EzraS wrote:
What I found out is we were near the Maltby Cemetery. Which has an amazingly interesting story that goes with it. At one time there was a crypt there that you got to by walking down 13 steps. If someone went down these steps at midnight, they supposedly saw a vision of hell. The legend is several teenagers over a period of time had traumatic experiences with this. So someone finally had a bulldozer fill in the area where the steps were. And now the cemetery is on private land. And many claim to see a woman and child (or children) in ragged clothing there.
Way more often stuff like this is just subconscious stirrings, not sure what causes them to occur but it's really difficult to tell whether it's an odd parting of your subconscious and pre-filtered inputs or whether it's actually something more.
The analogy I like to use for 'something more' is that the difference between wondering if it was all in your head vs. having enough evidence to suspect it wasn't is like the difference between the sensation of having a cold or mild flu vs. needing an appendectomy. The first is maybe a 1 to 2 on the pain and irritation scale, the later is more like a 7 or 8.
You know you're dealing with something odd if you feel something like spiderwebs of static electricity interacting with you in an odd and deliberate manner (ie. where you can rule out a spider-web) and where you feel a very clear sense of other, ie. another intentionality interacting with your own which is just as bright as yours, foreign/autonomous to your thoughts, and regarding you in a particular manner - ranging from very loving to the other polarity. If its the other polarity, if you get close enough to it and irritate it right, you can get a screaming in your inner ear.
Most important thing to note - this stuff wouldn't be objectively solid and anything you perceive of it will be in some way shape or form it's reflection off of your own physical apparatus. Whether it's the spider-web thing, feeling touch on your body, even feeling touch at a distance (that's a tough one to explain but I've had it) - it'll play with you but it generally won't (as far as I've ever understood it) play with any non-sentient part of the physical environment, rather it comes closer to playing your nervous system like a musical instrument.
I do look forward to the day when we have a lot less brain-mysticism (ie. both 'Anything I see is true' and 'the brain can hallucinate absolutely anything' - both are equally credulous) because regardless of what these experiences are I'd have to say that there's something a lot more tangible about this stuff than a person's brain spitting up on itself.The need for that to be the case might fit our current conception of physics and neurology but it doesn't fit the circumstantial evidence at all. It's either a) deeper substructures in nature that we misinterpret or b) forms of sentient being we don't have a proper understanding of attempting to interact. As transactional and intelligent as the experience often is I also have to go with b) on this one.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.