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Share the Monsters!
Jeremy left an excellent comment on the I See Monsters post (which itself has grown to excellent and enormous proportions):
something that strikes me from reading this account is how many people must have these experiences! we’re taught to consider them strange or unusual or weird, but it seems like everyone has experienced something like this at least once or twice. it’s not really unusual at all! i mean, the experiences themselves might be strange, but it’s not that strange to have them. people are just trained not to share them.
This is exactly why I wanted to talk about it, to show people it’s not weird, and that even people who are intelligent and totally “with it” have all kinds of strange experiences and encounters. We’re trained (by media, by who?) to believe that only crackpots and complete nutcases have these kinds of things happen to them. But that’s not the case. Those are just the people who aren’t afraid to talk about it. What if all of us “normals” who experience(d) weird stuff could just be honest and open about these things with everybody? What if we could have conversations with complete strangers in coffeeshops and super-markets about this stuff? We could share those awesome moments of relief and recognition where we exclaim “Oh my god! You too?!”
None of us are alone. We’re just convinced that we are.
I don’t usually give out homework, per se, but what if we try an experiment. What if each one of us in the coming week tried to start open, honest and non-critical conversations with regular people, friends and even strangers about our weird experiences. Remember though, it’s going to require you keep an open mind, and give people the benefit of the doubt. In my experience, everyone wants to talk about this stuff, but you usually need to be gentle with them. And they will back off quickly at the slightest sign of criticism or judgement. Are you up to it? Let’s meet back here and discuss our findings over the next few days.
Class dismissed!
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- Next: Jews & Freemasons Unite!
September 14th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
i take exception at being called a “normal.”
September 14th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
That’s why I put it in “quotes”
September 14th, 2005 at 1:29 pm
I’m normal.
September 14th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
I’m a bobbie, so screw you pinks.
September 14th, 2005 at 2:38 pm
I attended a wedding over the weekend, and in attendance were several relatives, whom I either hadn’t met or whom I hadnt seen in years. A spontaneous party erupted at one of the rellie’s homes. As often happens in these sort of affairs different cliques developed and somehow I started discussing thoughtforms and manifestation of intention, and other esoteric topics, and as we discussed, you could see some people shutting down, yet as soon as one left another person appeared in their place to affirm our discussions. The most surprising of which was my nephew, a Conservative republican, with a family background fundamentalist christianity started talking about lucid dreaming and his experiences, and how he was glad to find out he wasnt weird or insane.
As the evening wore on more and more people opened up to sharing their experiences and you could definitely feel the vibration and consciousness of the group rise, as more intelligent discussion emerged, we lost interest how peoples explanations of these paranormal events differed and found a common ground not in the semantics of the discussion but in the sharing of our human experience.
September 14th, 2005 at 3:12 pm
the best way to get folks to talk about this stuff is to start by sharing one of your own experiences first. then it usually cascades as people start listening in and telling their stories.
oh, and it helps if there’s lots of booze flowing. that always helps.
September 14th, 2005 at 4:41 pm
speaking of monsters, you can buy an authentic mermaid’s head on ebay!
http://tinyurl.com/bseuj
check it out, it’s pretty rad, actually.
September 14th, 2005 at 4:56 pm
I was in an office and brought up the topic of alien abductions as a joke, right, haha. Someone mentioned it being tied to sleep paralysis and I said something about that and then the entire office cascaded into a veritable “Unsolved Mysteries”…
No, they just looked at me like I was crazy. Not a sympathetic soul in sight. Hell, one of them had even been to Burning Man. “None of you have every woke up and not been able to move, or forgetten where you were? Had night terrors?” “Nope.” “What are you talking about?” “Do you take… Drugs?” Now, it may be that I tend to work with people who have an above-average investment in maintaining the status quo, moving on up, that type of thing. Back when I worked in maintenance my coworkers and I had much freer reign over what I could and couldn’t say without stepping on toes.
Maybe my saturnine nature draws me places and situations like this.
September 14th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
When you’re talking to people in a firsthand situation like this office thing, they can be extremely skittish. Nobody wants to be the odd man out. I like what JP said about the best way to do it is simply just to share yours, and give people permission, but not make demands of them to share as well. Maybe they won’t say it right then in front of everybody, but if they know you’re cool with that stuff, they might approach you privately and really open up. I’ve had some really amazing interchanges that way.
September 14th, 2005 at 5:26 pm
don’t forget the booze!
parties are the best place to have these conversations. after a while, i might even drag out the ol’ tarot cards or play some yes/no spirit or some such other parlour game, pull some actual spooky stuff on people.
September 14th, 2005 at 5:46 pm
Yeah, EVERYBODY likes being a little spooked out. I guess it’s probably all about “set and setting” like they say with drug trips. You have to go into it in the appropriate frame of mind, and provide a safe atmosphere - in the “trust tree, in the nest” to quote Old School.
September 14th, 2005 at 7:04 pm
now here’s a good question: on at least five occasions, my encounters with entities have been shared with other individuals and independently verified. other folks were present who described seeing/experiencing the same things i did. did anyone else ever have shared experiences like this, or were your experiences individual/when you were alone?
September 14th, 2005 at 9:48 pm
More wierd stuff from John Keel’s The Eighth Tower:
“(A window area is a geographical location where unusual events have occurrred over and over again, century after century.) Ufologists try to explain the flap phenomenon by pointng out that it takes a long time for the spaceships to go back and forth from their home planet. Occultists nourish a more complicated belief- that the earth passes through zones in space inhaited by terrible spiritual beings. Each time we enter such a zone, the beings ooze through holes in our “etheric envelople” these holes being located in what I call window areas.”
Jeremy - remember what I was talking about in the last post about how perhaps indiviudals provide the visible “face” of these entities, and that otherwise they are mindless? Keel was saying that it’s possible that people who were more psychically dominant in a group situation will be the ones to give the face to these entities, and they’ll consciously/unconsciously spread that image to the rest of the group. Thought that was interesting…or maybe a copout.
There are a couple of things I haven’t gotten time to write about on my blog: This weekend a friend told me about his issues with manic-depression, and that there was a period that he would go through these hallucinations. One time he was supposed to go out to dinner with his girlfriend but he decided to go home instead (he was feeling ill). I guess she showed up later that night banging on the door and insisting that he let her in, but he didn’t open the door because her voice didn’t sound right. He didn’t know if he was hallucinating again or what, but she kept wandering around the house banging on windows and walls for what he said was 12hours.
Later, he talked to her and she said that she hadn’t felt like herself and had actually gone down to the hardware store to get an axe and chop down the door. He still doesn’t know what happened and if she was possessed or if he had just worked up his mind, but he dumped her either way.
Also: my roommate has had seven dreams in a row involving this little girl that scratches his arms. He says that it is the scariest thing he has ever had to go through, and that he lays in bed not wanting to fall asleep. Each dream has been building, and providing more information - he says he now knows what city this entity is calling him from. This weekend he plans on heading up to Lake City and driving around to see if he can spot the house he’s been dreaming about.
He says when he wakes up in the morning his arms are not scratched but they still tingle.
I told my mom this and she said that she thinks it’s a daughter he is supposed to concieve, but that’s not going to happen since he KEEPS HIS SNIPPED TUBES IN A JAR BY HIS BED! Don’t worry, I already recommended that he discard these fallen soldiers.
Garrett
September 15th, 2005 at 12:40 am
Hey Jeremy- absolutely, yes. The first is phenomena in Solano county, these things we call sprites that flit around the trees, I have taken many people to see them and nobody has failed to spot them. There have been others, but this one phenomena has been so reliable it’s the best example. Another would be a spot in Vacaville where a few leylines (It’s a friend who dowses, I’m not well versed in the mechanics of it all) supposedly cross; one can sit out at night and see figures ‘crossing’ all night long- so thick we used to joke that it was the ‘astral freeway.’
September 15th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
haeresis: oh yeah, dowsing is an awesome tool for looking for spooks. my friends and i in st. augustine once dowsed the entire ley-line pattern in town, and the heavy intersections were always full of activity. there was one graveyard in particular, the tolomato cemetary, that was FULL of activity:
http://www.myfloridatrips.com/st_augustine/tolomato.html
this was long before the ghost tours became popular, and it was far more run-down when we’d sit outside and just watch these wispy entities lurching around above the graves.
September 15th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
[…] lly inspired yesterday, I thought I’d promote one of Jeremy’s comments from my Share the Monsters! post: now here’s a good question: on at least five occasi […]