I miss disappearing into Thief's impenetrable shadows

With a remaster on the way from Nightdive, I've been revisiting 1998's Thief: The Dark Project and trying to work out what I find so magical about its stealth. In brief, I think of Thief's stealth as a form of dissociation - a kind of surging and ebbing, out-of-body experience. Dissociation is a clinical condition, of course - I don't want to trivialise the suffering of people who lose all sense of time and identity as a symptom of trauma. But dissociation is more than anguish and disarray. There is also the milder experience of dissociation as daydream and reverie, a gentle loosening of the screws. You glance down and find that your arms and legs are far removed, like roads or rivers along a sunny valley floor. You try to reestablish the connection to those vagabond, limblike geographies, and realise you have nothing to connect them to.