A Peculiar Experience

This happened long ago, when I was in high school.  I was alone in the apartment.  I had just lain down on my bed to take an afternoon nap, so this must have happened on a weekend (or during summer vacation -- why, oh why did I not write down everything then!).

Suddenly I found myself standing in the hallway.  I did not remember how I got to be there, but the oddness of the situation did not bother me so much at the time as the fact that my vision was somehow impaired (in retrospect, it was as if my brain were operating on autopilot, with the critical faculty turned down) -- I could see, but the whole environment seemed steeped in a shadowy sort of gloom.

It felt very oppressive, almost physically so, so I went (back) down to my bedroom, reached for the light switch by the door, tried to flick it on -- and could not.  I had not felt my finger making contact with it.  Thinking I had simply missed the mark, I looked at the switch, tried again, and it looked as if my finger went through it.  Under normal conditions this would have been shocking, but at the time I was simply perplexed (again, the incomplete critical faculty).

Then, suddenly, it came to me -- I realized why I couldn't see normally -- my eyes were closed!  So I had fallen asleep after all, and of course my eyes would be closed.  How I could see at all when I was sleeping with my eyes closed, that question did not arise at the time.  Instead, I tried to open my eyes but found it difficult at first -- it was as if my eyelids were glued shut, and they simply would not respond to my effort.  I tried again and again with a kind of desperation, and finally my eyes suddenly snapped wide open and I found myself awake and lying in bed.

What did I experience?  Was it some unusual semi-lucid dream?  "Traveling consciousness"?  A partly-conscious astral projection?

Oliver Fox, a pioneering writer in occult literature of the early 20th century pertaining to lucid dreaming and astral projection, set out four stages in the journey of dream-to-full consciousness in his writings.  It lists, at its base level, to put it very simply, just accepting everything in your dream unquestioningly, just as you would with any other ordinary dream, then only after waking, realizing there was something strange or odd about the dream;  then the next level is where you do notice something odd, but excuse it with your dream-logic as something that could normally exist within the dream.  Then, in the next level of awareness, the critical faculty comes into play, and you compare things in the dream with the waking world versions, and realize it really is odd, but still justify it somehow, using loose logic (like "It could happen!").  The last stage is a fully lucid dream -- you see something in a dream that's just absurd, realize it could not possibly happen in real life, and therefore you must be dreaming.

I mostly agree with this, and I would place my "strange dream" somewhere between the second or third categories.  But I confess I have always felt rather dissatisfied with Fox's categorization of dreams.  He seems to unduly emphasize melding from lucid dreaming to what he describes as astral projection without making a hard-and-fast distinction between the two (by way of contrast, Sylvan Muldoon makes the difference absolutely clear in his autobiographical classic tome of occult literature, Projection of the Astral Body -- he does not mention lucid dreaming at all anywhere in his book).

Related post:  A Silent Explosion

Head Of A Baying Dog

That is, a stump that looks like one.

Itsy Bitsy Spider

From last summer.

Still More "Seen In A Seoul Alley"

Just one question... 

Is it to keep people out, or to keep something confined within?

Moon Longing

 

I Must Have Been Really Pissed off

to have done this to my hand.  Most likely I punched a wall in anger/frustration.

Luckily though, nothing seems to have been broken.  Supposedly it happened in 2022, but as is so often the case with these things, I have no memory at all of this injury or what led up to it.

Related post:  Speaking Of Knives

Evening Sunbow

Beyond

Amulet

 

Errant Broom

Somewhere out there there's a witch who's lost her broom.  Can witches fly without brooms?  I do recall some flew to the Sabbath riding on the back of goats, but I don't know if that was standard practice.

 

Gloves Set Out To Dry

outside a fried chicken place.

I could be overthinking it, but this could be a subtle form of rodomontade:  "See, we run a hygenic joint here -- we always wear gloves when handling our chicken!"

Or maybe I AM overthinking it.

Plugged

Made me think of medical illustrations -- like cross sections showing foreign objects embedded in tissue, for example.

One In Every Class

That one clown that just has to stand out from the bunch.

Be it a curly tree in a parkful of arrow-straight trees

or a Baba Yaga house in a neighborhood full of plumbline-straight homes^

Yet Another Mirror In An Absurd Setting

Unlike most other out-of-place mirrors, this one looked classy and expensive.  That lacquer frame with mother-of-pearl inlay surely must have cost its original owner a considerable sum.  It actually looks like there might be an interesting backstory to its present unusual circumstance -- perhaps one that involves a misfortunate Victorian-style romance between star-crossed lovers that led to some tragic incident and the mirror becoming haunted (which could explain why it's placed behind the banister -- to keep it "behind bars")...?  Ooh!

Winged Gods Adoring The Sun

Dancing Figure On The Sidewalk

Performing a pirouette!

 

Meat

hanging in a restaurant window.  I understand about dry-aging, but I wished they'd chosen a more visually appealing way to show it off somehow.  This particiular display didn't look appetizing so much as zombie-eaten.  And I'm not sure about the sun exposure.

For Once,

an image of aloneness that is actually kind of humorous.  At least, it so seems to my eyes.  But as to why it should seem humorous, I'm not sure.  Maybe it's the mural in the back?  But I think the image would still be... well, let's say not lacking in some mysterious kind of humor even without the mural.  Hah, "mysterious humor"!  Good one.

Maybe it's because the lone figure here somehow manages to convey a feeling not of loneliness so much as of... aloofness(?), as if alone by conscious choice...

(Click to enlarge)

Comparison with these images may help to explain what I mean:  A Bit Eerie;

            A Drizzly Day In Hongdae;

            Exit/Transfer 

Parts

In a prosthetist's window.

Bardo -- Liminal Spaces

 

Anonymous Chunk Of Ice

Thanks to the streak of subzero temps it's survived on the sidewalk long enough to be immortalized by moi^

Wintry Afternoon

 

Crazy Stare

Late afternoon sun looking oddly p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶t̶i̶c̶ intimidating.

Maybe this says more about me, though.

Obsessive-Compulsive

Being OC and a photobug means being forced to expend a lot of mental energy (and often varying amounts of physical energy as well) doing this sort of thing every day.

Errant Snowball

It looked so out of place, a lump of snow out of the blue, by a busy sidewalk with not a trace of snow anywhere else around.  Hardworking "environment beautification technicians" (aka street cleaners) had cleared all the snow off the sidewalk, but had left this one snowball alone.  Or perhaps made it themselves, as a reminder of a moment in time.  Kind of poignant, that.

A cleaning crew with a sense of poetry.  Or perhaps irony.