The Visual Cinema Sanctum

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a small but obsessive subset of home theater enthusiasts (mostly men in their 30s–50s) began experiencing what psychologists later termed "home theater dissociation" or "immersive overload syndrome."

They would spend so many hours in perfectly calibrated dark rooms with 7.1 surround sound, massive screens, and subwoofers tuned to shake the floor that their brains started struggling to readjust to "normal" reality.

Some reported mild hallucinations (hearing phantom dialogue or explosions when no TV was on), anxiety in quiet rooms, or even depersonalization (feeling like their living room wasn't "real" anymore).

A 2004 informal survey by AVS Forum (one of the biggest home theater communities) found that ~8% of hardcore users admitted to "needing" their setup to feel "grounded," and a few described panic attacks when forced to watch TV on a regular living-room set.

The phenomenon faded as home theaters became mainstream and less extreme, but old-school audiophiles still joke that "once you go 7.1, you never go back to mono... or sanity."