North Brother's Island

"It has happened to me during lonely walks around the woods at Baarn that I suddenly stopped dead in my tracks, seized by an alarming, unreal, and at the same time blissful experience of standing face to face with the unexplainable.That tree there is, of it its own, as object, maybe not astonishing. The distance, the space between it and me, however, seems suddenly enigmatic."

North Brother's Island, one of New York City's little-known deserted islands in the East River, is home to a highly concentrated Synaptic Locus. On the West shore sits a long-abandoned tuberculosis sanitarium. In the first of a series of crumbling dormitory rooms, a crude image of a desert island, complete with solitary palm tree, has been painted, no doubt by an inmate, directly on the wall. In the center of the painting, the wall has been punched through, revealing a second, identical room. Through the hole one can just make out, on the far wall of the second room, another palm tree, on another desert island, similarly painted - and similarly punctured - revealing a third room, a third painting, and a third hole - a third illusory plane, shattered to reveal the next vulnerable plane of the real.

This is quintessential Synapse Experience, and may be due to a coil in our world-lattice, allowing for multiple experiences to be nested in the same moment in time. The lattices, though often represented as straight-lines in the Codex, are rarely so well-behaved. Knots, tangles, and friction with neighboring lattices can all induce the lapses of unreality that momentarily reveal the Synapse, glimpsed through holes poked in the walls of our world.