You Thinking What I'm Thinking?

Okay, this one I'm going to need to provide a little bit of history, some backstory, to fill you in on what exactly I've learned about myself and something I've learned that I am capable of. This is probably going to be met with a lot of skepticism, but considering everything I've experienced in my life up to this point, would it really be a big surprise if this indeed is what I think it is?  

For starters let's take you all the way back to the Mountaintop. I was still in high school, it was a weekend afternoon, I was in the kitchen dining room.  Mom was puttering about making the family meal, when this event occurred for the first time that I can recall. It was brief, I wasn't entirely sure that it had happened until I mulled it over later.  

Like I said I was sitting at the kitchen table reading something, Mom had the refrigerator door open, her head buried in there looking for something and for the briefest of moments I was going to ask her something but quickly decided against it. I distinctly recall thinking 'Mom?' But again I never actually vocalized it. And a moment later Mom popped her head out of the refrigerator and asked me, 'Que quieres, mijo?' What do you want, son? 

"No, nada, no dije nada." 'No, nothing, I didn't say anything.'  She paused for a second with a look of doubt but quickly went back to making lunch. I thought about it later and I was positive I hadn't actually called out to her, I just thought it and quickly changed my mind. That was as much thought I put into it at the time. But it happened again a few weeks later. Similar condition where she was in the kitchen and this time I was in my sister's room, which was right next to the kitchen. Her second bedroom door opened right into the kitchen, the door was open and I was in her room doing something, messing with her TV, I think and again, quickly was going to ask her something but changed my mind before I said anything. But once again, she 'heard' me and responded. This can't be a coincidence that I was thinking about asking her something and she happened to reply in that moment. 

It's happened quite often in the years since actually. It happened a LOT when I lived at the Bed & Breakfast with my ex when I was going to ask her something but didn't. And she replied anyway. 

Here's the part where some of you might start thinking about calling bullshit on this. And I wouldn't blame you. Except I've been doing it purposely more and more often. I can project my thoughts. Not always and not everyone is receptive to it but it has happened, and I've been practicing. It's also one of those things I hadn't ever talked about before because either you think I'm crazy thinking I can do that or you immediately become suspicious thinking I may have done it to you. Honest truth?  I might have. I practice it and obviously the receiver has to be either willing and open, in tune with me. Hence why my mom or girlfriend were open to reception.  Or sometimes entirely distracted that allows me a foot in the door, so to speak. 

The only time I've ever openly admitted this to someone else before was a girl I had met on a dating site. When I told her about it, she admitted that she felt a chill down her spine at the time. That wasn't me. But when we met up for our first date a few nights later, I may have suggested things progress more than she intended. Because she admitted that she let things go further than she meant to that first night. Then again, she invited me back over the next night with the intention that she wasn't going to let me leave until dawn. That, I didn't suggest and stayed the night anyway. 

So...  With all this out in the open, odds are some of you are starting to wonder if I've done anything to you, if it were possible. Let me be totally upfront about it...  I might have. 

Ladies, there MAY have been a moment where I happened to cross your mind at the most random time and you started imagining the two of us getting...  Involved. That may have been me thinking it, projecting it. Conversely, if you've had these thoughts about me and it WASN'T me, then that's all you and your dirty mind. Why haven't you called me? 😉🤣 

And to take things to an even more unbelievable level, remember I mentioned my ability of clairalience?  There's been a handful of times, especially late last year, early this year when one (or more) of you may have been thinking about me and taking care of business. Yes, I could pick up that scent from wherever you might have been. 

Now with all this out in the open, there may be a few of you blushing, some of you may even be pissed that I may have put those thoughts in your head, if it was me. And no doubt, a few of you are still thinking, 'bullshit!' You have to admit though, for a guy who's never actually done anything, I've been accused of a lot of stuff. Wonder why that is? 🤔

Only one way to find out though. Ask me. I'll be right upfront about it. If I did, I'll admit it to you. BUT realize that if I tell you I didn't, you're going to have to own up to the fact that you were thinking of me as more than... whatever we may be right now. 

Seaside Living

 The unexplainable events in my living situation seemed to have cooled off after I moved back to Orange County.  Both the Seaside Resort and the Bed & Breakfast didn't have too much activity going on.  Or if there was, it wasn't affecting me hardly at all.  

I will say that at the Seaside Resort, I had some really vivid dreams.  So much so that a few times I would wake up in a cold sweat and once I even called my brother to check on his well-being after what happened to him in my dreams.  Let's just say I had never dreamt about dragons before or since.  Yes, dragons, the whole medieval flying lizards, fire-breathing dragon was a thing in that dream.  

The Bed & Breakfast, one would almost assume it should have had some kind of activity based on its age and location.  But I already had enough drama going on with the living situation as it was for me to think about anything else.  And it had such a bizarre layout.  Like it was probably a large single-family home with a courtyard that previous owners at some point divided into a duplex.  So the bathrooms were in the center of the structure and despite there being a window in the bathroom, opening it you were looking at a small cubby with a vented skylight.  So the only natural light and ventilation in the bathrooms were indirect.  

But as I was saying, not a whole lot of activity going on at either of those locations.  Casa on the other hand, my current abode, well, every few weeks/months, I'll start to feel a creeping touch while I'm in bed.  Nothing like a full grabbing sensation but more like a caress.  A most inappropriate caress.  I have to call out to it to leave me alone, I'll center myself for a bit and then it's gone for another stretch of time before it starts over again weeks later.  

But it's also at these apartments when the baby universe dreams have become  more frequent.  If you're not familiar with the term I've been using, "Baby Universe," allow me to elaborate. 

I have these recurring dreams.  But not like most people who have the same dreams over and over.  The clown chasing you with an ax while you run away naked?  Nothing like that happens.  No, my recurring dreams are more inline with the same locations within my dreams.  I actually wrote a blog post about them a year ago so I'll just copy and paste that here to explain and maybe expand on the concept because a few of them have become more fleshed out in recent months.

1) The School - Despite visiting this universe countless times, I can't pin-point whether it's a high school or college.  Or if I'm even a student or working there.  I did work at the Community College for several years.  But it's also unlike any school I've ever attended myself.  There are hallways and classrooms I've been in.  Lecture halls or they could have been theaters used to lecture students in.  There's been flights of stairs and shop classes, an underground or lower level with rows of classes downstairs as well.  I have interacted with people in this space though.  But often as I'm giving them information, the others who are here rarely speak to me.

2) The Farm - The Farm location is always interesting when I drop in because it's the one I visit the least.  But it is definitely someplace out in the country.  There's an old-fashioned barn, pasture or field with crops.  Like wheat crops or something.  I don't recall seeing many animals outside of maybe a horse or mule, some livestock.  But there's never any people out at this site either.  

3) The Mansion -  This location is unusual in that, I've been only a few times and they were always very brief visits.  But what happens here has left me a funky state once I wake up out of it.  The Mansion is exactly that, some big home, not unlike you might see on the BBC or east-coast estates.  Big, dark wood paneling, heavy wooden railing along the stairs but most of the time, it's empty.  Just me, maybe one or two others, often strangers.  And then it's what happens in the Mansion that goes beyond the norm for even my dreams.  I've been able to become lucid in this Baby Universe.  I would come to realize that I'm in the middle of a dream and start to take it over.  I've gained the power of self-flight, which is the most bizarre feeling ever.  What would it be like to fly like a superhero?  I think I felt that within the Mansion.  I was playing around over the bannister and suddenly, I was floating, hovering.  I was only a couple of feet off the ground but within a few moments, I started to become lucid and then I really took over the dream and my flight ability.  And all I can recall from that is the sensation of falling.  In the Mansion, my ability to fly was making me feel as though I was just constantly falling.  A controlled fall, if you will.  But with forward, controlled motion.  That's about as best as I can describe the sensation.  Haven't been back there in a while but I wouldn't be against a return sometime.  

4) The Future World - This is always my most interesting destination and the one I've visited probably the second most.  I feel like I'm in some sort of megalopolis in the distant future.  Like how the 1920s imagined what the future would look like with endless high rises and high-speed rail lines crisscrossing between the buildings.  I've ridden on those subway-type vehicles a few times but there's also a high-speed foot transport, like a moving walkway you might see in an airport but at a much higher rate of speed and you have to step into these harnesses for your feet to hold you in place.  

5} Travel Town - I call this one Travel Town mostly because there's a depot or port (air or maritime) of some sort. I've flown to and from this airport, been in a plane that landed here or taken a bus to this terminal. I've been in the parking structure in cargo vans and limousines. I've taken off from here and landed at some amusement or water park in the Midwest. And I know it was the Midwest because of the grain silos. But the insides were ginormous and had water slides inside them. But again, there's a terminal or airport involved and I'm often coming or going. 

6) The Aquarium - Out of all the Baby Universes I've been to, the Aquarium is the one I've been to most often.  And while I call it an Aquarium, it could also be a water park like SeaWorld because in addition to the fish displays, there are aquatic shows with marine life.  I can practically draw a map of the Aquarium, I've been to it so often and the layout stays about the same every time.  There's always people there, either watching the shows or wandering around the hallways looking at the displays.  There's a show  room upstairs that I've never attended but I have been to the arena for the big show.  It wasn't a killer whale or even dolphin show, they were seals, or walruses. Once, there was an audience filing in and I took a seat next to dad one visit.  It was unusual in that, since he passed away, I've only dreamt of dad maybe 3 or 4 times but he was never in one of my Baby Universes.  And the funny thing is, while I sat next to him, I never once looked at him, didn't see his face at all.  I just knew it was him, that he was there.  I don't think we even spoke.  And with the way time works in a dream, we may have been sitting there for a few seconds to a few hours but afterwards, we just got up and kind of went our separate ways in the dream.  

7) The Apartments - I call them the apartments but it could be just a large layout/campus of some sort of living situation.  Lots of low-lying, single-story buildings, front and rear entries so only two shared common walls between units.  And a recent trip there, within the last couple of weeks, has expanded the location to include a more centralized, larger building.  Whether it's offices or community center, I'm not sure.  

8) The Road - This one has started becoming a frequent setting and it's unusual because I'm starting off traveling this road and it could take me up to some forest/mountain setting and then I'm out of whatever vehicle it was I took there and exploring.  Or, and this one was a trip even at the time I was in the middle of it, the Road became a coastline road.  Similar to PCH but the ocean was on my right as I was traveling north.  There were people traveling along the road riding bikes.  Road bicycles, like Tour de France types of thing.  And like I mentioned, my journey starts along the road and eventually makes a stop where I'm out exploring.  And this latest trip, I ended up in another familiar location.  But I couldn't figure out if it was a real world location or a variation of my other Baby Universes.  Wouldn't that be a trip?  Starting off in one Baby Universe and traveling to others from there?  

Anyway, the baby universes started becoming more prevalent in recent years though I don't know what I could attribute that to.  

Down a Rabbit Hole

Charles Dodgson was a scholar and a teacher at Christ Church, Oxford England.  He was a lanky figure with a number of health issues.  A knee injury that gave him a hobbling gait, he suffered from a fever at an early age that left him deaf in one ear and a bout with whooping cough as a teenager that left him with a chronically weak chest throughout the rest of his life in addition to a stammer/stutter that he  dealt with since childhood.  

While at the university, Dodgson would end up taking the Dean Liddle's children on row boat rides up and down the river.  First the Dean's son, Henry and soon after his three sisters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice.  It was on these row boat trips that Dodgson would start to tell the children tales based on what they may have seen along the riverbanks, creating fanciful stories of a rabbit dressed in a waistcoat running late to an appointment or flowers singing.  Another time, perhaps they would 'see' a dodo bird and the stories would branch off from there.  The children loved his stories so much that little Alice begged him to write them down, which he eventually did.  Under the pseudonym; Lewis Carroll.  Alice would become a central figure in many of his stories from then on.   

It was believed that Dodgson may have also suffered from epilepsy.  Speculation persists due to the sensation some epileptics report at the onset of an episode, feeling as though they're falling down a rabbit hole.  Considering the Wonderland stories are loosely based on real-life occurrences he and the children would see on their excursions, it would make sense that Dodgson, ne Carroll, would include this specific feeling when Alice journeyed to Wonderland.  

The reason for this rambling preamble?  

Of the many sensations, encounters and activities we experienced at The Garage, the one that was the biggest mindfuck of them all was what I later discovered to be called: Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, AIWS. To give you a quick idea of what I went through, and I wasn't alone in this as I found out both my brother and sister had similar issues was, like the story where Alice drank to become Lilliputian in size, or ate to become a giant, we too would get the sensation of growing or shrinking in size, regardless of the world around us.  Just as an example, I may have been laying in bed, wide awake even though it may have been dusk or dawn, and suddenly out of the blue, I felt, had a literal sensation that I was rapidly shrinking in size right there on my bed.  Almost to the point where I was going to disappear into the bedding.  The effects would last anywhere between a few minutes to maybe half an hour and then it would be gone.  Never a revert to normal, you were just back to where you started from.  Or sometimes the reverse would occur and it would feel as though we were growing beyond the confines on the bed, the room was shrinking around me and a few times, I thought my bed was going to break under the stress and weight of my now immense size.  
For a pre-teen who's already seeing growth spurts, this was a hell of a thing to deal with.  And again, it was all three of us kids.  You can ask my brother or sister, they'll tell you they felt the same thing.  

Once we moved to the Mountain Top, I was already in my teens and that Alice in Wonderland sensation would subside and eventually pass before I hit 16 although migraine headaches would replace them for the next few years.  I don't know when my siblings would also get over that feeling but we eventually talked about it while we were in our teens and came to the conclusion that it must have been the Garage that was doing that to us.  Yet another in a long line of the unexplainable associated with living there.  

And I thought that was that.  Just a memory and the house being active.  Until about 10 years ago when my brother told me one of his kids was suffering from Alice in Wonderland effects.  O.k., there's got to be more to it than the Garage.  She hadn't lived there, she knew nothing about it but she was dealing with the same problems?  I started looking into it on my own.  

That's when I found a handful of medical articles describing Alice in Wonderland Syndrome.  Yes, it's actually a real thing and apparently a small percentage of the population suffer(s/ed) from it.  
According to a case report in Frontiers in Neurology, "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome  (AIWS) is a rare neurological disorder characterized by distortions of visual perception (metamorphopsias), the body image, and the experience of time, along with derealization and depersonalization..."  "In the literature, no more than 180 “clinical” cases of AIWS have been described (i.e., cases in need of medical attention). Of them, some 50% showed a favorable prognosis. However, non-clinical cases (i.e., fleeting, transient cases of AIWS for which no professional help is needed) have been described in up to 30% of the general population."  Up to 30% of the general population means that it's not as rare as one may have thought.  But oddly enough, outside of the 4 people I know who have suffered from it, myself, my siblings and my niece, I've never heard anyone ever mentioning going through a similar condition for any length of time.  If it's as common as the literature states, where are the other sufferers?  After all, to go from 180 clinical cases which required medical attention to 30% of the population is a massive leap in figures.  Which makes me wonder just how well it's being monitored/tracked or even diagnosed/misdiagnosed?  

But the primary reason why this fell under a Meddling Kids post was because we (my siblings and I) assumed the sensation was related to or perhaps induced by The Garage and not a medical/psychological condition.