Blast(s) from the past(s)

At the risk of sounding insane - or, much worse, boring - I just have to register the reappearance of that cat again.

Yesterday evening I returned home. As I went out again, to empty the trash bin, I saw my neighbour's cat jump from the (neighbour's) stairway and disappear into the bushes in front of the house.

I can almost hear you: "She is losing it, the poor thing... She is obsessed with the cat!"
Well, I can't really blame you, especially considering the fact that most likely you don't know me in person. All I can do is to reassure you - again - that it does have exactly the same (very specific) appearance of my neighbour's purportedly deceased cat (which would be a Methuselah anyway, were he alive).

But in case you're interested in reading about it anyway, and certainly for my own benefit (instead of keeping a diary of such occurrences) here are two interesting tidbits that may - or may not - be associated with the cat's reappearance.

For two days before the sighting of the cat I had been, once again, actively practicing - or so I would hope - the "parallel life" thing, so to speak. (See the previous cat-related entry, hyperlinked above.) I must be getting better (?) at it, because this time no headache followed.

And the same day of the sighting I had been awoken by what sounded like a sound from my past that I thought I would never hear again: the sound of a melody another neighbour used to play on her flute, until she moved away, about four years ago. (Other people, unrelated to her, live there now.)
At first I thought I had been dreaming. But as I got up, I heard the flute again. I even heard the passage that always gave her trouble: she skipped a few notes, just like she always did in the past.
It went on for about two hours: the usual time lapse for her daily practice in the past.

As I went out that afternoon, I walked by her house to see if she had returned to live there. (I really didn't know her well enough to just knock on her door.)
But nothing seemed different. The car of the family that lives there now was parked outside the house.

I really don't know what to think at this point.

Bats in my belfry is a very tempting explanation - oh, how easy and pleasant it is to laugh, even (or especially) at oneself! - but it would really make no sense. My mind seems to be working better than ever in every other aspect.

Anyway, I'll continue with my tentative inhabiting a timeline that I like better than this one. In an age when everything seems explored-out to death this may be the last - and ultimate - adventure.

Meanwhile, you can read a fascinating account about an unexpected change in a very mundane reality, taken from a very interesting - and extremely useful - book, called Parallel Universes of Self, by Frederick Dodson.
(You can see the image and other details of the book in the Recommended display on the right side of the screen.)

That morning, I had meditated and shifted myself into a slightly different reality. I was scheduled to go to a hairdresser I had been to many times around midday. Upon arrival, I was astonished to find that a brand-new building had been built right beside the hairdresser's place. "How could they build it so quickly?" I asked myself. I had only been there four weeks ago, and four weeks ago, there was a lawn and a park bench, without any sign of a building or even a planned building. I stood there for a while, baffled and confused. I entered the hairdresser's shop and asked, "When did they build that house?" The staff looked at me incredulously. "Oh, it's been there for a few years, actually. I remember when it was built," said one of them. "It was shortly before Christmas, five years ago." I stared in disbelief. "But wasn't there a park bench and a small grass hill there?" They couldn't tell me or couldn't remember, but they looked at me as if I was mixed up. I could have sworn that only a few weeks ago, the place looked entirely different. After getting my hair cut, I went out to examine the place. Behind the building, everything looked exactly as it had before - except for the brand-new building. Finally, I accepted that I had shifted into a parallel reality, and that the building was a good indicator. It was the first of many physical reality shifts I learned to accept, rather than labeling me insane, as the consensus-reality would.

Well, it's not the first time that a building has proved to be wickedly unstable... :)
Then again, entire hills have been known to disappear (and, who knows, reappear somewhere else?).

Anyway, it would be all too easy to dismiss such accounts as being the consequence of faulty attention. If that were the case, it should also be explained why other segments of the same reality appear unchanged in the eyes of the same observer.

Maybe for some unfathomable reason the author of the account above failed to register the change at the time when the house was built, and kept the earlier landscape intact.
Which would still mean that (at least) two realities can coexist in an observable mode.
Or perhaps even in an alternate - on again, off again - mode?
More on this the next time.

To tell you the truth, I am not very satisfied with this entry. But I wanted to register my experience, whatever it was, while it was still fresh in my memory. Because whatever it is, it is not something that should be neglected.




P.S. As you may know by now, I often edit my entries (again and again and again), as new thoughts occur to me, so don't forget to come back at some later time.

Schrödinger's cat on my doorstep

Time for a personal confession...
I use the word "confession" because, unlike the other personal experiences I have reported so far (which came uninvited), the event I am about to describe seems to have been directly related to something I did - or tried to do. And it is an activity that is often best left unmentioned, unless you are willing to risk being considered a kook. A mad(wo)man. A lunatic. Someone who is not to be trusted with the simplest tasks in life... You get the picture.

The outward appearance of the event was anything but spectacular; if you're expecting the time-shift equivalent of some "mother ship" appearing, you're in for an anticlimax, to put it mildly.

Still, it boggles the mind.
And while I usually don't mind letting go of my (rational) mind, there is something about this event that makes me want to keep silent about it.
Hence the term "confession".
(And don't be surprised if I later change my mind about publishing this and take the post down.)

Something odd happened on the evening of July 23, 2008.
It had been a breathtakingly beautiful summer day, with all the colours burning bright in the sunlight that filtered through dark grey stormy clouds. (There had been a storm the previous night, and there was another coming later that day.)

I had been out for a coffee with a relative of mine. It had been a most interesting meeting: we had a conversation that, I feel, directly pertains to what I am about to describe, but would rather withhold it, for fear of "tainting" the thought process (and possibly even clouding the memory itself). Let me just say that it was a conversation about a dream that might indicate that dreams perhaps could be more than just "processing" of our daily rubbish (garbage, if you're an American ;) - that perhaps they sometimes could be a very real meeting point of different levels of Reality.

As I was coming home that evening, maybe ten or twenty metres from my doorstep, I suddenly saw my neighbour's cat. It was sitting by the rubbish bin, looking at me.

There aren't many cats loose around my neighbourhood; in fact, that was the only cat I ever saw in my street.
And this cat had a very distinctive appearance. Its fur had a colouring and pattern that I hadn't seen on any other cat; and most of all, it had a very visible patch of discolouration around its nose, the consequence of a disease he had had years before.

My heart leapt when I saw him.
I slowly approached him.
He didn't move; he just kept looking at me.
"Is that you?" I asked him, calling his name.
If he ever replied, I didn't hear or understand him. But then, there was no need for a reply: I could see quite clearly it was him.

It was my neighbour's cat - who had died two years before.

I stood there looking at him for a while; and then I slowly walked away and into my home.
The next day I didn't see him. Or the next.
I did see his (former) "owner" a few days later, and I inquired - as breezily and "by the way" as I could - about his cat. Oh yes, it had died. How did he know for sure? Because he saw him die. Did he get another one? No, no way - too much trouble. "I thought I had seen him," I finally added. Didn't he see a cat just like his around lately? No.

I know what I saw.
Maybe the man, for some obscure reason, didn't tell me the truth: maybe he did not see him die, so he could not know for sure that the cat was dead.
But that was the only time I saw the "late" cat (who had been quite elderly at the time of his purported death) in more than two years, ever since I had stopped seeing him around and later learned he was dead.

Until a few days ago.
It was late in the evening and I was returning home.
When I walked past my neighbour's door, I saw the cat again, sitting where it had been the last time I saw him.

This time, I walked even closer to him, to have a good look at him: yes, it was him. There was his unmistakable patch around the nose. And he seemed to know me.


I know I said I wouldn't talk... but now I think I might as well admit to you openly (after all, you already suspected I was a kook, right?) that the first time, on July 23, 2008 - or rather, the night before - I had been doing an "exercise", the aim of which was to switch to a different timeline.

It certainly resulted in an occipital headache that defies description. No industry-strength pills could relieve it - and that's saying something, considering that: a) I hardly ever get headaches, and b) an aspirin is usually enough to dispel my headaches.

Then, later that day, when I met with my relative, she told me about a dream that she could not get out of her mind: it had been a "Technicolor" dream (something that, in her own words, never happened to her, as she only dreams in "black & white"); it felt as vivid as any present reality; in her dream she was perfectly aware of the obvious change between the waking reality as she remembered it and the (also "waking") reality of the dream.

I am not usually interested in dreams, but this time I was impressed.
I didn't tell her (but she may find out now) that while she was sleeping I had been suffering the mother of all headaches, after having tried to "immerse" myself completely - mind AND body - in a different timeline: a timeline that corresponded exactly to what she had dreamed.

Did this have anything to do with the cat?
I don't know. I just felt it had to be mentioned, considering that both events were highly unusual, to put it conservatively.

What baffles me is this: IF (and it is a big "if") my mind-forcing the boundaries of time/space had somehow provoked the apparition of that cat... what was it that made it appear a few days ago? My mind frame and activity had been totally different from what they were on July 22/23, 2008.


I may be editing - or just removing - this entry in a while.
But in case you just like reading about phantom cats - nah, let's call them Schrödinger's cats :) - here's a short mention of a similar event.