Where Did the Road Go? Exploring the Fringe...

i was talking to my wife recently about 'the nightmare', and i remembered an experience i had about seven years ago, when i was still living in america.

my daughter and i were living with my parents, and i slept on the sofa in the living room. one night, at some point after i fell asleep as normal, i found myself suspended in an empty, dark space surrounded by 3 faceless humanoid forms that (and this is the best i can describe it) shone darkly.
they are equidistant from one another, suspended in this dark space around me about four arm lengths away from me. they are each casting or spinning webs or bands of a dark static-y material around me, binding my arms to my sides, my legs together. there were muffled, indistinct sounds. there was a faint ozone smell.
i feel these entities are malicious and attacking me, trying to...trap? me, to control me and i know without a doubt that if they do, i am lost. not dead, but lost and without hope. i am physically unable to fight back, and it occurs to me to start praying.
i am not a christian, so i begin reciting aloud the 42nd chapter of the tao te ching:
from tao came one
from one came two
from two came three
from three came ten thousand things...

(side note: as a self-spun taoist, i see that passage as describing the fundamental unity everything is rooted in and springs from; what the judeo-christian paradigm refers to as god with a capital g.)

it is at that point that i wake up ever so slightly in the air over the sofa ( like i had fallen onto it from a decent height and rebounded off it and woke up as i reached the apex and start back down) and land. i am not groggy. i am now wide awake. and the experience had no dream-like qualities (besides perhaps the muffled sound). the images and...feelings were as real as everyday life. i talked to my parents about it when they woke up later that morning. being christians, they asked if i prayed to jesus for help and i told them no, and repeated the lines i had spoken. they seemed more than a little disappointed in and dubious of my choice of supplication.

that day i wrote a prayer based on those first four lines, and it is to this day my daily prayer...and that makes it seem quite odd to me that i had forgotten the liminal experience that was the germinating event of that daily prayer.

since that time, while i have not had a repeat of that sort of encounter, the boundaries between my conscious and sub/un-conscious minds has been quite shifty and very permeable. i find myself in dream-like states at times when i am fully awake and there are times when i am lying in bed next to my wife, very deep into a train of thought, and my wife interrupts it when she asks me to roll over because i am snoring

Thanks for sharing, deinktvis.

It's funny how people forget these experiences until something triggers the memory, and then we wonder how we could have forgotten something so unusual or important.

Have you ever tried keeping a dream journal?

no, no dream journal...and in this instance, i don't feel it was a dream. i feel it was an out of body or spiritual experience.

deinktvis wrote:
I didn't mean to suggest your experience was "just a dream". The reason that I asked about a dream journal is that keeping one can help people remember and make sense of unusual experiences, even ones not directly related to dreaming. It can open you up to these experiences. For instance, precognitive dreams are one of the most commonly reported psi experiences. I have a friend who kept a dream journal after a dream saved his life. He thought it was just a coincidence, but his wife insisted it was more than that. So he kept a dream journal to prove her wrong. It didn't. The journal showed that he was having precognitive dreams. Finding that out made him much more open to other kinds of experiences.

well, i guess then my poetry notebook acts as my dream journal.

That's awesome!