Wednesday, September 3, 2014
Cough Interrupted
I haven't written in a while, mostly because there was nothing really new to report. I still consistently get multiverse visions in which I exist as a "cloud of me's" all in one location, with many pairs of eyes, many bodies, many minds, but with a core personality if you will, one central part of my mind that is in common perhaps, with all of my minds. My vision skips around between the many versions of myself, between my many pairs of eyes, so reality seems to jump around a lot as I see slight differences in my surroundings. Again, I can clearly see *and* feel many versions of myself in one location, with slight variations due I think to them existing in different Universes with very slightly different outcomes. Perhaps in one my head is in one location, but in the next it's a half-inch to the right. That sort of thing.
I said that there was nothing new to report, but last night there was. While sitting in this many-minds state, I suddenly felt a strong tickle in my throat that presaged a cough, no doubt due to the fact that I'd just smoked. I didn't want to cough, because I was in such a serene place. That's when I noticed something quite remarkable. Not all of me needed to cough. Let me re-phrase that. Most of the versions of me needed to cough, but I noticed outliers that had no tickle in their throat, no need to cough at all. So my focus quite naturally went to one of those, and I literally felt the other versions that needed to cough "move away" somehow, not in space but in probability. I now occupied one of the versions of me that felt no need to cough, and indeed, I no longer did. I even tried to cough, to see if the irritation was still there. Nope. Gone.
This corresponds with other phenomena I have seen and felt, and indeed explains them. Awakening the dog or the wife, for instance. I am not awakening them with psychic energy. What I am doing is selecting one Universe out of the many in which they happen to awaken, focusing on it, and "becoming" it. Causing it to become my primary Universe in which I exist. So it then happens as if I had psychically caused it, when I was only selecting that outcome out of the many, perhaps infinite possibilities.
When I am in this "many-minds" state, existing as a superimposed cloud of "myselves" all in one location, I also pick up on what seems to be interference between Universes. Hard to explain. It's like sometimes I see many, many universes at once and it fills my mind with the sheer amount of data all coming into my visual cortex at the same time. Overload, if you will, seen as an incredible solidity, multiple planes of existence all concentrated in one look, one glance. It fills my mind with overlapping data, or so it seems. It feels like all reality becomes solid and is interpenetrating my mind. It reminds me of a feedback whine in a sound system somehow.
When I am in "many-minds" I always ask myself if this can be just a guy smoking a drug and warping his mind, and I always come back with a resounding "not possible." It's far too real, too glaringly realistic, and too bizarre a thing to be just imagining it. What seems instead to be happening is that I am ingesting a substance that alters my perceptions in such a way as to see what is normally *suppressed.* Salvia seems not to cloud the mind, but to reveal things we normally refuse to see, or simply cannot see. Things far too basic to our existence to even question. The flow of time. How we progress through time, not by staying in the same Universe, but by constantly selecting new Universes in which what we desire, or *fear,* is already happening. Those sorts of very basic things we all take for granted.
All possibilities exist, and seem to actually have some kind of existence, even if unrealized. This is very hard to grasp, even for me as I live it, being able sometimes to see it happening.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
More Adventures In The Multiverse
Friday, June 27, 2014
More Adventures in the Multiverse
I seem to always get multiverse type visions now. I carefully dose myself so that I only hit the margins of a deep trip, skirt around the edges of one, then I feel my whole mind split into many minds.
Last night was amazing. The bureau near my right side, the corner of it I happened to be looking at, became many corners forming a staircase-like shape as it extended into more and more versions of itself. This is not my vision, not my eyes in other words. I can feel one of my minds behind each pair of my eyes, in each universe, if you can believe that. I can clearly feel my mind split up into many minds. This used to disconcert me, but now I actually find it rather pleasant to contemplate many realities at once with many minds at once.
It's not like "double vision only more than two." It's not just the visual effect, definitely not. It's multiple minds, one to go with each of the multiple images that I see. I was relaxed and experimenting with it in the moment, and it passes all tests I can throw at it. It's not a visual thing, it's definitely my mind becoming many minds, all running in parallel.
I see, touch, feel, sense many realities all 'stacked up' on top of each other, and in each one, there I am meditating.
I even feel my mind being replaced with a new almost-identical version, over and over again as time passes into the future. It's very subtle, but I'm so still inside that I can feel it happening.
So in addition to all the multiple universes with multiple minds to go with them, as time passes I clearly sense *discontinuities* of my own mind. It ceases to exist for a microsecond and there it's there again, but it's not the same one as before, it's slightly different, not my old mind with new thoughts, but a new mind containing the new thoughts. It's replaced from second to second, but in "normal mind" I cannot sense the transitions so it appears to be continuous and steady.
Is this what thinking is? Selecting the next proximate universe in which one has their next thought already?
In these meditations I also feel myself thinking with those many minds at once, skipping around from mind to mind as I think. To be honest, not only do I not know if I end in the same mind that I started with, but I actually doubt it very much. I'm pretty sure it's real, and that when I end, it's in a different version, a different reality than my old reality, if it can even be said that that "old reality" existed at all as we like to think of it existing in the first place.
I think we access many minds at once all the time. I think that's how the mind works, by accessing many versions of itself all the time. We literally skip around all versions of reality that are nearly identical to this one, all the time, and think it normal.
More to come soon on this and other things. I've been keeping notes.
More Adventures in the Multiverse
I seem to always get multiverse type visions now. I carefully dose myself so that I only hit the margins of a deep trip, skirt around the edges of one, then I feel my whole mind split into many minds.
Last night was amazing. The bureau near my right side, the corner of it I happened to be looking at, became many corners forming a staircase-like shape as it extended into more and more versions of itself. This is not my vision, not my eyes in other words. I can feel one of my minds behind each pair of my eyes, in each universe, if you can believe that. I can clearly feel my mind split up into many minds. This used to disconcert me, but now I actually find it rather pleasant to contemplate many realities at once with many minds at once.
It's not like "double vision only more than two." It's not just the visual effect, definitely not. It's multiple minds, one to go with each of the multiple images that I see. I was relaxed and experimenting with it in the moment, and it passes all tests I can throw at it. It's not a visual thing, it's definitely my mind becoming many minds, all running in parallel.
I see, touch, feel, sense many realities all 'stacked up' on top of each other, and in each one, there I am meditating.
I even feel my mind being replaced with a new almost-identical version, over and over again as time passes into the future. It's very subtle, but I'm so still inside that I can feel it happening.
So in addition to all the multiple universes with multiple minds to go with them, as time passes I clearly sense *discontinuities* of my own mind. It ceases to exist for a microsecond and there it's there again, but it's not the same one as before, it's slightly different, not my old mind with new thoughts, but a new mind containing the new thoughts. It's replaced from second to second, but in "normal mind" I cannot sense the transitions so it appears to be continuous and steady.
Is this what thinking is? Selecting the next proximate universe in which one has their next thought already?
In these meditations I also feel myself thinking with those many minds at once, skipping around from mind to mind as I think. To be honest, not only do I not know if I end in the same mind that I started with, but I actually doubt it very much. I'm pretty sure it's real, and that when I end, it's in a different version, a different reality than my old reality, if it can even be said that that "old reality" existed at all as we like to think of it existing in the first place.
I think we access many minds at once all the time. I think that's how the mind works, by accessing many versions of itself all the time. We literally skip around all versions of reality that are nearly identical to this one, all the time, and think it normal.
More to come soon on this and other things. I've been keeping notes.
The Salvia Divinorum Experience of "Many Worlds." Is It Real?
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
The Salvia Divinorum Experience of "Many Worlds." Is it real?
In all my salvia divinorum experiments, I still have not proven anything as regards the question "is this purely an hallucination?" vs "Is this my mind leaving my one body and experiencing many of my bodies?" Is it all just my mind tricking itself, or is it actually experiencing something, well, for lack of a better term, paranormal?
Because lately, most every time I take it I experience multiple locations at once, multiple "me's" at once. Even feel my body weight bearing down on the chair in many places, many of my bedrooms, at once. It's exactly 50-50 to me if it's a real effect or not. It certainly feels very real, realer than my normal life in fact, but then I factor in how easily we silly hairless apes trick ourselves, and that ties it up again at 50-50. I mean, no way to prove it to myself definitively either way.
One thing for sure though: Even if it's all just fake, I've seen things, experienced things, that I would have never have thought my mind was even remotely capable of faking. I think in a non-human way on salvia now, most of the time. "Non-human" is the best way to describe it. Many thought lines at once, approaching a question from many angles at once, like a group of people all doing it at once on a "party line," incredible flows of convoluted information that no one mind should be able to accomplish or sustain. These lines of thought are also non-verbal. They are pictorial and emotional in nature, but complex concepts actually come much easier in this atypical modality. Non-verbal pictorial, emotion-based convoluted thought-lines that occur in simultaneous "packages" if you will. I stand amazed of that, every time it happens. No way to even accurately describe it to you, it's too different from how we think normally. Maybe like a hive-mind. But I love it. I admit that. I love the amazing feeling of basically accessing many of my own minds at once and thinking not as a man might think, but as a God might, if such things existed.
I should note that I still disturb the (sleeping) dog or the wife or even my son from time to time, although I consciously try not to. Can't prove that, though. I can't do it on purpose. It only happens when I'm in "too deep" to even think of any preconceived plan. So I must remain a skeptical experimenter rather than a convert. Maybe it's my skepticism that prevents me from going further, but I can't totally abandon that, not ever in my life, so I'll still muddle along.
It's never boring.
For instance, here's an example of "Things I Shouldn't Be Able To Do:" I have a ceiling fan. Set to medium speed, which is fairly fast, I can sit in my chair, and on only a light dose of salvia, I can focus my eyes in front of me on the wall, and not move that focus; then, with my peripheral vision alone, never moving my eyes, I can focus on one single moving fan blade above me and easily track it around in circles, my attention never leaving that one speeding fan blade, with my unmoving eyes not focused anywhere near it. I can thus accurately count the RPM's of the fan over my head while looking into my wife's eyes and having a conversation with her about it!
Or I can focus on five, six, or even more points on a wall at once, again with no eye movement. No need to move the eyes, I just move my *attention* and that is not like visual focus; it allows more than one foci at once with ease. And when I say "at once" I literally mean it. My attention does not flicker from one point to the other. It divides into many foci, all at once. And my peripheral vision is very different, much sharper, at all foci.
Just a couple of the many, many phenomena I get to experience. I feel, to be honest, very lucky to have ever found this substance.
On (light doses of) salvia I can experience literally anything that you've ever read about any Yogi experiencing, and more. The so-called "Rising of the Kundalini" for example. It can feel like it practically blows the top of my head off in a rush of white light. I get to experience all that directly rather than just reading about how others have done it after 20-30 years of meditation practice.
(Interestingly, when I do that, the rising of the energy thing, or just normal intense meditation, the crown of my head gets sore, and remains sore all the next day with no salvia in my system)
I also experience something like layers or strata, that my consciousness passes through. Laminations, even. The wild thing about them is, as I pass through one of them, it's like I hear many, many conversations at once, like literally hundreds of people all talking at once, as if the layer was made up of informational content! And I mean, like you're in an auditorium and everyone's having a conversation at once. Again, I have no words to really get the reality of it across to you. I read what I'm typing here, and it's not even close to the experience, but it's as close as I can come. Frustrating.
AND NOW, A PLEA TO MY READERS:
If you're reading this online journal and have had experience with salvia divinorum or any other psychedelic substance, I'd very much like to hear about it and discuss it with you, so please post your first experience, or your wildest experience, or your most significant experience, or whatever you want to share, into the comments section. See, I started this blog for two main reasons. The first and foremost was to have a journal that I would keep my experiences in for my own perusal that was also accessible to others, and the second was to be able to discuss those experiences with said others of like mind. I really am looking for conversations here, and not just an audience for my ego to preen itself in front of. So thank you in advance for saying hello and sharing.
The Salvia Divinorum Experience of "Many Worlds." Is it real?
In all my salvia divinorum experiments, I still have not proven anything as regards the question "is this purely an hallucination?" vs "Is this my mind leaving my one body and experiencing many of my bodies?" Is it all just my mind tricking itself, or is it actually experiencing something, well, for lack of a better term, paranormal?
Because lately, most every time I take it I experience multiple locations at once, multiple "me's" at once. Even feel my body weight bearing down on the chair in many places, many of my bedrooms, at once. It's exactly 50-50 to me if it's a real effect or not. It certainly feels very real, realer than my normal life in fact, but then I factor in how easily we silly hairless apes trick ourselves, and that ties it up again at 50-50. I mean, no way to prove it to myself definitively either way.
One thing for sure though: Even if it's all just fake, I've seen things, experienced things, that I would have never have thought my mind was even remotely capable of faking. I think in a non-human way on salvia now, most of the time. "Non-human" is the best way to describe it. Many thought lines at once, approaching a question from many angles at once, like a group of people all doing it at once on a "party line," incredible flows of convoluted information that no one mind should be able to accomplish or sustain. These lines of thought are also non-verbal. They are pictorial and emotional in nature, but complex concepts actually come much easier in this atypical modality. Non-verbal pictorial, emotion-based convoluted thought-lines that occur in simultaneous "packages" if you will. I stand amazed of that, every time it happens. No way to even accurately describe it to you, it's too different from how we think normally. Maybe like a hive-mind. But I love it. I admit that. I love the amazing feeling of basically accessing many of my own minds at once and thinking not as a man might think, but as a God might, if such things existed.
I should note that I still disturb the (sleeping) dog or the wife or even my son from time to time, although I consciously try not to. Can't prove that, though. I can't do it on purpose. It only happens when I'm in "too deep" to even think of any preconceived plan. So I must remain a skeptical experimenter rather than a convert. Maybe it's my skepticism that prevents me from going further, but I can't totally abandon that, not ever in my life, so I'll still muddle along.
It's never boring.
For instance, here's an example of "Things I Shouldn't Be Able To Do:" I have a ceiling fan. Set to medium speed, which is fairly fast, I can sit in my chair, and on only a light dose of salvia, I can focus my eyes in front of me on the wall, and not move that focus; then, with my peripheral vision alone, never moving my eyes, I can focus on one single moving fan blade above me and easily track it around in circles, my attention never leaving that one speeding fan blade, with my unmoving eyes not focused anywhere near it. I can thus accurately count the RPM's of the fan over my head while looking into my wife's eyes and having a conversation with her about it!
Or I can focus on five, six, or even more points on a wall at once, again with no eye movement. No need to move the eyes, I just move my *attention* and that is not like visual focus; it allows more than one foci at once with ease. And when I say "at once" I literally mean it. My attention does not flicker from one point to the other. It divides into many foci, all at once. And my peripheral vision is very different, much sharper, at all foci.
Just a couple of the many, many phenomena I get to experience. I feel, to be honest, very lucky to have ever found this substance.
On (light doses of) salvia I can experience literally anything that you've ever read about any Yogi experiencing, and more. The so-called "Rising of the Kundalini" for example. It can feel like it practically blows the top of my head off in a rush of white light. I get to experience all that directly rather than just reading about how others have done it after 20-30 years of meditation practice.
(Interestingly, when I do that, the rising of the energy thing, or just normal intense meditation, the crown of my head gets sore, and remains sore all the next day with no salvia in my system)
I also experience something like layers or strata, that my consciousness passes through. Laminations, even. The wild thing about them is, as I pass through one of them, it's like I hear many, many conversations at once, like literally hundreds of people all talking at once, as if the layer was made up of informational content! And I mean, like you're in an auditorium and everyone's having a conversation at once. Again, I have no words to really get the reality of it across to you. I read what I'm typing here, and it's not even close to the experience, but it's as close as I can come. Frustrating.
AND NOW, A PLEA TO MY READERS:
If you're reading this online journal and have had experience with salvia divinorum or any other psychedelic substance, I'd very much like to hear about it and discuss it with you, so please post your first experience, or your wildest experience, or your most significant experience, or whatever you want to share, into the comments section. See, I started this blog for two main reasons. The first and foremost was to have a journal that I would keep my experiences in for my own perusal that was also accessible to others, and the second was to be able to discuss those experiences with said others of like mind. I really am looking for conversations here, and not just an audience for my ego to preen itself in front of. So thank you in advance for saying hello and sharing.
Doing Some Research
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Doing Some Research...
I haven't posted anything here for a while, not because I'm not having any interesting salvia experiences but because I've been pursuing an idea, using small doses along with meditation in an attempt to clarify something I've theorized. It's the idea that we are the average of our experiences in all universes, that we actively experience an infinite number of multiple universes at the same time, all of them in which we appear, but each version of ourselves can only remember experiencing that which makes sense in light of the one averaged-out gestalt universe which we are accustomed to believing ourselves a part of. With infinite number of universes happening at this moment in which I exist, what I remember depends on the statistical concentration of universes that are mostly like this one that I (this version of me) seem to 'follow.' My consciousness does experience all the others, but none of them in sufficient statistical prevalence to make a salient impact on the average experience of the many that do not substantially differ one from the other. What I experience as reality is therefore merely a statistical concentration of similar universes that happen to mostly agree one with the other; my consciousness mostly disregards the infinite anomalous ones and notices only those that fit in with what I consider a rational chain of events that follow logically in this universe.
Yes, as you can see, this is very hard to pin down, very difficult to express in words. I'm honestly not quite getting it, not quite communicating it accurately, but I don't think that words exist in any language that will accommodate the true scope of it. Very frustrating, actually.
I'm not nearly convinced yet that this is the case, but I keep getting hints that it may be. Last night I found myself (on salvia) randomly thinking of a chain of events which I had experienced, none of which I can recall now, but a chain of seemingly real events that I eventually realized was totally foreign to my "actual" experiences in this reality. They were making complete sense to me at the time, but what I realized about them at the end there was that they didn't make any sense at all to me in my normal state of mind, because they didn't fit in with my life experiences. Those events that I seemed to be recalling were utterly foreign to my actual experiences, or so they seemed to be. It was as if I were momentarily conscious of an alternate-universe version of myself to whom those events made perfect sense, because that version had had another life into which they fit. As soon as I realized this, it was like the thoughts immediately started to fade out, very rapidly. It was impossible to hold them, and in fact very difficult merely to recall that I'd had such an experience at all. It's like it's forbidden to remember that which does not fit.
I have also noted on several recent occasions that it seemed that my mind was very much like a radio, tuning into one station at a time, and that sometimes on salvia I seem to be able to change the channel, to tune out from this reality and tune into a different one, or even many at once. One time a few days ago the reality that I tuned into seemed to be like some sort of "underchannel" or more accurately perhaps, a "master frequency" that permeated all universes like a series of back doors connected to secret paths in an infinite woodland. Yes, visually it was like being in an infinite forest, with infinite paths going in all possible directions, all very shaded and green and with a general feeling of happiness accompanying the phenomena. It was quite profound.
Somehow I sense that all these apparently disparate things connect. Somehow I will make sense of it. Too often have I sensed directly that what I consider one existence is in reality a superposition of many existences, and I can't seem to let that go.
Thanks for following my quest. Hope to write more soon.
Doing Some Research...
I haven't posted anything here for a while, not because I'm not having any interesting salvia experiences but because I've been pursuing an idea, using small doses along with meditation in an attempt to clarify something I've theorized. It's the idea that we are the average of our experiences in all universes, that we actively experience an infinite number of multiple universes at the same time, all of them in which we appear, but each version of ourselves can only remember experiencing that which makes sense in light of the one averaged-out gestalt universe which we are accustomed to believing ourselves a part of. With infinite number of universes happening at this moment in which I exist, what I remember depends on the statistical concentration of universes that are mostly like this one that I (this version of me) seem to 'follow.' My consciousness does experience all the others, but none of them in sufficient statistical prevalence to make a salient impact on the average experience of the many that do not substantially differ one from the other. What I experience as reality is therefore merely a statistical concentration of similar universes that happen to mostly agree one with the other; my consciousness mostly disregards the infinite anomalous ones and notices only those that fit in with what I consider a rational chain of events that follow logically in this universe.
Yes, as you can see, this is very hard to pin down, very difficult to express in words. I'm honestly not quite getting it, not quite communicating it accurately, but I don't think that words exist in any language that will accommodate the true scope of it. Very frustrating, actually.
I'm not nearly convinced yet that this is the case, but I keep getting hints that it may be. Last night I found myself (on salvia) randomly thinking of a chain of events which I had experienced, none of which I can recall now, but a chain of seemingly real events that I eventually realized was totally foreign to my "actual" experiences in this reality. They were making complete sense to me at the time, but what I realized about them at the end there was that they didn't make any sense at all to me in my normal state of mind, because they didn't fit in with my life experiences. Those events that I seemed to be recalling were utterly foreign to my actual experiences, or so they seemed to be. It was as if I were momentarily conscious of an alternate-universe version of myself to whom those events made perfect sense, because that version had had another life into which they fit. As soon as I realized this, it was like the thoughts immediately started to fade out, very rapidly. It was impossible to hold them, and in fact very difficult merely to recall that I'd had such an experience at all. It's like it's forbidden to remember that which does not fit.
I have also noted on several recent occasions that it seemed that my mind was very much like a radio, tuning into one station at a time, and that sometimes on salvia I seem to be able to change the channel, to tune out from this reality and tune into a different one, or even many at once. One time a few days ago the reality that I tuned into seemed to be like some sort of "underchannel" or more accurately perhaps, a "master frequency" that permeated all universes like a series of back doors connected to secret paths in an infinite woodland. Yes, visually it was like being in an infinite forest, with infinite paths going in all possible directions, all very shaded and green and with a general feeling of happiness accompanying the phenomena. It was quite profound.
Somehow I sense that all these apparently disparate things connect. Somehow I will make sense of it. Too often have I sensed directly that what I consider one existence is in reality a superposition of many existences, and I can't seem to let that go.
Thanks for following my quest. Hope to write more soon.
Inside Outside
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Inside Outside
In your imagination, do you ever wish that you could meet people and talk to people? Actually, I mean. So that they'd remember it, too, and talk back. Telepathy. Against the rules of reality, though.
Or is it? I am talking to you in my imagination right now. The only difference this is from telepathy, is that you agree that it's just a computer. You agree that this is not in my imagination, and not in your imagination, but in our mutual reality.
Well, I was just thinking (on salvia) a few minutes ago and I realized that my imagination is everything that I think, the totality of my "inside world." And when I see a room around my body as I do now typing this, that room is in my imagination, too. This computer is in my imagination. It's inside of that imaginary room I just talked about.
My imagination is an infinite sea of thoughts and visions and dreams and stories and plot lines and songs and happiness and sorrow, intense visual scenes and bizarre vistas, and mundane, normal things. I can think of any and all of the things in it, because it is my imagination.
There are parts of that vast inner world however, where I find other beings apparently, much like me, only where I am imagining them, they are also imagining me, and where those two things intersect, we agree that what we are seeing and what we are doing, is real. We agree that each other is real.
I found an island in my imagination, and there are people there, and we all agree that that island is real and is definitely not imaginary, and we are very happy about that. Since it's the part of my imagination that we've decided is real, I concentrate on it a lot. I tend to kind-of live there.
Maybe there are other islands in my imagination where I will find other beings that will agree that their tiny part of intersection with my imagination and theirs is real, too. What fun! Imagining each other into being. For it's all just in my imagination, only you are there too. You see me and I see you and we both agree that this part of our imagination, this island where we find each other, is definitely real, and so are we. We're as real as this part of our mutual imagination has managed to explain and justify to us.
Reality is the part of my imagination that everyone else believes is real, too.
In my inside, I found the outside.
Inside Outside
In your imagination, do you ever wish that you could meet people and talk to people? Actually, I mean. So that they'd remember it, too, and talk back. Telepathy. Against the rules of reality, though.
Or is it? I am talking to you in my imagination right now. The only difference this is from telepathy, is that you agree that it's just a computer. You agree that this is not in my imagination, and not in your imagination, but in our mutual reality.
Well, I was just thinking (on salvia) a few minutes ago and I realized that my imagination is everything that I think, the totality of my "inside world." And when I see a room around my body as I do now typing this, that room is in my imagination, too. This computer is in my imagination. It's inside of that imaginary room I just talked about.
My imagination is an infinite sea of thoughts and visions and dreams and stories and plot lines and songs and happiness and sorrow, intense visual scenes and bizarre vistas, and mundane, normal things. I can think of any and all of the things in it, because it is my imagination.
There are parts of that vast inner world however, where I find other beings apparently, much like me, only where I am imagining them, they are also imagining me, and where those two things intersect, we agree that what we are seeing and what we are doing, is real. We agree that each other is real.
I found an island in my imagination, and there are people there, and we all agree that that island is real and is definitely not imaginary, and we are very happy about that. Since it's the part of my imagination that we've decided is real, I concentrate on it a lot. I tend to kind-of live there.
Maybe there are other islands in my imagination where I will find other beings that will agree that their tiny part of intersection with my imagination and theirs is real, too. What fun! Imagining each other into being. For it's all just in my imagination, only you are there too. You see me and I see you and we both agree that this part of our imagination, this island where we find each other, is definitely real, and so are we. We're as real as this part of our mutual imagination has managed to explain and justify to us.
Reality is the part of my imagination that everyone else believes is real, too.
In my inside, I found the outside.
Multiple Plane Overlap
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Multiple Plane Overlap
Last night, sitting meditation in upright chair, 100x. Eyes closed at first, then later opened as I came back into my body.
I was very relaxed and calm, when I was suddenly immersed in a maelstrom of sensations that at first was very hard to decipher. I was totally wrapped up in it for a while before I even thought to try, but as I slowly came back to my senses while still in it I realized that what I was experiencing was nothing less than many, many realities all overlapping mine simultaneously.
This is, once again, almost impossible to describe, but the best that I can do is to say that it was a very clear realization of multiple realities all in the same place, as if instead of being tuned to one radio station somehow my radio was picking up all of them at once and playing them all overlapping in a mish-mash. I could see and sense and even feel kinesthetically somehow, many realities all stacked on each other, on me, on the space that my body and mind occupied; a very large number of “other spaces” all at once. Not all of them had me in them; many were occupied by other people, strangers, and perhaps some had other, different versions of me in them, hard to say. Many were definitely occupied, at any rate. Conversations were going on in some of them. I could hear them at the time, but their content was lost to me later, as often happens with salvia.
It was like being underwater in a way, a feeling of being immersed, but not in water but in multiple planes of existence. I did not see and feel one reality after the other sequentially; what I saw and felt was many realities all at once, like superimposed immersive videos. Many seemed to be a version of my room; many were different, seeming to not even be my room at all. Some seemed to not even be inside a building, but outdoors. I could clearly sense other beings, other people being present in many of them, just living their lives, doing things, talking, and so forth.
There were so many realities superimposed one on top of the other that I couldn’t begin to sort them out enough to find the one that I was originally in at first. I was lost in them, in a sensory overload of information stacked on information, senses of people and places that were all superimposed in the same place at the same time.
This was very different from my many experiences of me being personally in multiple planes. In a way it was the opposite. In those experiences I was present in many places at once, in multiple bodies; in this one many “places” were present simultaneously around only one of me.
It was as if I had consciousness of not just my one reality, but all parallel realities that existed in the same space, and there were a lot of them.
Slowly as the salvia effect wore off, I saw/felt my familiar reality getting “louder” in the sense that it was as if it was occupying more “bandwidth” in this experience, and as it started to stand out to me against all the other planes of existence, I concentrated on it and then suddenly I clawed my way (metaphorically) back into my body and my room, like slowly clawing my way out of a river onto the safety of its bank.
So there I sat in my chair, having not moved a muscle throughout all of this, with the maelstrom still raging in front of me but lessening moment by moment, and as seemed to recede, to lessen, those now-familiar glowing lines of spatial distortion began to twist the very space in my bedroom into folds and ripples. As this started to happen, in that exact, precise moment I heard my dog who was sound asleep on the bed all this time about six feet away begin to cry out with soft muffled barks in his sleep as if terrified, and then wake up.
This happened (as usual) at the exact, precise moment that the lines of ‘spatial distortion’ began to twist around the room. As soon as the softly glowing lines of distortion began to reach the approximate point where the dog was sleeping, he started to whine, and then awakened.
This was also in no way premeditated on my part. I didn’t try to awaken the dog. I had the overlapping-realities experience, and then as the room began to distort afterwards, the whining of the dog was just there, acting as a counterpoint to the strange visual effects of the room twisting.
I was motionless and silent as a stone all the time.
So once again, my sleeping dog was awakened, and clearly frightened, by my salvia hallucinations.
I don’t think they’re hallucinations. My skeptical side is starting to have real problems dismissing the fact that the dog or sometimes my wife and the dog are clearly and fairly consistently being disturbed by what science would say was a man sitting in silence having a hallucination.
I think that somehow the effect of the salvia along with me being in meditation, instead of causing me to see things that aren’t really there, are causing me to see things that are really there that my mind was filtering out before. That everybody’s mind filters out.
Again, the only logical conclusion to this is that the Universe is not what it seems, that it is more likely some sort of communal dream state, one with multiple planes of existence. Perhaps a Type III or IV Multiverse, only based in consciousness as it’s ground. Multiple simultaneous intersecting and overlapping communal dream states. After all, my dog isn’t the one taking salvia. If this were the kind of Universe that most people think it is, one of actual matter and energy and time and space, then no other being should be able to sense my visions in any way.
That is clearly not the case. And this is not confirmation bias. It's too consistent and dramatic to be that. I've pretty much ruled that out.
Still a mystery, though.
Fortunately, I like mysteries.
Multiple Plane Overlap
Last night, sitting meditation in upright chair, 100x. Eyes closed at first, then later opened as I came back into my body.
I was very relaxed and calm, when I was suddenly immersed in a maelstrom of sensations that at first was very hard to decipher. I was totally wrapped up in it for a while before I even thought to try, but as I slowly came back to my senses while still in it I realized that what I was experiencing was nothing less than many, many realities all overlapping mine simultaneously.
This is, once again, almost impossible to describe, but the best that I can do is to say that it was a very clear realization of multiple realities all in the same place, as if instead of being tuned to one radio station somehow my radio was picking up all of them at once and playing them all overlapping in a mish-mash. I could see and sense and even feel kinesthetically somehow, many realities all stacked on each other, on me, on the space that my body and mind occupied; a very large number of “other spaces” all at once. Not all of them had me in them; many were occupied by other people, strangers, and perhaps some had other, different versions of me in them, hard to say. Many were definitely occupied, at any rate. Conversations were going on in some of them. I could hear them at the time, but their content was lost to me later, as often happens with salvia.
It was like being underwater in a way, a feeling of being immersed, but not in water but in multiple planes of existence. I did not see and feel one reality after the other sequentially; what I saw and felt was many realities all at once, like superimposed immersive videos. Many seemed to be a version of my room; many were different, seeming to not even be my room at all. Some seemed to not even be inside a building, but outdoors. I could clearly sense other beings, other people being present in many of them, just living their lives, doing things, talking, and so forth.
There were so many realities superimposed one on top of the other that I couldn’t begin to sort them out enough to find the one that I was originally in at first. I was lost in them, in a sensory overload of information stacked on information, senses of people and places that were all superimposed in the same place at the same time.
This was very different from my many experiences of me being personally in multiple planes. In a way it was the opposite. In those experiences I was present in many places at once, in multiple bodies; in this one many “places” were present simultaneously around only one of me.
It was as if I had consciousness of not just my one reality, but all parallel realities that existed in the same space, and there were a lot of them.
Slowly as the salvia effect wore off, I saw/felt my familiar reality getting “louder” in the sense that it was as if it was occupying more “bandwidth” in this experience, and as it started to stand out to me against all the other planes of existence, I concentrated on it and then suddenly I clawed my way (metaphorically) back into my body and my room, like slowly clawing my way out of a river onto the safety of its bank.
So there I sat in my chair, having not moved a muscle throughout all of this, with the maelstrom still raging in front of me but lessening moment by moment, and as seemed to recede, to lessen, those now-familiar glowing lines of spatial distortion began to twist the very space in my bedroom into folds and ripples. As this started to happen, in that exact, precise moment I heard my dog who was sound asleep on the bed all this time about six feet away begin to cry out with soft muffled barks in his sleep as if terrified, and then wake up.
This happened (as usual) at the exact, precise moment that the lines of ‘spatial distortion’ began to twist around the room. As soon as the softly glowing lines of distortion began to reach the approximate point where the dog was sleeping, he started to whine, and then awakened.
This was also in no way premeditated on my part. I didn’t try to awaken the dog. I had the overlapping-realities experience, and then as the room began to distort afterwards, the whining of the dog was just there, acting as a counterpoint to the strange visual effects of the room twisting.
I was motionless and silent as a stone all the time.
So once again, my sleeping dog was awakened, and clearly frightened, by my salvia hallucinations.
I don’t think they’re hallucinations. My skeptical side is starting to have real problems dismissing the fact that the dog or sometimes my wife and the dog are clearly and fairly consistently being disturbed by what science would say was a man sitting in silence having a hallucination.
I think that somehow the effect of the salvia along with me being in meditation, instead of causing me to see things that aren’t really there, are causing me to see things that are really there that my mind was filtering out before. That everybody’s mind filters out.
Again, the only logical conclusion to this is that the Universe is not what it seems, that it is more likely some sort of communal dream state, one with multiple planes of existence. Perhaps a Type III or IV Multiverse, only based in consciousness as it’s ground. Multiple simultaneous intersecting and overlapping communal dream states. After all, my dog isn’t the one taking salvia. If this were the kind of Universe that most people think it is, one of actual matter and energy and time and space, then no other being should be able to sense my visions in any way.
That is clearly not the case. And this is not confirmation bias. It's too consistent and dramatic to be that. I've pretty much ruled that out.
Still a mystery, though.
Fortunately, I like mysteries.
Traipsing Through The Afterlife (lucid dream)
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Traipsing Through The Afterlife (lucid dream)
I am driving to a nearby city to meet a friend of my wife’s, on an errand. It’s a clear, sunny day. I approach the apartment complex that she lives in. I have never been here before. It is very large, much larger than I’d anticipated. It also has more the look of a professional building to it, or perhaps a hospital. There are several large main buildings; I approach the one given in the directions. I park my car and enter the building.
I walk down long corridors. There are people everywhere. It’s filled with people. It’s definitely more of a hospital, but somehow that doesn’t disturb me. I’m here to find room number 6N.
I ask directions of a passer-by; he doesn't seem to know, or really that interested in answering me. He seemed a bit "out of it."
Perhaps it’s a mental hospital combined with geriatric care? So it would seem, except for the ridiculous number of visitors. Every hall is crowded, every room filled, every space bustling.
I finally find someone, an employee, who guides me to the correct room. I had been on the wrong floor apparently. The elevator was very crowded, and we had to wait in queue for several minutes just to get one. We rode up several floors.
The room was off a narrow hallway with a great room nearby, perhaps a nurse’s station and recreation area combined. The door is open, but there is no-one inside that would fit the description of my wife’s friend. What was her name again? I look at the slip of paper that my wife had written the room number down on, but she had neglected to write her name. I should remember it, but I don’t.
The room is not any kind of an apartment. It’s more like a hospital room. One patient in a bed, several people visiting her. So this cannot be the right room.
Suddenly a maintenance worker, perhaps a janitor, hails me by name. “Brian!” An elderly black man in janitor’s clothing is calling to me. He is standing in the hall a short way behind me, near a public telephone on the wall. He hails me again, so I approach him. I’d never seen him before in my life.
“Brian! Good to see you!”
“Hello. Um, where do I know you from?”
“I remember you from that book that you wrote!” He mentions a title but I didn’t catch it, and it didn’t sound familiar anyhow.
(I have never written a book. Even if I had, why would he remember me personally from reading it?)
We chatted for a short while, but he never revealed anything more about said book or our supposed previous acquaintance. I eventually asked him if he knew where room 6N was, and he informed me that I was in the wrong building.
I said to myself “Well, that makes sense, because there’s nothing residential about this one!”
We said goodbye, and I walked back toward the elevators. When I got back to them, I was dismayed by the long lines of people waiting to use them. I said ‘to hell with this’ and found a stairwell.
I walked back down the four floors (or so) to ground level down a crowded stairwell. I had the thought that I should call my wife to ask her the name of her friend and anything else more that she could tell me, but when I took out my cell phone, it was not mine. It was an unfamiliar model, not a smartphone, with few buttons, and no clear indication how to dial out. I was dismayed that I’d apparently somehow dropped my phone and picked up someone else’s.
Still searching for my phone, I find two others on my person, neither one mine, and both with no apparent way to actually dial a number. Too few buttons, and concealed keyboard on one that meant little to me. I tried a couple of buttons, tried to enter my wife’s phone number, but nothing happened.
I continued walking, somewhat disturbed by all these developments.
I eventually found someone that informed me that the building that I was seeking was accessed through the back exit, so I left out the rear.
The view from out the rear entrance was a collection of buildings, large and small, leading down perhaps a quarter-mile to a waterfront with massive barges anchored in place to extend the useable surface area of the shoreline, and collections of stores and restaurants and other large edifices, with a railway and transit station or something similar. There was even an entire fenced-in abandoned carnival with Ferris wheel, in a sad state of disrepair. There were people everywhere, except in the carnival apparently.
Seeing no building such as was described to me, I try to walk around the building that I just exited to its front, but the walk seemed to just go on and on, past the railway with railway workers busy doing whatever it is that they do, past many more large open spaces crowded with people and more buildings and roads and even vehicles. Busses. My walk just kept revealing even more large vistas with more complex buildings and of course, more people *everywhere.* I was constantly threading my way through crowds.
Strangely, the people all seemed incredibly apathetic, dazed even. Sad. Wistful.
There seemed to be no clear path to the front of the original building; in fact I could not even be sure that the building that I was walking around *was* the original building at that point. I felt as if I could walk forever and never get anywhere at all.
People were everywhere. Walking, sitting, talking, going about various tasks in a mechanical fashion. Many were just sitting around doing nothing at all.
I began to realize that I could not get back to my car. That indeed, I could not find any indication of any parking area anywhere. A slight panic began to set in.
I reversed direction and went back to the back area, the waterfront with the barges. It was a very long walk, but I eventually made my way back there.
There was a large open area there that I'd seen before, unpaved, with picnic tables in rows, crowded with people. I began to walk down the center of that area toward the waterfront.
“BRIAN!”
I turned at the sound of my name being called out. A young woman approached me, having been seated at one of the tables. “Brian?”
I did not recognize her. I’d never seen her before in my life.
“Brian! How are you?”
“Hello. I’m fine. I’m afraid that I do not know who you are though. Have we met?”
“You don’t remember me? We worked on that political campaign together!”
(I had never worked on any political campaign in my life)
“Um, no. I can’t seem to remember you. Sorry.”
We began to talk.
“What is this place?” I asked her.
“-I don’t know.” (she seemed confused)
“How long have you been here?”
A slightly panicked look crosses her face, then confusion.
“-How long? Why, I don’t know. I don’t know…” (Seems very confused now)
“-…I don’t know how long I’ve been here. It could have been years.”
It could have been years. It could have been years?
Then it began to sink into me. I started to put it all together in my mind. It all clicked.
I was dead. She was dead. This is where dead people go, at least at first. Some sort of waiting area perhaps. Everybody here, was dead. Unaware of it, but dead.
“I think we’re dead” I informed her. "I think this is some sort of afterlife. We're all dead..."
-"Oh, really?"
She seemed accepting of this, strangely. No arguments. No sign of fear or apprehension. Complacent, even.
We walked around some more together, conversing a bit, and as I looked around at the crowds, and at her, I began to realize that it wasn’t so much apathy that I was seeing, but people living totally in-the-moment, with no recollection of the past unless someone like me happened along and questioned them about it or otherwise jostle their memories. It would for instance not occur to any of them to eat, since they felt no hunger. It would not occur to any of them to question their present circumstances either, since they were existing in the present, with no thoughts of past or future. This is what I was seeing. Semi-amnesiac people with no thoughts of the past or future, just *being* in the present moment at all times, doing whatever felt right in those circumstances in that moment, and nothing more. No panic, no happiness, no sadness, just being there, in a daze.
I thought of my wife, whom I would apparently not be driving home to now. Did I crash the car on my way to meet her friend, and wind up here in some strange apathetic vestibule of the afterlife? Perhaps.
I can’t find my car. Why is that so familiar to me? What does that mean to me?
I CAN'T FIND MY CAR!
Suddenly it hit me. I’ve been in this place before, or at least in many places like it. I often dream of a strange place full of apathetic people where I cannot leave, cannot find my car, or bicycle, or whatever mode of transportation brought me there; and cannot find any way out. In my recurring dreams, I come here often.
Having had dreams like this before, I had taken the time to condition myself to take special notice of the concept “I cannot find my car.” To realize, whenever that happens and I am lost and can’t find my way home, that it is a dream that I am in. A dream, but one that happens to me over and over, with variations on the plot, but the basic concept the same. One that happens to me so often, that I installed precautionary measures.
“I cannot find my car”
This is a dream.
I became fully aware at that moment.
From that point onward, it was a lucid dream.
But, what a dream! I looked around again with new eyes. This was no dream, surely! It was just as detailed as my waking consciousness, just as realistic. The sun shone overhead, the buildings, the water, the people all so clear, so real. All the details were there, even a slight breeze. I actually began to doubt that I was right. Surely this was not a dream, could not be a dream… It was as real as what I call my reality. Just as real, even knowing that it was not. I took my time to look around, at all the activity, all the people, all the details. Wow. Maybe the other dreams were premonitions of this, and this one was real? Maybe I am dead?
Then and there, taking no more notice of my companion, I knelt there on the dirt and closed my eyes and began to meditate. To meditate within a dream, to awaken from the dream.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to awaken. I knelt there for a while, concentrating on awakening. Or perhaps more accurately on remembering my reality, my life, which is how I awaken from a dream, or from a salvia vision for that matter.
There. That's it.
I felt no transition at that point. I merely opened my eyes, and got out of bed.
You see, while I don’t have visions of the afterlife on salvia divinorum, I do have them in my regular dreams ever since starting to take salvia divinorum. Recurring dreams of a limbo-like afterlife heavily populated by the recently departed, and perhaps also by those yet alive but asleep and dreaming, all willing to wait forever in their state of ‘life-in-the-moment’ with no sense of anything but their present millisecond of being, of doing whatever they're doing, hence no panic, no fear, no regrets, just sitting around waiting for something while not being aware that they are.
This one was by far the clearest and most detailed of all such dreams that I have experienced, and so convincing that I almost bought into it myself. Almost.*
So was it merely a dream? Maybe. Then again, maybe this reality is one, too. It certainly seemed no different in kind from my waking life except for unlikely details that seemed to fit in there but would not here.
Why did I meet people that knew me from events that had never occurred to me? Another good question.
Maybe none of this matters. Maybe it matters more than almost anything else. No way to tell, till I finally die and see for myself.
Ironically, if it’s really where we go after we die, I doubt I’ll notice then, either. I’ll be too busy being in-the-moment.
*As to the detail of this dream, upon reading what I've written above, I realize that I provided a noticeable lack thereof. Not so in the actual dream, I assure you. All details were filled in; where they are omitted is where I cannot remember them. I do however remember that they were all there, because I recalled most of them immediately upon awakening, and in those few minutes that I had before they slipped away, I made the effort to at least force myself to remember the fact that those details were definitely all there. I conversed with a few more people in passing, I saw many more details of the buildings, the waterfront, the inside of the Hospital, and the crowds. Even surrounding forests in the distance, if I recall correctly. It was all very coherent and clear as glass. So clear that in point of fact, upon awakening from it I experienced as severe a shock as if you, reading this, were to awaken right now at this moment, awaken from this reality, or rather this dream of a reality, awaken in some other reality, a familiar one that had merely slipped your mind, and realize that this reality here where you are reading this now, was just a dream, too. That level of shock.
How would that feel to you?
Traipsing Through The Afterlife (lucid dream)
I am driving to a nearby city to meet a friend of my wife’s, on an errand. It’s a clear, sunny day. I approach the apartment complex that she lives in. I have never been here before. It is very large, much larger than I’d anticipated. It also has more the look of a professional building to it, or perhaps a hospital. There are several large main buildings; I approach the one given in the directions. I park my car and enter the building.
I walk down long corridors. There are people everywhere. It’s filled with people. It’s definitely more of a hospital, but somehow that doesn’t disturb me. I’m here to find room number 6N.
I ask directions of a passer-by; he doesn't seem to know, or really that interested in answering me. He seemed a bit "out of it."
Perhaps it’s a mental hospital combined with geriatric care? So it would seem, except for the ridiculous number of visitors. Every hall is crowded, every room filled, every space bustling.
I finally find someone, an employee, who guides me to the correct room. I had been on the wrong floor apparently. The elevator was very crowded, and we had to wait in queue for several minutes just to get one. We rode up several floors.
The room was off a narrow hallway with a great room nearby, perhaps a nurse’s station and recreation area combined. The door is open, but there is no-one inside that would fit the description of my wife’s friend. What was her name again? I look at the slip of paper that my wife had written the room number down on, but she had neglected to write her name. I should remember it, but I don’t.
The room is not any kind of an apartment. It’s more like a hospital room. One patient in a bed, several people visiting her. So this cannot be the right room.
Suddenly a maintenance worker, perhaps a janitor, hails me by name. “Brian!” An elderly black man in janitor’s clothing is calling to me. He is standing in the hall a short way behind me, near a public telephone on the wall. He hails me again, so I approach him. I’d never seen him before in my life.
“Brian! Good to see you!”
“Hello. Um, where do I know you from?”
“I remember you from that book that you wrote!” He mentions a title but I didn’t catch it, and it didn’t sound familiar anyhow.
(I have never written a book. Even if I had, why would he remember me personally from reading it?)
We chatted for a short while, but he never revealed anything more about said book or our supposed previous acquaintance. I eventually asked him if he knew where room 6N was, and he informed me that I was in the wrong building.
I said to myself “Well, that makes sense, because there’s nothing residential about this one!”
We said goodbye, and I walked back toward the elevators. When I got back to them, I was dismayed by the long lines of people waiting to use them. I said ‘to hell with this’ and found a stairwell.
I walked back down the four floors (or so) to ground level down a crowded stairwell. I had the thought that I should call my wife to ask her the name of her friend and anything else more that she could tell me, but when I took out my cell phone, it was not mine. It was an unfamiliar model, not a smartphone, with few buttons, and no clear indication how to dial out. I was dismayed that I’d apparently somehow dropped my phone and picked up someone else’s.
Still searching for my phone, I find two others on my person, neither one mine, and both with no apparent way to actually dial a number. Too few buttons, and concealed keyboard on one that meant little to me. I tried a couple of buttons, tried to enter my wife’s phone number, but nothing happened.
I continued walking, somewhat disturbed by all these developments.
I eventually found someone that informed me that the building that I was seeking was accessed through the back exit, so I left out the rear.
The view from out the rear entrance was a collection of buildings, large and small, leading down perhaps a quarter-mile to a waterfront with massive barges anchored in place to extend the useable surface area of the shoreline, and collections of stores and restaurants and other large edifices, with a railway and transit station or something similar. There was even an entire fenced-in abandoned carnival with Ferris wheel, in a sad state of disrepair. There were people everywhere, except in the carnival apparently.
Seeing no building such as was described to me, I try to walk around the building that I just exited to its front, but the walk seemed to just go on and on, past the railway with railway workers busy doing whatever it is that they do, past many more large open spaces crowded with people and more buildings and roads and even vehicles. Busses. My walk just kept revealing even more large vistas with more complex buildings and of course, more people *everywhere.* I was constantly threading my way through crowds.
Strangely, the people all seemed incredibly apathetic, dazed even. Sad. Wistful.
There seemed to be no clear path to the front of the original building; in fact I could not even be sure that the building that I was walking around *was* the original building at that point. I felt as if I could walk forever and never get anywhere at all.
People were everywhere. Walking, sitting, talking, going about various tasks in a mechanical fashion. Many were just sitting around doing nothing at all.
I began to realize that I could not get back to my car. That indeed, I could not find any indication of any parking area anywhere. A slight panic began to set in.
I reversed direction and went back to the back area, the waterfront with the barges. It was a very long walk, but I eventually made my way back there.
There was a large open area there that I'd seen before, unpaved, with picnic tables in rows, crowded with people. I began to walk down the center of that area toward the waterfront.
“BRIAN!”
I turned at the sound of my name being called out. A young woman approached me, having been seated at one of the tables. “Brian?”
I did not recognize her. I’d never seen her before in my life.
“Brian! How are you?”
“Hello. I’m fine. I’m afraid that I do not know who you are though. Have we met?”
“You don’t remember me? We worked on that political campaign together!”
(I had never worked on any political campaign in my life)
“Um, no. I can’t seem to remember you. Sorry.”
We began to talk.
“What is this place?” I asked her.
“-I don’t know.” (she seemed confused)
“How long have you been here?”
A slightly panicked look crosses her face, then confusion.
“-How long? Why, I don’t know. I don’t know…” (Seems very confused now)
“-…I don’t know how long I’ve been here. It could have been years.”
It could have been years. It could have been years?
Then it began to sink into me. I started to put it all together in my mind. It all clicked.
I was dead. She was dead. This is where dead people go, at least at first. Some sort of waiting area perhaps. Everybody here, was dead. Unaware of it, but dead.
“I think we’re dead” I informed her. "I think this is some sort of afterlife. We're all dead..."
-"Oh, really?"
She seemed accepting of this, strangely. No arguments. No sign of fear or apprehension. Complacent, even.
We walked around some more together, conversing a bit, and as I looked around at the crowds, and at her, I began to realize that it wasn’t so much apathy that I was seeing, but people living totally in-the-moment, with no recollection of the past unless someone like me happened along and questioned them about it or otherwise jostle their memories. It would for instance not occur to any of them to eat, since they felt no hunger. It would not occur to any of them to question their present circumstances either, since they were existing in the present, with no thoughts of past or future. This is what I was seeing. Semi-amnesiac people with no thoughts of the past or future, just *being* in the present moment at all times, doing whatever felt right in those circumstances in that moment, and nothing more. No panic, no happiness, no sadness, just being there, in a daze.
I thought of my wife, whom I would apparently not be driving home to now. Did I crash the car on my way to meet her friend, and wind up here in some strange apathetic vestibule of the afterlife? Perhaps.
I can’t find my car. Why is that so familiar to me? What does that mean to me?
I CAN'T FIND MY CAR!
Suddenly it hit me. I’ve been in this place before, or at least in many places like it. I often dream of a strange place full of apathetic people where I cannot leave, cannot find my car, or bicycle, or whatever mode of transportation brought me there; and cannot find any way out. In my recurring dreams, I come here often.
Having had dreams like this before, I had taken the time to condition myself to take special notice of the concept “I cannot find my car.” To realize, whenever that happens and I am lost and can’t find my way home, that it is a dream that I am in. A dream, but one that happens to me over and over, with variations on the plot, but the basic concept the same. One that happens to me so often, that I installed precautionary measures.
“I cannot find my car”
This is a dream.
I became fully aware at that moment.
From that point onward, it was a lucid dream.
But, what a dream! I looked around again with new eyes. This was no dream, surely! It was just as detailed as my waking consciousness, just as realistic. The sun shone overhead, the buildings, the water, the people all so clear, so real. All the details were there, even a slight breeze. I actually began to doubt that I was right. Surely this was not a dream, could not be a dream… It was as real as what I call my reality. Just as real, even knowing that it was not. I took my time to look around, at all the activity, all the people, all the details. Wow. Maybe the other dreams were premonitions of this, and this one was real? Maybe I am dead?
Then and there, taking no more notice of my companion, I knelt there on the dirt and closed my eyes and began to meditate. To meditate within a dream, to awaken from the dream.
I closed my eyes and willed myself to awaken. I knelt there for a while, concentrating on awakening. Or perhaps more accurately on remembering my reality, my life, which is how I awaken from a dream, or from a salvia vision for that matter.
There. That's it.
I felt no transition at that point. I merely opened my eyes, and got out of bed.
You see, while I don’t have visions of the afterlife on salvia divinorum, I do have them in my regular dreams ever since starting to take salvia divinorum. Recurring dreams of a limbo-like afterlife heavily populated by the recently departed, and perhaps also by those yet alive but asleep and dreaming, all willing to wait forever in their state of ‘life-in-the-moment’ with no sense of anything but their present millisecond of being, of doing whatever they're doing, hence no panic, no fear, no regrets, just sitting around waiting for something while not being aware that they are.
This one was by far the clearest and most detailed of all such dreams that I have experienced, and so convincing that I almost bought into it myself. Almost.*
So was it merely a dream? Maybe. Then again, maybe this reality is one, too. It certainly seemed no different in kind from my waking life except for unlikely details that seemed to fit in there but would not here.
Why did I meet people that knew me from events that had never occurred to me? Another good question.
Maybe none of this matters. Maybe it matters more than almost anything else. No way to tell, till I finally die and see for myself.
Ironically, if it’s really where we go after we die, I doubt I’ll notice then, either. I’ll be too busy being in-the-moment.
*As to the detail of this dream, upon reading what I've written above, I realize that I provided a noticeable lack thereof. Not so in the actual dream, I assure you. All details were filled in; where they are omitted is where I cannot remember them. I do however remember that they were all there, because I recalled most of them immediately upon awakening, and in those few minutes that I had before they slipped away, I made the effort to at least force myself to remember the fact that those details were definitely all there. I conversed with a few more people in passing, I saw many more details of the buildings, the waterfront, the inside of the Hospital, and the crowds. Even surrounding forests in the distance, if I recall correctly. It was all very coherent and clear as glass. So clear that in point of fact, upon awakening from it I experienced as severe a shock as if you, reading this, were to awaken right now at this moment, awaken from this reality, or rather this dream of a reality, awaken in some other reality, a familiar one that had merely slipped your mind, and realize that this reality here where you are reading this now, was just a dream, too. That level of shock.
How would that feel to you?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)