Observations placeholder

Mysteries - Colin Wilson

The effect that it had on me. . was to notice that if I stared at an object for more than a fleeting glance, I would begin to see superimposed, or rather underimposed, another picture. On this occasion, I was staring at a light plug and saw a picture which appeared to be people in a factory, which I took to be the place where it was manufactured. If I continued to gaze, a further series of pictures, rather more hazy, would appear -scenes which appeared to be the places where the raw materials of the plug were mined or extracted. I found this to be true of just about everything that I looked at for any length of time.

I was aware that this could have been an illusion, but when I discovered that the phenomena still took place when I was out of doors, it was possible to subject this to some form of test. I visited my mother who had lived in Harrow for most of her life and knew the surrounding countryside before it had been built on. With her, I walked around Harrow and its surrounds, describing, to her astonishment, the landscape with its farms, streams and fairly small pockets of dwelling places in existence before I was born.

According to her memory I was very accurate. I cannot, of course, discount the possibility that I had at some time heard her describe what it was like in the past . . . all I can say is that I cannot consciously remember anything of the sort.

I also noticed that, as with the light plug, if I continued to look at one area, earlier dwellings would appear, then scrub or forest only; finally, in one case, earlier types of primitive dwellings such as I imagine a Stone-Age settlement would look like.

As to myself, I noticed that I appeared to be somewhat insubstantial.

As I walked, everything, including my own body, appeared to be shimmering - at first I thought that I would have difficulty negotiating stairs and kerbstones. . . The whole universe seemed to be unreal, shimmering with energy. The only real thing was 'l'.

For the first time in my life, I felt myself to be totally real. The observer was really 'here', and observing; everything else was an illusion. I could see particles which, for some reason, were slowed down. What a change from my usual state - in which 'l' felt insubstantial and the rest of the universe too horribly real.

This state lasted about three weeks, during which time I lived in a curiously placid emotional condition, rather like being in a mild state of shock, not unpleasant, but oddly unreal.