ways, I feel extremely, uniquely privileged to have these experiences. One that really sticks with me is having an episode while sleeping; I was at the highest point of a mountain range, a lavender sky stretched out overhead. The sun(s?) was just coming up, making pale, yellow streaks in the clouds above me. The sun reached down to the mountain faces around me, pitch black but shimmering in the light, like rippling waves of abalone. At my feet, the mountain I was on dropped off into a valley, overgrown with tree-like flora, leaves deep green and rustling. Curling through this alien forest, like a massive serpent on its belly, was a river of silver, ferocious in its perpetual voyage. The whole episode was so beautiful and serene, it's really stuck with me as an example of the beauty of possible futures and alternate realities, and made me feel really lucky to have TAPS.
What is one of your worst experiences with TAPS? -> I was on the CTA during rush hour when I had an episode. Thankfully I was sitting down, but I was totally overcome with the vision of standing at the foot of a volcano as it erupted, a lightning storm battering the blazing peak and striking my surroundings. I heard a lot of commotion, but couldn't identify where it was coming from, and I couldn't move as the volcanic ash rained down upon me, dark and scorching, lava racing ever closer. It was viscerally terrifying, being at the complete mercy of extreme forces of nature. It took me a while to come out of the episode, and when I did I was a) very disorientated, tired, and still pretty scared, and b) had missed my stop by a pretty good margin. Needless to say that day's commute felt very, very long.
