143 - Doppelgänger

【ドッペルゲンガー、dopperugengaa】

Doppel means "double" and gänger means "goer" in English.

As the name suggests, a doppelgänger is a person's alter ego, another self that exists in this world. There have been doppelgänger encounters not only in the West but also in China, Japan, and many other countries around the world.

Many famous and well-known people have claimed to have witnessed doppelgängers. Maupassant, a leading French naturalist writer known for "A Woman's Life", met another version of himself who visited his room in 1889. And, the German Goethe, writer of "Faust", was riding his horse in a park when he saw another self coming from his front on a horse. Other doppelgänger witness accounts include that of English poet Shelley, considered a representative of the Romantic school, and the novelist Ryuunosuke Akutagawa.

In addition, the Russian novelist Dostoevsky and the American poet and fantasy writer Edgar Allan Poe have also written novels based on doppelgängers.

Creepily, it is said that anyone who sees a doppelgänger will die in the near future, and that is what tugged at the heartstrings of these writers.

However, it is difficult to say that the rumors are true because Goethe, who witnessed his doppelgänger at age 21, lived until he was 83.

In recent years, seeing doppelgängers is said to be a kind of psychosis.

In the psychiatric world, this is called "autoscopy" and its characteristics are:

- Clearly seeing oneself several tens of centimeters to meters in front of oneself, or to the side.

- Most of the time, the doppelgänger does not move, but sometimes, it moves in accordance with one's own movement.

- Full-body images are rare, with partial images such as only the face, head, or upper body being more common.

- Generally, the doppelgänger appears to be monochrome.

- It can appear to be flat and lacking three-dimensionality, as a vague image, or transparent like gelatin or glass.

- It does not necessarily need to look like oneself, it can be wearing different clothes, having a different expression, and even sometimes being of different age.

- Etcetera.

However, those who witness doppelgängers, no matter how different they may appear from themselves, are said to have no doubt that they are images of themselves.

According to recent studies, it is also believed that some causes, such as tumors or migraine headaches, may alter the border region between the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain, which controls body image (the unconscious perception of the shape and size of one's own body), causing the actual body and the body image to be perceived as two separate entities.