There are spaces between words. Letters are placed in discrete bundles that together represent something greater than the sum of its parts. Fixed to a surface, words don't change without eraser and ink or chisel and hammer. Printed words don't change without some force, or at least that's what I have been told. This reality is not mine. My world is of magic and miracles. Letters, words, sentences, and blocks of text change, disappear, and transmute themselves into new things, all with out my knowing. It is hard for me to judge what I perceive without knowing what is "normal", but I have been told what I see is not what is there. The person that has only known unvarying light is the same as a person who has only known darkness; they are both blind. Neither can describe the cave that they live in, nor can they understand the others world without experiencing it.
Take a page of text and remove all of the spaces so that all of the letters are nearly touching. Remove words, and replace them with close approximates. Now take some of the letters and randomly float them off the page. Replace them with something reversed, rotated, or perhaps nothing identifiable at all. This is dyslexia for me and for others; it is different. It is hard to explain why the numbers on a page cascade down, randomly recycling like a waterfall, or how I know a stop sign says stop. The majority of people question this reality because it is not theirs'. They have not shared this view and can not imagine viewing a world that only selectively distorts symbols.
Before the advent of computers, a reality that constantly shifted and changed was unrealized by all but the surrealists who even in their best attempts could only create a static image. I see both worlds and never know when the transition has been made. A word that I glanced at just moments before, may be something different if I go back to it. With ruler and pen, I could count every letter and check each word, and the secret transformations would still occur somewhere between my eye and the creation of the image. If it were simply that the world was backwards I would wear glasses, but not all things are affected.
In the art of movie making, there is a technique called forced perception. A woman can stand at a distance and appear to be only a few inches tall compared to the hand that she stands on. This is not reality, but a perceived reality created by well performed visual trickery. The audience perceives the difference and may question it, but they ultimately believe what they see, because in a movie anything is possible. I live with forced perception, knowing that all that I see is not always what is there, but believing it all because it makes sense.
Ethan Mcleod Saxton