June 21, 2008

• popping out

   

  I have never claimed to be psychic or able to see the future.  In fact, I refute any such ability with the observation, "If I could see the future, I would never have married my first husband."

   

  But things have been happening since I was a small child.  For a long time I assumed these things happen to everyone and since no one ever really talked about it, neither did I.  Once I started noticing others didn't always have these experiences, I was careful to remain quiet about my experiences because I was afraid people would call me crazy.  I was already picked on bad enough as it was for being different and antisocial.

   

  One thing I can do is 'pop out'.  This was the first and has always remained the most prominent of my 'abilities'.  I don't like calling this an 'ability'.  I just don't know what else to call it right now.

   

  When I was growing up, my parents didn't believe in doctors, and I would spend high fevers in bed.  I was not aware that I 'pop out' or 'travel out' (my phrases) until one day when my mother walked into the room.  I was in a fever and felt 'spazzed', a term I used for my aspie spacing out.  I remember being at the window sill, looking at the cracks in the paint, the dust, the lines of construction.  When Mom walked into the room and talked to me, I went back to the bed, only I didn't walk.  It was more like drifting back, and when I returned I opened my eyes and spoke back to her a little.  I never thought to tell her I was by the window, and I never told anyone else until I was grown up.  However, during odd episodes like this, I do remember complaining about a very strong 'onion-mustard' smell.  It seems whenever I was ill and popped out, I associated it with a very whangy odor that I could never pinpoint to a source.

   

  I did this so often that I rarely gave it a second thought.  Any time I was bored in school I could 'travel out' to a light in the ceiling, or out a window into a leaf or blade of grass.  One thing I wondered about as I got older was how could I get so small?  I could see very tiny things that I would have had to have a magnifying glass to see if I were holding it in my hands.  I could see structures and energy.  I didn't understand it, just watched it, very engrossed in my aspie way.

   

  Sometime in middle school I got very sick again and felt terrible for several weeks.  During this time I traveled out and couldn't seem to pop back in right.  I felt like I was 'hanging out', cockeyed, sticking out at an angle.  I was still experiencing life through my body, but also watching myself from another angle, close by, almost in.  One particular day of that was so disturbing that I nearly turned to a classmate I was walking with to ask if they could do the same thing, but changed my mind.  I finally popped back in a few days later, to my great relief.  For a long time after that I went out of my way to stay in, because I was afraid I'd get stuck out.

   

  After I was grown and had a baby, I was visiting with friends of my mother's from church.  I was bored and not part of the conversation, and without realizing it had drifted out.  I suddenly jumped and came to myself as my mom's friend's husband caught me at it, looking right at me, and me being horrified to find I was right there at his face.  I pulled back in to my chair across the room immediately, and could tell he knew exactly what had happened because his eyes were laughing at my embarrassment.  Then he looked away and never looked at me again that evening.  He never told anyone.  He was an elder in the church, and we never talked about what had happened, although I suspect there were a great deal of things he knew and didn't talk about.

   

  Some years later I woke up under full sedation and begged a doctor and nurse to stop the abortion.  They were so surprised and caught off guard that I was spoken too very harshly, told to shut up.  I suspect they believed I wouldn't remember what happened, but I was out of my body during the rest of the procedure and saw them finishing up.

   

  Some more years after that I woke up and spoke to the surgeon right after my heart was restarted during an ablation procedure, again, under full sedation.  I laughed and told him he found it, because I could see both the monitors and inside myself and knew he'd found the worst of the irritated nerve bundles.  I was told later it unnerved him terribly that I did that.

   

  These are just a few of many, many times I have popped out, floated out, traveled out, whatever you want to call it.  I travel in my dreams to other places and see other people.  I have dreamed of earthquakes, plane crashes, bridges collapsing, tsunamis, and hundreds of tornadoes, sometimes as they were happening, sometimes before they happened.  I am able to see ahead of time what will happen in some of these devastations, but the information is so nonspecific that I can't give details, but one time was able to confirm later through news reports that I actually knew some very specific details several hours ahead of time.  I've never been able to do the detail confirmation thing since then.

   

  I have also died many times as other people in my dreams, ever since I was a child.  I am in car wrecks, shot to death, exploded, beaten to death, drowned, and that goes on and on.  I feel like I experience things with other people as they are experiencing them.  I have no sense of 'me' when this is happening, and have woken up a number of times surprised to find myself alive, back in this body.  I vividly remember being wounded and dying, without any emotional attachment.

   

  I don't watch horror movies or crime shows.  I watch very little in the way of violence, and what I do watch has very little bearing on the things I experience in my dreams.  Spaceships don't show up in my dreams, for instance.  I don't have nightmares about the Borg.

   

  I have no explanation for any of this, and know of no reason for it.  I used to be curious and look for information, perhaps others do the same thing, but there is very little research or literature on this kind of stuff.  I don't go out of my way to try to make it happen, and I rarely experiment with it.  I have never been able to get pertinent information during these experiences, such as names or places.  I simply experience.

   

  I don't feel I am psychic.  I can't read minds or touch something and 'see' things.  I don't feel like this is anything paranormal as much as me just not being anchored to my body very well, like I'm 'unstuck' or something.  Did it start from being so sick as a baby?  I have no idea.  I've been sick most of my life, and I seem to have a knack for getting out of myself so I won't have to feel the pain and depression, although most of that is into a made up world for my own amusement.  The traveling out seems to be completely separate from the way I drift into fantasy to escape the overload of sensation when I'm ill, and it usually happens when I am unconscious of doing it.

   

  A few years ago I wondered if perhaps some of these experiences happen because I am called to be a witness.  I have a deep belief that none of us dies alone, or is ever truly alone.  I think, because of other things that have happened throughout my life, that we are part of a network, and these physical lives are more like an assignment or project than happenstance.  I feel like we each follow a unique path and collect experiences and then assess what we've learned, and sometimes we recognize each other along the way.

   

  I'll talk about some of my other abilities in another post, because this is long enough.  But if you are aspie and looking for more answers to your weirdness, I'm going to venture that our nerve centers being hard wired a little differently (making us feel too 'on') creates a sort of psychic static that we find very confusing and have to sort through and disentangle from regular stuff that we find confusing, like social mapping and relationships.  People negatively react to aspies almost instinctively, and I believe it's because we are on an edge of experience that is difficult to quantify.

   

  I know this is a weird post, and I don't care.  Those of us who need to will find each other and figure out our puzzles.

   

  • 8:08 am
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