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Something From 07

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Graphimancer

Skilled Investigator
On August 9th through 12th, I attended Wizard World Chicago, a large comic and pop culture convention held every year at the Donald E Stephen’s Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois, on the edge of the Chicago O’Hare International Airport. It was Friday evening, after the second day of the show, and first full day of the show, and I was in my 6th floor room at the Embassy Suites across the street.

I’m a large, middle-aged man with severe sleep apnea, so I sleep alone and wear a breathing apparatus attached by a hose to a Respironics CPAP machine. This was nothing new, and I had been assisted by this machine for two-and-a-half years at this point. Even with the room’s air conditioner turned to max, it was still uncomfortably warm for me, and I slept with only a sheet over me.

At approximately 2:00 a.m., after having been asleep for at least four hours, I awoke to witness three beings standing by the edge of my bed. My first impression was that these people (?) were literally downloading information into me.

For whatever reason, I was neither alarmed nor puzzled. I don’t know if I suffered from sleep paralysis or not, because I made no attempt to move. I can’t say if it was because I didn’t want to upset the process, or what, but I was calm and at peace with what was happening.

The beings were somewhat indistinct. They were, I believe, physical, or perhaps very realized on an astral level. They were all three identical, in white garments that lacked seams or folds. Either they were nearly human sized, or they floated high enough off the floor to appear human height. I could not see their hands from my vantage, which were at their sides. The oddest thing about them was that their heads far outsized their bodies, or, more likely, the radiance/aura they emitted did, and the light of their heads hid their actual features away. It was as if they had large light bulbs for heads.

For an indeterminate amount of time, I observed these three. I knew there was an exchange or downloading of information going on, but what it was I didn’t know. Unconcerned, I drifted back to sleep.

The next morning, I awoke with a crystal clear memory of what had transpired, and the memory became set as something of a signpost in my mind. I didn’t tell anyone about it for weeks, and I didn’t want to. To be honest with myself, I almost felt lucky to have been treated to this.
If you came to the conclusion that perhaps I had had a particularly vivid lucid dream, I wouldn’t blame you. Nor could I categorically deny it. I’ve had many lucid dreams over the years, as have most people, but this felt completely different. Perhaps you might say that what I encountered was founded not in our four-dimensional consensual reality, but in some subjective reality of my own. Again, maybe. There were no physical trace effects in the room or on my body that I could see, and absolutely no evidence that anyone or any entity had made an outside entry through the rooms sealed windows. Consequently, despite these people’s feeling of mass and physical presence, I can only think that they were astral, or materialized there, or some such.

Am I particularly reliable witness? As far as I’m concerned, yes: I’m educated, traveled, and reasonably well respected. But, as a cartoonist and writer, I make a meager living off my imagination, and I’ve been on anti-depression meds for decades. I doubt that makes me an unimpeachable witness.

At first I felt that this was some sort of astral initiation rite, that perhaps the so-called Secret Chiefs of 19th century occultism had singled me out for some sort of elevation. Later, I became concerned that these people were aliens, and perhaps I had been abducted. I’m glad to say that I don’t believe the latter is the case. There was nothing ‘alien’ or ominous about these three, and I don’t believe I was taken from my room or marked, tagged, etc., in any way.

In any case, despite the singular nature of this encounter for me, I suppose it could have been written off as some sort of bizarre dream state if nothing else happened. Things did happen, though, and this event led into a particular odd period of my life laced with high strangeness. I’ll cover that in another post to this thread. I’ll also post a drawing I made of this event.
 
Please do, Graphimancer. So far, I think your experience is one I need to hear because my spouse seems to have had similar experiences. They don't fit abduction stories, but they involve entities common to them.

I'm also very curious about the strangeness you encountered afterward.
 
Sorry this is so dang long. I tried to cut it down to the most relevent stuff.

In the six months that followed what I now refer to as a Transformative Event, a great deal of change and synchronicity entered my life. While I wouldn’t call any of this High Strangeness, it was still all quite strange for me.

As soon as I got home from Chicago, I began to fill a journal book with ideas. Information was cascading in at me from every direction, and I made a point of trying to get my thoughts down. I had always been interested in cosmology, but now I was being assaulted by rather complete and coherent ideas about consciousness, reality, space and time, psychic ability, and magic. As I filled page after page of my notebook, I kept suddenly coming across interesting idea synchronicities, where I discovered that lead thinkers in their fields were coming up concepts similar to what I had written down.

I won’t bore you with what my ideas consisted of. I also will make it clear that I am not trying to put myself on a level with the great thinkers of our time when they arrived at similar conclusions. I won’t even claim that that I haven’t come across some of these ideas in singular forms in my past readings, conveniently storing them away in my subconscious. I will say, however, that all these ideas had reached a critical mass, assumed a coherent and workable form, and piled into my mental queue waiting to be written out. Where these ideas part of the "download" I had experienced in that hotel room? I believe so.

One the earliest and most unnerving changes I experienced was a massive increase in empathy for other people. It was extremely uncomfortable, because it seemed as if I had lost the interpersonal barriers between me and other people. All the tension, frustration, joy, and exhaustion of other people were now mine too, and I couldn’t shield it out. Group dynamics affected me directly, and people grew more and more uncomfortable for me to be around. I had to stop listening to news radio, because I could no longer separate myself from the anxiety of the times.

Every Sunday, I go to Open Studio at the local Art Center. There, I draw models and work on my art skills. I almost had to quit, and came very close to doing so, because I suddenly started drawing in the style of whatever artist I sat next to, and this without actually looking at the artist’s work. When people with mental illness sat near me, as happened all too often, my work would become abstract, troubled, and "off." I usually had to excuse myself and leave early.

This empathy-run-amok also made me aware of energy present in different environments, and different flows of energy in the land, buildings, and the like. Sometimes places would make me light-headed, sometimes I would avoid locations for this reason alone. Too much energy in the air, such as an entity might generate, or an oncoming thunderstorm, would make me feel as if I thrown my brain in the rinse cycle.

I’m part Scottish, and part Irish, with a pinch of German thrown in, so the Second Sight is nothing new to me, really. Still, to get a handle on what was happening to me, I took up meditation with real determination. I discovered that I was actually pretty good at it, and that I could reinforce my personal shields and regulate my own energy to a degree. Nowadays I don’t practice meditation as often as I should, but it really helped me wall myself off from unwanted psychic bleed-over and intrusion.

The strange psychic effects of my transformative experience didn’t end at empathy. On two separate occasions I experienced unwanted out-of-body experiences. The first time, for example, my wife and I were in a Super Target in Noblesville, Indiana, and I tried to look over a shelf of goods and see beyond. In a moment of disorientation, my vantage point rose several feet above my head, and I could easily see what lied beyond that shelf and well beyond. This scared me, to be honest.

I’ve never been someone who can see auras, and I didn’t get that ability, per se’, but something similar did happen. I started to see people in an alternate, sort of symbolic way. One friend appeared to me as a cloud of unruly bees, wildly buzzing all over, the cloud of bees supporting his clothes as he threatened to disperse. Another person I know with deep-seated psychological problems I saw as sort of a layer-cake human, but with all the layers un-aligned, and some big parts missing. Another person I know and see too often I perceived as an ‘alien’ or non-human of some sort, someone who walks among us disguised as a person. I’m not claiming that this person is not physically human, yet I’ve also come to trust my perceptions in most of these matters.

In the early days of this transformation, I experienced several instances of random telepathy while at restaurants or in crowds. These often came through as voices, sounding like the people they originated from, but heard only by me. I never bothered anyone to confirm what I heard, and I was happy when this effect faded away. Maybe my strengthened psychic shields filtered these out.

During this time, my freelance art career took a sharp swing upwards, and I made more money and did more projects in that time than I have ever done during a comparable period. I also developed a spontaneous interest in the paranormal. I had always been interested in magic, but I had not believed in UFOs, and I had little patience for what I considered New Age thought. Yet, within a few weeks’ time, I was listening to the Paracast, the Paranormal Café, and about six other paranormal based blogcasts. My reading came to consist solely of paranormal subjects, and I attacked my knowledge deficit with passion, moving up the steep side of the paranormal knowledge bell curve rapidly.

Now, almost a year after this transformational event, my life has returned to more or less normal.
 
Graphimancer wrote:
"...as a cartoonist and writer, I make a meager living off my imagination, and I’ve been on anti-depression meds for decades."

and "I’m part Scottish"



Just so you know - This sounds a lot like me!
 
Interesting similarities, Mike.

I don't know the basis of 6th sense, other than that Celts are known for it. I guess I just figure that the Celts, much like American Indians, were somehow more in tune with the mystic and the unseen.

As far as cartooning goes, I do all types, but I tend toward the more realistic superhero styles of 70s (as drawn by Gil Kane, John Buscema, and Neal Adams). (It was Neal Adam's interview on the Paracast that first led me to this show, as a matter of fact.)
 
I'm not even sure a suggestion is relevant, Graphimancer, but you might enjoy reading Psychic Sexuality by Ingo Swann, another artist and former SRI remote viewer. Your last post made me think of the book. Could just be me making an insignificant connection so I almost find myself apologizing for the suggestion. That's high strangeness for me.

Thanks for sharing with us.
 
Hey, Mike--Absolutely awesome stuff.

You can see what I'm up to at www.johnnysaturn.com, and the new graphic novel is available there and at Amazon.com. You can see my non-cartoon stuff done for other customers at www.scottstoryillustrator.com.

My wife is buddy with Sergio Aragones. They both knit, and talk fiber stuff. Sergio wouldn't know me from a hole in the wall, but he likes my wife. They catch up at conventions we do and share notes there.
 
Fantastic image, I love the cartoon poster. I actually produce cartoons myself as part of my illustration work :)

Bit worried about Jeff R though...... he needs to go out and catch some sun I think ;)

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This marker sketch fits my memories of the evening pretty closely. My view was not 3rd person omnescent, of course: that's just for making scene clearer.
 
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