A few years ago, I saw some online discussion where multiple folks were saying you can't write a beautiful poem about spiders, for whatever reason. At that point, I was deep into writing poems and I do think spiders are swell, so I actually took that as a little challenge to write such a poem. After half an hour, I had something I was happy with and just threw it into the thread.

And man, the reaction will forever sit with me. Around ten folks responded. Every single one with yet another variation of the same joke, that they wanted to know what I'm smoking.
Even when I disprove their thesis, that you can't write such a poem, by literally just doing that, they still need to declare it impossible without the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

I guess, I might have a special talent there, but it was just also particularly weird, because I'm practically clean-edge, as in the hardest drug I'll occasionally have is coffein.
And yeah, that just left me with the same bewilderment as you. How different is my reality from theirs that they absolutely cannot imagine such thoughts occurring without drugs?

No idea, if that and the dissociating are linked. It does probably help a lot with poetry, too, to look at the world for what it is, rather than navigating it on auto-pilot.