Imagine you are diving into a deep pool of water.

Your fingers pierce the surface of the pool, and your descent slows–almost exponentially–as your body inserts into the water.

By the time your head becomes submerged, it is almost as if time has stopped. You initially panic, for fear of drowning, but eventually realize that since “time” has stopped, you have no need to breathe. In fact, now partly submerged in the pool, you only see darkness from the way your eyes reflexively closed when you hit the water.

Time shows no sign of resuming at its previously ginger pace. You are in this state, and you wonder if the slowdown of time really is exponential in relation to you. You wonder how long you might be here; minutes, hours, years, centuries? You also wonder if you should stop thinking, because surely all this activity in such a short amount of relative time could be harmful. After all, time is relatively standing still for you. Would the neurons firing at normal speed in this suspended state translate into all the thoughts you have been thinking condensing into one brilliant picosecond, the energy from which explodes your brain when “real” time resumes?

You begin to try and rationalize it. How can you still be conscious and thinking if time has slowed to a crawl? Perhaps you’re not tied to your neurons after all. Maybe you are existing as a location-less quantum swarm of entangled strange matter, the brain acting only as an antenna? This thought soothes you somewhat, but it still seems ill-conceived, and the idea of the instant flashbang heating of your brain still makes you nervous.

So the question is, what do you do with all this time? You can feel the defense mechanisms kicking in–you have to have a goal in the chaos. Imprisoned alone in your own pocket universe for who knows how long, you’d have to think of something to do, right? And maybe you are still tied to your neurons, because as science has found, your memories are tied up in that matter. So, you’re able to think thoughts, but can you really record them? Maybe if you focused all your will, for however long, as a singular goal to transmit one singular thought to your brain when you snap out of this temporal quagmire? What would the end result be? How detailed could a picosecond’s worth of thought really be, when you can only write to the storage medium at a rate of one bit per century?

If you can spend so long tied up in this temporal whirl, without being able to affect your ongoing consciousness, is it possible that this has happened before? Perhaps several times? You shudder at the thought, and begin your long and arduous journey into contemplation far deeper than any mortal has ever dared delve. At first, progress is slow, but through the years you develop the logical tools to help you better organize your thoughts. Every year you get more efficient at your work.

With no distractions, you give yourself entirely to the process of rational thinking. At the 30-year mark, you have already found insights into yourself and the world that would shock even the most seasoned scholars. At the 50 year mark, you decide to spend an entire decade developing mnemonics to help you catalogue your conclusions and be able to recollect them with ease. By the end of your 59th year, you have mastered the art of thinking in codes and cryptic shorthands to further increase the efficiency at which your thoughts and conclusions flow.

You could fill entire shipping containers with the pages of the thesis you have been steadfastly developing, if only you could print it out. As the years go on, you further refine your cryptic shorthands, finally eschewing your native language in favor of the more efficient semantic language you have developed. Countless centuries pass as you labor away in darkness, processing complex thoughts that would sunder even the most agile supercomputer. And so it goes, seemingly forever.

Short version:
One day at a pool party you take a dive into the deep end of the pool, and when you surface, a thought grips you with such intensity, conviction, and power that you nearly choke on your own breath:

“Corn!!” You scream raggedly, “… Wait, corn? What? That was weird.”