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.