Went to the dentist last friday.

I fully comply with the rest-of-the-world’s view of the British relationship with the dental arts, and am completely terrified of going to the little room with the cup of pink rinse.

I asked for recommendations from friends for a dentist who specialised in making people who hadn’t been to the dentist in… a long time… feel more relaxed and happy about the experience.

Mr. Webb told me about his dentist, Dr.Bashar Al-Naher who uses a combination of mild anaesthetic and NLP to induce relaxation and a feeling of security in his patients.

I’ve been lucky enough never to have to have surgery or be in another situation where anaesthesia was employed, so this was a novel experience for me.

Once I’d reached the state of both local and mild general anaesthesia, I had a curious feeling of distance from my body.

I felt as if my conscious mind (in which I seemed together enough to start dissecting the experience) was ‘up on a balcony’ somewhere in my head. I had a distinct feeling that I had retreated to an observation gallery, compartmentalised from my body itself, and even the lower part of my head/face where the action was.

Whilst feeling removed from ‘where the action was’, I started reflecting on ‘Where the action is’, and my previous work with Chris on embodied interaction. I even started thinking about writing this post.

Sometime during this, a small daemon system running somewhere sidled into the balcony where “I” was, and started fretting about all the dissection of the experience I was doing – perhaps fearing the degree of conscious thought going on would let the body (and the pain) in through the back door.

I went back to (un)concentrating on my breathing, and the visualisation that Dr. Al-Naher was leading me through. Happy again, I let the drilling and filling continue…

After the work had been done and I was coming out of the state of anaesthesia I was talking with the dentist, probably quite slowly and deliberately – but definitely ‘back in the room’.

There was a moment where I was aware that my foot was in an uncomfortable or precarious position. Most of the time we wouldn’t give this a microsecond’s conscious thought, and we would just effortlessly readjust the position of our foot.

I felt I had to send a discrete set of instructions down my body to my foot, almost like Flesh-Logo in order to move it.

Of course there are all sorts of flaws with this interpretation, but the temporary compartmentalising of ‘body’ and ‘mind’ that I felt just reinforced the fact that most of the time there is no separation at all.

The experience (apart from making my teeth better) has left me with real conviction the train of thought in Paul Dourish’s book – about the power of embodied interaction to improve our interfaces with technology.

And also, of course, how good my new dentist is – but he probably mindhacked me to say that…