Visions of other realities

Back in mid-February 2006, I was pretty exhausted and I lay down to sleep for a while. As soon as I closed my eyes, I could see an array of tiny bright shards, all about the same size but in different orientations. They all seemed to be about the same distance from me, and formed a wall that extended an indefinite distance up and to the sides. The bottom had a definite boundary, though. On the lower part of the wall of shards, a blurred line ran across, and below the line was blankness, apparently at a somewhat greater distance. If I remember correctly, I opened my eyes and then closed them again, perhaps more than once, and each time I closed them the vision of the shards came back.


Some hours later, or perhaps the next day, I woke up from a dream (I think that this had been a separate sleep period from the one just mentioned). I closed my eyes again and could immediately see a scene, but it was not from the dream that I had just been having.

In this scene, this vision, another reality seemed to be overlaid onto this one. Everything was dim and half-seen.

Close by, a strange plant, perhaps a couple of feet high, had a very large, multicolored, clothlike leaf that had a slight outward curvature. Large waves, caused by the breeze, slowly moved across it.

In the distance, I could see tall, thin, strange-looking buildings, like part of a city. Not far away were lower buildings with wide paved areas and large planters with vegetation, like some kind of plaza. This apparently extended to, and past, where I was.

In the middle distance, some people were standing apart and talking. Their voices were somewhat distant and distorted, and sounded like they were slightly speeded up. I couldn't understand what was being said.

As before, I think I opened my eyes and closed them a few times, and each time the scene came back. It seemed to be very realistic, although only partly there, like looking at a badly faded picture.

Dream - A warning from a future self

I had a dream in late 2005 in which I was overlayed by a future version of myself, along with some other entities who were along for the ride. The future self may have been me in this life, or me in a future life, or perhaps something else. I don't think it was actually from later in this life, though, because the reason I was given for his coming was that he was there to experience a significant and negative event that was going to occur in my life and that he and the others were there to witness it. That's the long version. What actually happened was that the knowledge and timing of the event were given to me, along with knowledge of who he was and what his and the other's purpose was, just as a knowing, a feeling. I could also feel it as his spirit came down over me, and I could feel the others watching.

In the dream, I was working on the front yard late at night, in the dark. The negative event mentioned above would occur when I went to a vary dark area of the side yard on the left (east) side of the house, near where the back fence begins, and work on a tall bush (or short tree) with lots of skinny narrow branches (in real life, no such plant is there). I believe the event was supposed to occur at 1:45 AM, or something like that (it's been a long time since the dream). The nature of the negative event was given to me, but I'd rather not state it here. You can use your imagination.

The event in question never occurred, at least not yet. Forewarned is forearmed. I hope.

The palms of my hands

I have very few lines on my hands, and none form an M. The lines on my left hand extend greater distances than those on my right, but the pattern on both is similar. Basically, I have a line that runs across and then a shorter line under that. From near the beginning of the shorter line another line branches off and curves downward. At the end of the shorter line, near the upper center of the palm, another line or two curves downward, but these are very faint.

I have a small white scar on the palm of my right hand that I got from pushing on the broken end of a shovel handle decades ago. The dull point of the wood damaged the flesh of my hand, even through the heavy rubber of the glove. On the left hand, on the edge near where the thumb would rest if it was laid against the edge of the hand, I have two small scars, nearly invisible now, from a time even longer ago, from a cactus needle that became embedded under the skin and then infected (for months).

I am right handed, but when I was very young this was less certain. The teacher told my mother that I seemed to use either hand, and recommended that I be trained to use the right hand to avoid problems later on.

Dream - The mall under the ground

Around the end of April 2005, I had a dream in which I was in New York City, on the edge of it, but it wasn't like the real New York at all.

In the dream, the city was very small and constructed mainly of metal, though the metal was mostly painted or otherwise coated, and various other materials, perhaps cardboard or plasterboard, were also used.

In the dream, my mother had wanted to go shopping there, complaining that she seldom got out. I left her in a large store that looked like part of a mall (actually, the whole city seemed to be one big mall), and wandered around the outside of the city. Someone was with me initially, but I don't know who.

Outside, it was uneven ground, with various businesses here and there. They seemed to be laid out in lines, though there really wasn't a road. It was as though they followed along the wall of a cliff, or even the wall of a cavern or a tunnel.

I went into a large store and was looking around. The front of the store was entirely open. At the back, there was a notice, something printed on the wall, about something on the other side of the wall. Someone who was there, someone who was just looking around like me, wanted to try to get to it.

Getting to it meant going through the wall, and I was a little suspicious of this. He went ahead, though, and I watched him fade through the wall.

I decided, then, to try it myself.

On the other side of the wall was a corridor, like a wide hallway, but of varying widths. The floor was not level, but was straight in sections, like sections of flooring laid over uneven and somewhat tilted ground. The edges of the floor, while also straight in short sections, moved in and out like it was following an irregular and somewhat curving tunnel. The floor had an industrial look, being constructed out of what looked like long strips of tire rubber, set into panels. Along the sides of the hall were various small businesses, constructed mostly of metal.

There were a few people walking around, but it wasn't crowded. I walked along the hall, which had a mild downward trend. Eventually, I got to a big open area. It had a large sunken arena off to one side. There were a few people in it, but it seemed to be a time when it wasn't being used for an event.

There were some nearby tables, where people ate food that they bought from the nearby businesses. At one of the tables I found my father and at least part of his family (he divorced and remarried a couple of decades ago), though some of the people with him I didn't know. He looked much thinner than when I saw him last, and he had not shaved for what looked to be a couple of weeks. I talked with him a while and then moved on.

As I walked, the hall became much wider and took on a more conventional look. It also became very crowded. Eventually, I came to the end of it. Two broad escalators were there, one taking people to the surface, where presumably the shopping continued, and the other bringing people down. The hall ended a little ways past the escalators, in kind of a rough, rounded look, but offshoots went to either side.

I went to the right, into a much smaller hallway. and eventually into a short offshoot of that. I went into a business or two and they seemed to be fairly conventional, like convenience stores or drug stores, with heavy concentrations of touristy stuff.

I went back, then, and went into one of the offshoots on the other side of the escalators. There was a small eating place there, along the hallway, with a small counter and stools. A few people were there, and at the far end a small man wearing a brown striped suit and hat sat, slouched over.

One of the people standing by me remarked about the man wearing the suit, that it was out of place because the man was a maintenance worker for the complex. I looked again, but he wasn't wearing the suit anymore, and had gained some weight. He now had on a t-shirt and probably gray workpants. He was sitting down but he was turned sideways to the counter and was leaning over backwards, with his upper body embedded in the wall.

He seemed to be doing some type of maintenance, but I also felt that he was showing me how to get behind the wall. I felt that there was something behind the wall, some other rooms. Small rooms that led off in a series, gradually but swiftly climbing. I could see them dimly in my mind.

The metal wall into which he was embedded had some kind of structure visible, like the panels were stressed and slightly out of place, although I felt that he was somehow faded into the wall as well as going through some secret opening in it.

He somehow emerged from the wall, then, and was sitting up. A small device started to slowly fade in attached to the wall on the left side of him, a short section of wall before the counter started.

I watched the device slowly fade into view, and then I woke up.

My first cars

My first car was a 1955 Cadillac 4-door sedan with a light tan body and a reddish brown roof. It had a forward pointing hood ornament that was a streamlined person, and its front bumper had two huge protrusions on either side of the grill, like rocket nose cones, pointing straight out. On the back, it had stubby fins with wraparound tail lights. This was probably back in 1970 or 1971, and it was a car my father had been using for business. It was kind of an informal gift, and he still ended up using it for business sometimes.

The car was very tall and had a musty smell inside. When driving down the road, sometimes it seemed to bob on all four corners, and it felt very isolated. It felt very stable on dirt roads, though, even when driven fast. It had a bad quirk, in that it sometimes died when idling when the engine was only partially warmed up. The engine ran so quietly, though, that it was difficult to tell when it died, and I sometimes ended up trying to pull into traffic with the engine dead.

An interesting feature was the gas cap hidden under the driver's side tail light. To access the gas cap, you had to push in the small round reflector under the tail light. The tail light would then pop up on a hinge, revealing the gas cap. I remember one young man at a gas station who was going to put gas in the car (this was before self-serve was common) who looked up and down both sides of the car, along the back, behind the license plate, and everywhere he could think of before finally giving up and asking where it was. I got out and demonstrated for him.

I only had that car for a year or two, though it stayed in the family for a long time. It finally ended up sitting for a long time in the carport of my grandmother's house. She didn't mind, because it looked more like someone was home if a car was there. The mailman got in the habit, though, of scraping his bicycle against the car when he delivered the mail, and over time he left a huge scraped area along the side of the car. When my father found out he was really mad, and got the post office to pay for fixing it, though I don't remember now if the money was ever used for that purpose.

I got my next car, and the first one that was really mine, in 1972 or thereabouts. My father knew someone who was trying to sell a 1964 Cadillac Coupe DeVille with a light blue body and white top, and I ended up buying it. It had an internal combustion leak, and had to have water added to the radiator every week or so, sometimes sooner. We eventually put new head gaskets on it, but not for several months, maybe longer.

I really liked the design of the '69 and '70 models, though. They were still fairly new at the time, and I figured it would be quite a while before I could afford one. Then, late in the summer of 1973, my father took me to the local Cadillac dealer to look over what they had. I didn't intend to buy anything, just look.

The used car section had a lot of bright, shiny cars of various colors and ages (though all were fairly new). None of them seemed to be quite right, though, being either the wrong color or wrong model or wrong year. They were all kind of expensive, too, probably being somewhere around $4500 to $5000 even for a 1970 model (new Cadillacs at the time probably went for $8000 or $9000 or so).

My eye kept being drawn back to one car parked at the back, a 1970 Sedan DeVille with gold paint and a white vinyl roof. Unlike the other cars, its paint was already a little faded in some areas, and it didn't seem to have any information posted on it. I wasn't sure if they were trying to sell it or if someone had parked there.

My father went and checked, and they told him that they had just taken the car in and hadn't checked it out yet. They were wanting a little less than $4000 for it, but my father managed to get them down to $3350 or something like that. Thinking back on it, besides them having not checked the car out, the already fading paint and the relatively high mileage (almost 40,000) may also have factored into them lowering the price that much.

I bought the car that night. It was a car I ended up keeping for a long time.