Responses to Weird Phenomena

Dear Readers:

I am sharing with you the responses I received to the prior blog.  I thought all of you who shared would be interested in hearing from each other.  I removed names in order to protect privacy.  Some responses were logical and scientific in nature and others, well...not.

B Michael (optometrist) had to tell me that as we age parts of our bodies begin to sag (no kidding!) and that goes for the vitreous humor lining of the inside of the eyeball.  As the shreds sag and eventually land in a pile in the bottom of our eyes they set off electrical signals which the brain sees as fireflies until all has peeled off and settled.  Not really a pretty picture, but no worse than the flap under my upper arm that wiggles when I shake my hands.  I honestly don't have much help for you in the remembering too much department.  I am in constant fear of not remembering enough: names, dates, words, directions, calculations.

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YES, YES, YES!! I do have scary similar experiences, especially the snippets of memories that I can't quite grasp once the experiences are over. When these "spells" first occurred, I would have to run for the bed and stay until the spell passed. They seem now to be less forceful, and I usually just freeze (as in a fugue? heart attack?) and let it happen. I have asked three doctors about these experiences, and they all looked at me as though I had three heads.  I have been told by doctors, by the way, that if there are flashes, a doctor needs to look into the problem.

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Yep, happens to me all the time and not just recently.  The oddest memories randomly come along having nothing to do with what I am doing in the moment.  I have not experienced your peripheral vision thing though....

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OH YA!!  I will write details later.  I thought I was nutz.  The floaty things to the side . . . I was thinking it was Mike's wife still here so I started talking to . . .ummm . . . her?!  Not talking back.  I'm serious,  girl scouts' honor.  And yes, going to a different “level” or “awareness”. 

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Well, yes, I have these things as well.  I suppose the flashes out of the corner of one's eyes might have an ophthalmological explanation, but let me tell you when I experience them most.  Just after the loss of someone important to me.  I'm thinking, at least in my case, that it is that person making contact for a last goodbye.  And not just people, but pets as well.  Gene and I both do this. 

I think perhaps the older we get, the more we pause to reflect on past memories which seems to unlock the door for more memories to flash.  I also find myself humming or singing a certain song unintentionally and then realize that the song is pertinent to thoughts or actions happening at that time.  For instance, after visiting with the folks who ran Joel's Grocery, a neighborhood store a block from my home in La Grande, I found myself humming Jim Croche's I've Got A Name.

I'm wondering if the closer we come to our end, the more our past friends and relatives draw close - the flashes just out of our sight.

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I have also been "seeing things" usually off to the right, more like shadows or dark shapes.  I hope they're my guardians and not some sinister soul or voyeuristic being...AND having occasional memory flashes.  These are interesting cuz so much of my past lives has been blocked for some reason that I welcome a brief reminder of something or someone I had forgotten all about.  I usually try to expand on the memory which doesn't always work.  Maybe both of these events is a sort of awakening, a growing, tho not of a tumor...more like evolving in bursts. 
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Good for you- this sounds like a conscious mind expanding.   There’s so much we’ll never know.  The only thing close that I  have experienced is when I’m falling asleep, I have these revelations that explain very deep concepts, but they’re just a flash and it’s impossible to hold onto them.  I feel so wise when it happens, but it’s also frustrating.  This hasn’t happened to me for a couple of years.  Send your blog to Dana Anderson if you know her.  She would have some enlightened comments!

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I've noticed both of these things.  That fleeting thought thing is so weird.  Happens to me at least once a day and I just think to myself, what the hell and consider it a brain leakage of some kind.  The eye thing I have a different take on because of my eye surgery 3 years ago.  I always worry something has gone wrong with the surgery, but then it goes away and I breathe a sign of relief.  What funny things age is doing, although now you've heard that the brain thing also happens to younger people.  Tooooooo much.

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 I would like to share with you an experience I had years ago and still have on occasion, when I am especially in tune with myself.
It must be over 20+ years ago that I went to New Mexico and did a week long program with Chris Griscom at The Light Center.  (http://lightinstitute.com/site/ )  It was a multi-incarnational week…. J  She took us back into a “past lives” and at the end of the session she would ask “when did this happen?”  On the final session I went to a rather magical life and was a child playing with my son (who was in this life my brother).  It was in a place I had never seen before, either in this life, pictures or history books.  When she came to the questions “when did this happen?” … my answer was quick “NOW.”  There was not a shred of doubt that it was happening right that moment simultaneously with the life I was currently experiencing.  (fun, huh!)  I won’t go into describing the other life, but what I think is pertinent to your discussion is that after the sessions, that life would unexpectedly come into my peripheral vision.  It would disappear if I turned to look at it, but if I just continued to allow it in my peripheral vision, it would continue and I could experience it.  (Kind of the same as when you first experience deep meditation, if you allow any kind of a “wow” you lose the meditation … but if you just allow and stay in that moment you go deeper and deeper)  Now this other life would pop up at the oddest times, like even at a stop light when I would be driving or when I was waiting for something else to happen.  Those moments in life that you pause ---

When I consider that it happens less to me now, I realize, sadly,  I am taking less time to “pause….”  Thank you for making me think about this.  I will make some changes to allow for pauses more often.  J

As an addendum – As I said, I had never seen the place/location of this other life.  It was kind of tropical, but way more magical than any tropical paradise I had seen before.  About a year after the sessions I was in an art gallery in a California beach town and I saw a painting of “my place.”  The artists was there that day and although there was a large crowd and we did not have an opportunity to go into a long conversation, I was so excited about it I ran to him and said I’ve never seen this place in this life before, I live here in another life.  He smiled and said “I know.”  I went back the next day and he was gone, and I have not seen him since.  (I know, that part kind of sucks, doesn’t it?  I think if I write a story about it, I will change that ending for sure!) 

So maybe the peripheral visions are a simultaneous life/alternate reality bleeding through?  It was for me. 

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I am seeing so much out of the corners of my eyes that I am getting bored with every day reality. 

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Good reading because it is good writing. You're dangerous to an old order that's time has come.  It's time to return to the ferment of the past.
Dangerous your pen is.

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Some of you haven't been having the experiences I wrote about, but you have been recipients of vivid dreams.  One such response is on the blog itself and this is the other:

As for the dreams…I saw as clear as day, but in the dead of the night last night, five concurrent bombs explode here in LV.  I was at a school filled with small children and celebrating somebody’s birthday party when the explosions deafened us and created the thickest, blackest, and oiliest-appearing clouds I’d ever seen forming in the sky.  The school we were in was located on top of a hill, allowing us a panoramic view of the bomb sites scattered across the valley.  Muslim terrorists claimed responsibility.

The night before, I was traveling through CA and found myself in an enormous stadium with a yellow, orange and glittering red stage and a marquis with Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and Peter Lawford’s names scrawling across the top of the whole thing. We attendees were all wearing huge helmets of the same colors and moving our heads in unison to some stupid rap tune.

WTF???

P.S.

I must confess that I had consumed my boyfriend’s killer chili with a generous sprinkling of tobasco sauce on each of those nights.  Could these be brain farts, or something more?

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I found all the responses interesting and hope this discussion continues.  Already, more examples of weird phenomena similar to ours have been winging themselves my way and to some of you. 

Weird phenomena

At lunch yesterday with a friend, I was relieved to learn that certain brain events I've been experiencing the last year are not particular only to me.  She's been having the same experiences and she says many people of all ages are similarly affected.  Whew!  I thought I had a brain tumor.  Maybe these phenomena have visited you as well.

Quick flashes of moments from out of my past burst into my consciousness--not long events, but images that have occurred  just seconds in real time.  These images are not significant in any way nor are they relevant to where I am in the present or to what I am doing.  They just flash, like there's been a rent in time and they have squirted back out to me in the now.  For example, one that flashed the other day was what I saw out our rental car window in 2000 when we went to San Diego.  Houses in a housing development as we drove by on the freeway.  That's it.  All my flashes are like that.  No meaning, no connection, just things I saw for an instant some time in my past.  I can't attach any meaning to them whatsoever other than to realize they are things I have seen.

Another mind event has been the past-at-a-glance moment.  My lunch friend calls it "The Big Picture."  My life comes back to me in total, as if I'm reading a map of myself.  Everything is compressed into a smaller portion and I take it I'm supposed to glean something from being presented this outline.  Sometimes I get an "aha!" but as I'm always trying to pay attention and make meaning from daily events, I've covered a lot of ground already and there's not much of anything new to come up for me.  So why is this mind feedback occurring? 

Again, I thought this was happening because I'm at the over-65 stage of life.  I assumed this was something that happens in brains our age because of our age.  The total-life phenomenen is quite opposite from memoir thinking, where I am going through events moment by moment in order to make story from them.

My friend tells me, however, that this and other similar events are happening to people of all ages.  She says there is a shift in consciousness going on and quotes a four year-old who said, "Things are going to change.  The crystals inside us are turning on, and they'll be telling us what to do."  My friend in her career persona is privvy to what goes on in the mind of people of all ages, and this shifting is happening in one way or another to all of them.

One more experiential oddity--I have been seeing movement out the corner of my eye and sometimes above me, birdlike, but not birds.  When I look straight on, nothing is there.  Yesterday while I worked at the stove canning beets, I noticed there was a multitude of movement at the window end of my kitchen--swift, black cloudiness zipping back and forth.  I see a lot of this movement when I work in the garden as well.  But when I focus straight on, nothing.  I know I don't have cataracts or macular degeneration or any other eye malfunctions.  I do have migraines from time to time due to air pressure changes, but the events I'm describing do not accompany the headaches.  So naturally, I worried brain tumor.

Until this morning.  As I recounted the weird phenomena lunch discussion to my husband, he said he has been experiencing the movements as well.  He's a left-brain, logical thinker not prone to whimsy, so if he experiences the same events, then what the heck is going on?

Another friend just told me she thought the mind flashes were her brain being so full of memories that it had to dispose of a few.

Have you been experiencing any or all of these same phenomena?  Do you have an explanation?  Is your consciousness shifting?  I really want to know.  I find it all very interesting and am glad to learn I'm not alone in all of this strange territory.  I don't mind the wondering--we don't really get a lot of answers about mystical events, do we?--but as with everything else in life, inside our brains, or the ethereal, I'd like an explanation, too.