Sad Crackhead Ghosts or Something

So that was ... odd.  I just had one of those visual experiences I don't often get.

This evening D and I were near the end of our 1.5 mile walk home, talking about the lame business forum we'd just been to, which went roughly like "This town is great for business when you take out a loan at my bank!" and "Whine whine whine point fingers blame whine FLOUNCE!"  5 blocks from home saw a man dressed in a dark knee-length coat at the end of the block.  He staggered behind the little retaining wall of a stairway we'd be passing ahead.  We live on the border of a sketchy part of town and the guy was creeping along with that crackhead kind of lope, so I stopped talking to keep my eye on the stairway as we passed.

"Hold on a sec," I muttered to D as we approached.  I could tell he was wondering what was up but I wasn't about to raise my voice and I regretted leaving my stun-gun at home.

Except no one was in there.  There was also nowhere he could have gone that we wouldn't have seen, just due to the way the little area was laid out.

"Did you see a guy walk behind here?" I asked D.

"Nope."

And then I realized I'd felt a little strange.  It's kind of hard to describe, but it was almost like when you're dreaming and some small strangeness makes you slowly become aware and question what seemed completely banal before, like, "Wait, why is there a flamingo riding a bicycle on the roof?  I felt a bit like that when noticing that man.  D calls them "slippery people" because your mind slides around them like they aren't there.  I always understood the theory, but had never experienced it before. It's hardly worth mentioning when you think of all the intensely strange stuff other people see (stuff that makes for way better stories) but I take note because I have never seen anything like this in a full waking, walking, talking state.  Sure, I have weird experiences from time to time, but they are almost never visual.

I'm not sure what that means.

Of note: a 4.0 quake this morning woke us up. Given how quakes can sometimes mess with my inner ear, who knows what subtle quaky energies might be messing with my perceptions?

Dreaming the Sci-Fi Nerd

I'm going through my old dream journal as I work on a project I'll write about later, one having to do with the "things in the sky" dreams I wrote about in the last post. I have created a new category for dreams: "amusing." Here's my favorite one so far, back from October 2008:

 Han Solo is a space vampire. He's walking down the street, distressed because he doesn't have the money for dental surgery, so he tries to keep his lips drawn over his vampire fangs. He sits in a lecture about different blood viruses, and raises his hand to ask about space vampires, but then worries that the people around him will wonder if he's asking for himself--I guess he's wondering if "space vampirism" is a bloodborne virus. He shuns friends because he doesn't want them to notice his problem. 

Poor Han. I'm sure this dream related to some inadequacy I was feeling at the time, but now all I can think of is Han getting all Buffy-style vampire on Jabba the Hut. Things would have been very different if that had been the case. Princess Leia would have had no need to rescue Han, since he'd have thoroughly drained Jabba and all his minions of their life force, and therefore Leia would have never been Jabba's sexy slave girl. Think of all the legions of sci-fi fans that would have been denied their favorite risque fantasy!

I also found a dream from 2007 that just said, "I dreamed Agent Mulder was being a dick." This was after the dream in which I turned lucid, looked in the mirror, and said, "THE SPICE!" while making my eyes turn luminously blue like in the Dune movie. Don't tell anyone, but I guess my inner dreamer is a sci-fi nerd.

Increasing UFO dreams, and hallucinating earthquakes

Just a small note to myself: I just realized that I have an absurd amount of dreams in which the dream is interrupted briefly by UFOs, flying black crafts, or something else odd flying through the sky. It is so common now that I barely notice it. In the last dream, they hung in a row like Christmas lights, shining a blue light down onto me and my friend as we finished our conversation. Of course, tonight's dream was interrupted by an earthquake ... a real one this time (just a 2.7 but I felt it), rather than the one I hallucinated a few weeks ago. Yeah really. I hallucinated an earthquake that woke me up. I felt the whole room vibrate exactly as it does during a mild quake. And even when I got up and verified with USGS that there was no earthquake, of course I was wide awake from that brief moment of adrenaline. No sleep for me! Only stress hormones! So another small note to self: if you're going to hallucinate a physical sensation, how about something cool like a soak in a hot tub or the best massage ever? That would be great, thanks. *** Experimenting now with 5-HTP to see if it helps with sleep quality. So far I think it does, but physical issues can still negate its effects and cause crappy sleep.

Breathing Light in the Darkness: Visual Qi/Energy

On October 13, I had a weird experience that's been repeated a couple times since then, but not in such vividness. I’d gone to bed very late after staying up reading. D woke up when I came to bed, and I lay my head on his chest, gazing in his direction with unfocused eyes as he spoke about a vivid dream of speaking with his dead father.

And then I blinked as D exhaled light in the dark! It glowed and sparkled in swirls, pulsing and moving like exhaled breath on a cold day. When he made a sharp noise, such as a cough or laugh, small sparks shot out of his mouth.

I admit to a few girlish squeals. I saw this same swirly light hanging fog-like around my hands, and random sparks occasionally shot from my fingers. When I wiggled my fingers, tiny sparks seemed to fall in cascades (interestingly, this I used this same movement as a "cheat" to register raised energy in the biofeedback game Wild Divine). When I moved my hands, I created dim swirls in the air. It reminded me of being a child and taking a bath in the sunlight, and the movement of my hands in the water created a swirling pattern on the bottom of the tub as the light moved with the water.

D and I experimented with this for awhile. He couldn’t see anything, but I was just astounded and kept waving my hands around like a maniac, watching the sparkles and giggling about the possibility that I was now a "sparklepire."

I may have been seeing a visual representation of the Chinese concept of Qi. The sight I was using was, I think, physical, and I don’t think it would have worked in the daylight. Somehow it required my eyes to focus in a particular way. I thought at first I just had tired eyes and was seeing things, but the pulsations so clearly matched D’s speech and coughs and laughs. If this is what hovers in the air around us and in our bodies, then our world when viewed with this sight is extraordinarily beautiful. I should take my qigong more seriously.

I am not sure what I did to bring this on. I wonder if D's connection to the dreamworld and my physical weariness played a part in this. I’m sure a skeptic would say I just had tired eyes, but they didn’t see those exact ethereal movements in conjunction with what was happening in the physical world. Even if it was some astounding, elaborate trick of the brain, I am going to use that illusion however I can to make life more interesting and beautiful. So far it's all been spontaneous. I did find one person online discussing what Qi looks like, and it was similar to what I saw, but oddly I can't find the site anymore. However, this person had a similar idea:

     Q. What does chi look like to you?

     A. Water moving over rocks, sunlight moving through water, rocks resting on river bottom.

Are you a musical emotive?

A funny little thing I've been meaning to blog about:  musical emotives.

I have a bad habit of loading a playlist, or putting my music collection on shuffle, and then constantly fast-forwarding through songs until I find the exact right song for the moment.  D is a patient man but I know it drives him batshit sometimes.  I'll hear one note and fast-forward, leaving a trail of disjointed songs. We discussed this once and I said, "But sometimes its a great song, but it isn't the right feeling.  I'll be depressed for hours if I listen to this song."  On certain days I do not want to put Joy Division into the mix, for instance, or I'll just sit there all day, contemplating the dreadful gloom of humanity.  I adore Bat for Lashes, but I had better not play anything from "Two Planets" unless I want to stop what I'm doing and ponder the transcendent mysteries of my place in the universe. And last week I delved into pop music and had to stop, because I was trying to work but all I wanted to do was laugh and laugh at this silly high-energy pop-techno.  I just could not concentrate with LMFAO playing.  Then I made the mistake of watching some of their videos on Youtube.  (OMG OMG OMG he did not just ... shake his ... I mean with Ron Jeremey dancing on the table ... no, he did.  And he's still doing it.)

I'm totally lost if Gary Jules' version of "Mad World" comes on.  Don't even think of playing Sigur Ros's "Untitled Four."  I will be crying and playing it on repeat for the next four hours because I can't shake myself out of this ineffable groove.  There aren't even any words to that song!  At least, no real words.  And when the Church's "The Time Being" comes on the playlist, I will just kinda stop what I'm doing and stare off into the distance.  Not really helpful when trying to make a nice spreadsheet, or talk to a client about the intricacies of the American health care system.

So if I can't handle those states of mind, I hit/click the fast-forward button.  Best to nip it in the bud if I can't let it grow.

And then D says that it's not like that for him.  He recognizes that he's listening to a sad song that he likes, and that's about it.  The song has no effect on his mood.  D's the one with all the music industry experience, too. (ETA: he says that's not right, actually. It does have an effect on him, just different than what I described and he can't articulate it well.  So I'm adding that to be fair and all.)

So I want to know--is that how it is for other people?  Or am I just a musically enslaved person?  Now that I think of it, that kind of explains my attitude towards the piano.  I never play it as much as I want, probably because I know that once I start, the whole night is lost.  Which is great if you have nothing else to do in your life, but really bad if you have, say, a job, or chores, or health concerns to attend to.

Conversely, music is my best meditative tool.  I know other people from  religious and occult traditions have various props they use--robes, prayer beads, mandalas, athames and chalices, whatever.  For me, it's music.  In particular, songs with a fast soaring melody and musical tension can trigger a beautiful soaring energy in me.  Sometimes, it's even to my annoyance (good lord, I'm certainly not the Nicki Minaj pop music type, but that song "Super Bass" triggers it without me trying, just due to the composition of the chorus melody).  I joke that my "Happy Song" is Empire of the Sun's "Walking on a Dream."  If I weren't so lazy, I'd link to it in Youtube but I trust in your Google-fu.  That song in particular has probably resulted in many fellow train-riders thinking I was really high on some amazing new drug.

The Body Knows When You're BS-ing It

In my meditation last night, I was thinking about an oft-repeated New Age idea that with visualizations and affirmations, you can convince your DNA and RNA to change and produce healthy cells. I was wondering how true this is. Certainly, the world is filled with people who have meditated themselves out of illness, but I always assumed it was because they were removing the stress that caused or aggravated their symptoms.

But actually changing DNA? I was trying to imagine the mechanism that would cause that, thinking back to what I could recall of my college biology classes, when suddenly a voice in my head said, “None of that matters if you don’t first respect your body.”

Here’s the impression I got: It’s all good and well to focus on amazing feats of recovery. Yeah, sure, you can potentially meditate your way out of illness and pain. But it really doesn’t matter if you aren’t giving your body the daily respect it deserves. A few examples of common disrespect come to mind:

• Wearing high heels even though you know it hurts your back
• Eating a food you know will give you heartburn, and then taking a bunch of antacids to try to counter it
• Going to work when you have a bad cold and you know you should be resting
• Sitting in a slouchy position when you know it gives you a back-ache by the end of the day
• Obvious vices like smoking, excessive drinking, and overeating
• All these things translated as “disrespect to the body.” And all the lovely “Heal my DNA!” meditations will just roll right off you if you don’t have this basic level of respect to the body, because your subconscious is well aware that you aren’t really serious about being healthy.

That is incredibly inconvenient, but it might point to why healing meditations don’t seem to stick for some people (like me). It’s just that in my case, the level of respect that my body seems to want is, “Drop me off on a Hawaiian beach and leave me there for about six months, hold all appointments, hire a personal chef and a maid, etc.” My body emphatically wants to rest. And sadly, we don’t live in a world that values extended rest or makes it easily obtainable.

So I’m going to have to think about this. It can't be a lost cause.

Weird Oz Factor Experience

I had an odd experience a few nights ago. I was half awake in the middle of the night, when suddenly things went quiet. Not that things were loud to begin with, but every tiny noise stopped--the sound of the ceiling fan, the hum of the fridge, etc.--and I heard nothing at all. That's weird, I thought, then opened my eyes fully in shock and thought wildly, it's happening, it's all stopped, it's happening! I recognized this state of complete silence and it alarmed me because I knew it meant something else was coming ... until moments later, sound returned and I decided that no,"it" wasn't happening and went back to sleep.

It is really strange to know that you recognized "it", but no longer have any recollection of what "it" was.

The sensation of sudden stillness and cessation of sound, or sound getting muffled and things moving slowly, is sometimes called the "Oz Factor." Some people associate it with UFO abductions but if you read anecdotes carefully, you'll note it in all sorts of high strangeness, particularly time slips.

For those of you who are into out-of-body experiences, do you experience this "Oz Factor" as you're about to exit? I've only ever heard electrical buzzing noises, but I'm not that experienced.