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Phenomenological experiences.

Tag: the other place

  • 10.28.24

    I had been trapped in an alien museum, touring it, but I kept making the aliens mad, and the museum workers told me to leave, with a warning. I had gotten too close to a dragon/lizard/venus flytrap plant hybrid and it hissed at me, and then I thought an alien bird was a stuffed animal and touched it, and it bit my finger, and I got yelled at by an employee while I apologized. At this point I was fully dreaming, and not necessarily aware of this fact. I had gone into the alien museum on purpose, but on the way out the entry was filled with people, most of them skinny and oblivious to how much I am physically struggling to exit the museum. The entrance was covered by, or perhaps accessed by, a gymnastics rope net that seemed to remind me of vacation bible school. It was supposed to be a fun playground entryway, but instead, because my body is so drained and I’m so exhausted, it was like a prison. A college kid helped to boost me up into the narrow entryway near the top in the rope net by holding his hands together and allowing me to step up on them, and I made it half-way out and then he left me on my own. A man supervising the college kids started praising the college kid because he had taken a picture of him while he was helping me up, and was telling the kid how this would positively impact his status professionally. Enthusiastically and encouragingly, he remarked “Your program is going to blow up, it’s going to blow. Up.” I dragged myself the rest of the way out of the entryway and started looking around for a bench to sit on, as I wanted to find somewhere to rest desperately.

    Everything shifts, and things are very wrong.

    I’m immediately aware that I’m fully awake, but still dreaming. Fully aware, but trapped. I feel what feels like the most fear and terror it feels possible for my brain to generate. The area of my mind where the great, horrible, evil to end all evils is contained opens. I see geometric patterns and flashing of fractals, of portions of objects and memories cut up and stitched together, glitching together. I hear this terrible ringing in my head and I know that it is sentient. I hear it audibly, and I know for a fact that I’m hearing it outside of me. But I know I’m inside myself, I’m just completely cut off from the sensory inputs currently, at least in the way that I have access to them in ordinary waking life. (This is the first instance I experience of the ringing.) I have a very clear sense of my spatial orientation inside of the impossible non-euclidean architecture, inside myself. I experience the sensation that something is very wrong. I shouldn’t be here. The I that I am, shouldn’t be where the “I” that I am is. I shouldn’t be awake in this place. I’m fully inside myself psychologically, and trapped. I experience a knowing that the evil ringing is hunting me, and it is an entity. It is open. The thing that contains the entity is open, but it is also the concept of opening itself, or perhaps it creates the concept of opening. It is familiar. I know this entity. It lives with me when I am awake; it lives inside my brain. I have a brief thought of utter despair, thinking “no, no, this was supposed to happen with someone else, not while I’m alone” (referring to the accessing of this content). I see the inside of my apartment cut into pieces and shifted together and glitched and incomprehensible, and I can’t understand why it is the way it is, and it’s so horrific, the word bad echoes over and over again, it has the sensation of “bad bad bad bad bad bad evil bad dying”, and the visuals are shifting through various types of illustration styles and semi-reality wrongness. It feels as though I can see the chaos static noise of individual atoms.

    I’m in the basement in Akron, Ohio. The evil is contained in the basement, and it’s burrowing in the floor coming to get me. The evil is an entity that lives with me in my brain. It’s a virus, but I know that it’s not death or the grim reaper or anything personified, it has a personality, but it’s not a person, and it is pure evil, and it makes everything incredibly wrong, and imbued with the essence of wrongness. I can see so much, and it is wrong for me to be able to see so much. I know exactly how it all works, I know exactly how I work, and I can see it all. I know that I am inside of myself, I can’t feel the outside of my body, but I am the same as I am when I’m awake. I know again that I shouldn’t be here, that something has gone terribly wrong in my brain and I’m not supposed to be conscious right now. All of this happens at once. I can see all the textures, and it hurts so horrifically badly, television static, incomprehensibly.

    I know that in order to survive, I need to get out. I am looking for an exit, but I send a probe of intention to trace the entity in the background, in order to see what I can learn about it later. The feeling is that of reality-endingness, not just death, but dread of the end of reality. At the same time, it feels as though I’m being hunted by reality, and that I can see patterns and static and chaos and spirals that are always present, but not acknowledged or seen when I am awake. I’m trying to figure out how to jerk myself out of sleep because I need to get out or it’ll hurt me permanently. I think about how to get out, and think “grounding”, “grounding exercises”, I look around and see various brain-breaking textures, I think “I need to find a texture, real life, grounding”, and then (physically, my non-dream body) I’m able to jerk my feet against each other and focus on the feeling of the texture of my skin against the blanket in the real world, outside of me. I follow the sensation through what feels like wire-tunnels out of my brain so that I can wake up, and I do. When I wake up, I’m not psychologically “waking up” as I was already awake, but I am physically waking up. I “shift” out of the physical trapped state, and the dreaming and horror and static overlaid on top of everything starts to fade. I feel sick, my head hurts very badly, and I feel as though I have been left with a map to where the evil lives. I try to calm myself and understand the experience. It feels like the entity exposed itself to come attack me, but in doing so it left an opening for me to trace it, letting me know where it lives. I know that it’s still there, and I know that the knowledge that it’s there will persist. It feels as though it wants power. It strikes me that I didn’t understand how non-humanoid of an entity it is, that I thought it was more of a person before. I am left feeling unsafe and with the sense that I need to remain still so that I won’t be seen, and have a thought that if I pretend that I do not exist and don’t move, then perhaps I won’t die. My head hurts very bad, and I feel extremely nauseous.

  • 07.24.25

    I wake up. I’m laying in bed. I’m arising from a dream, but I fully reach consciousness and it’s as though I’m reviewing the dream, in remembering it. The dream, what I remember of it, is as follows.

    I am at a potluck-style buffet, made out of several neighbors within a neighborhood. It has echoes of being a church-style buffet, an after-church event, where everyone is bringing food on offer. I feel very isolated from the individuals who have brought food, as I haven’t brought food. I remember vaguely that my mother has brought food, and perhaps I am allowed attendance by proxy of her fulfilling our obligatory duties. Maybe it is some kind of baked good, but I don’t know. I’m starving. I’m in awe at the odd, carnival-esque style of the buffet, the block-party style of it, and how elaborate it is, and the sheer amount of food present. I walk through various different rooms, and take a look in advance at some of the food. I find the surroundings and presentation odd, and notice we’re in an enclosed, simplified kind of area, with a central hallway opening into different rooms which belong to different families, but a faint dark pinkish sort of hue, but the walls are different colors, and there is an intuitive sense of the layout, but it seems almost stylized, like a video game. Some of the rooms open into balconies or backyards, it resembles an apartment complex. There are machines present to help prepare the food, and long tables that hold all of the dishes. There is a machine in one room that seems to be for warming up or sanitizing bread/buns before you serve yourself hot dogs and hamburgers, which someone points out to me (perhaps my mother?) are being served on one of the balconies. I can’t figure out how to make the machine work. I put two hotdog buns and one hamburger bun in the machine, it’s lined with parchment paper and works by blowing air through it, but I can’t figure it out and at some point I awkwardly abandon them and move to the central table, grabbing a plate. Again, I am starving, but as I move past all of the food, each one seems unappealing and difficult and I don’t want to take any, while others in line are taking food ahead and behind me. I pass some dishes and then come to an aluminum tray where on the left side there are triangular slices of grilled pineapple, and on the right side there are slices of a grilled fruit I have never seen before. It’s shaped in a symmetric embellished swooping pattern, like a type of bulb perhaps with small spirals and gaps between the internals (like a fence or lattice) and near where the stem would have been it was brownish green, but the rest of the fruit was a vibrant iridescent blue, like a shining butterfly’s wings, and a deep oil slick magenta at the same time. It was blue on top, but the magenta was held within it. I picked up a slice with metal tongs and tilted it back and forth in wonder, asking the person behind me what it was. They gave me an answer, something that mentioned how it was a type of exotic fruit, but in a commonplace tone, and I don’t remember what it was called. I continue down the buffet and am not able to find anything that I want to eat.

    I wake up, remember the dream, and continue lying in bed. A very loud, harsh ringing noise starts, located on the left side of my brain, almost to the left and towards the back of my brain, spatially, and “takes over” becoming located in the very middle and center of where I am experiencing. The ringing is similar to the tone of tinnitus but different, and carries with it a harshness, and a type of buzzing, or perhaps an essence of friction and sandpaper-ness, perhaps it could be called grating, but only in the sense that it feels like being pushed through a grate from the abrasion. It isn’t entirely unpleasant, but is very clearly so at the same time. It is not suffering, but rather feels like you are pushing yourself through a very small opening in a cave, and the claustrophobia of it causes a type of inability to breathe. This is perhaps the fifth or sixth time I have experienced this ringing, always upon waking up from (or from within) a dream. In this case, it feels as though I have been shrunken down very small, and I am placed near a large ringing object, which is attempting to broadcast a message. I also get a sense that it is a type of lifeline, that it is there to watch while I attempt things that may not be wise, but are certainly not unwise, as long as I am not, myself, unwise.

    I experience a recognition at the ringing, a flash of fear and trepidation, and a clarity at the presences that I am in the presence of. I move my body, trying to get a sense of whether or not I can, and I can’t remember if this resulted in genuinely moving my body or only feeling as though I have. I feel a large wall, one that seems to be made out of a type of permeable thing, a film over a large fluid membrane, and it feels as though the fear that I experience, and have experienced in much larger degrees of terror in previous encounters, is a fear of the wall being punctured. I remember the wall from previous experiences, it has been here and it is important that I don’t puncture it. But the importance of this seems less prominent than previously. I attend to the fear itself, turning to face the wall, and the wall is a person, but the wall is a feeling, and the feeling is guarding the wall, and I calm it, by moving into it and feeling calm. This is accomplished by sending a question, a “why are you scared?” And moving myself into the place where the fear is and understanding it. Then something feels to “click” or “change” and I feel that I am in a different realm, as if I was on the threshold before, figuring out how to enter, and that now I have entered. I experience myself as opening my eyes, and I am in my apartment, though I also know that I am motionless “in the real world”. I hear whispering, as though the people whispering are impressed that I made it here, and I feel as though this must be what people experiencing drugs feel. I can see very clear and exaggerated after-burn effects visually, and I wave my hand, covered by my blanket, in front of my face and marvel at the trail of images that hover in the air. I am looking around and I glance upwards at the ceiling. There are waves of patterns and movements dancing across the ceiling, and moving back and forth. I see faces in diagonal patterns in the movements, and the one that catches my eye is a woman with her light brown wispy hair in a bun, regency-style aesthetically, with a pink dress collar and the essence of pearls, in profile, looking to the right. I’m interested in her, and I experience a desire to find more people, to hear more things, to stay in this space for longer. Suddenly my attention is drawn back to the ringing, and I am exhausted, and I think to myself “I’ve got to get out of here” and it feels as though my time in this place is up, but that I’ve succeeded in accomplishing something important in being able to make my way here. I wake up truly, and sit up, looking around me, and experience a distinct physical exhaustion in my brain. It is accompanied by some pain, though not a significant amount, perhaps the pain of overexertion, but not cramping or misuse, after a day of hiking.