Strange Things Are Happening

I told the guy I was seeing “You met me at a strange time in my life.”

But at the time, I didn’t realize just how strange things would get.

This was 10 months ago.

It all started with my lucid dream. In November of 2017 I had a strange and intensely vivid lucid dream that’s completely flipped the way I understand the world and ever since, weird shit’s been following me that I simply can’t explain. It’s felt at times as if I’ve slipped into one of my dreams, even while I’m awake. Sometimes I find myself thinking I’m dreaming while I’m really awake, and awake while dreaming, and it’s difficult at times for me to distinguish the two..or even bother to. I have a different way of seeing the world, our existence, reality and dreams now, and I guess the best way I can describe it to others is that I’ve had a ‘spiritual awakening’. I think that’s what they call it, anyways. But it’s still difficult to interpret the meaning of everything that’s occurred since then and be sure what it all means, what it’s purpose is and what it’s trying to point me towards, and what “it” even is..

So first off, what exactly are the strange occurrences that’s been happening to me?

Well since the initial dream, my first deep awakening, I’ve met some pretty spiritual people that have all helped me in one way or another. They’ve helped me try to make sense of what’s happening to me, what it means, and helped usher me into the world of ‘spirituality’ that I’ve been avoiding my entire life. They gave me their interpretations, book recommendations, and always the positive encouragement that this is all essential to the process of “awakening”.

But no one could have prepared me for things to get as strange as they did when I set foot here in this country.

So fast-forward to now. I’m in New Zealand.

I’m still the same person I was before, but also..not. I still have the same interests, I love travel and food and adventure and sports and I still get on with my old friends..sorta. But I daydream less about fantastical hypothetical situations that will never happen and more about existential mind-fucks about what life really is. Like the other day, I contemplated: “if I apply Descartes’ logic to dreams and believe ‘I think therefore I am’ while in one, yet the body I see and the things I feel aren’t real, yet I’m convinced they are, then could the same be true for when I wake up? Was Descartes wrong? Are we all just a dream? Just because I have independent thoughts and am self-aware and inquisitive enough to ask these questions doesn’t mean I’m necessarily real...I’ve been self-aware in dreams before. That doesn’t make the dream real. Are any of us real? What does “real” even mean anymore? I could be a figment of someone’s imagination.. Or like those robots in Blade Runner that don’t know they’re robots. What if the waking world is just one long dream.. or Matrix? Holy shit. I mean the Hindus believe we’re just Vishnu’s dream, and one of his breaths is all of universal time for us. So in that case, does the average Hindu even believe we’re real? Do they believe Descartes was wrong?

I was raised on Descartes as the basis for all other philosophical teachings. He was untouchable. Like it wasn’t just a theory of one school of thought about our existence, but more a scripture. In all my schooling and years of living in the US, I had no reason to question it. It was as up there with ‘you have to refrigerate your eggs’. But then I started to travel and realized heaps of other countries don’t refrigerate eggs!..and not just third world countries that don’t have many fridges, but rich European ones too! So if I can get something so basic and universal as refrigerating your eggs wrong, I could get something else equally as basic or perhaps even more basic wrong as well..right?
..Hmm..do I exist?

So between my ponderings over my own existence, I had strange occurrences over and over that made me start to lean more and more towards the latter.

I met up with a girl I had met a year ago in Taiwan. She’s on a spiritual quest but doesn’t know what it is or where it’s leading her yet. She hadn’t shared this with me before because I wasn’t spiritual when we first met and wouldn’t have understood.. Anyways, when we met again, we started discussing existence, purpose, whether there’s more to life and whether there even is life, and we realize we are so in sync and know we were destined to meet. (Oh yeah, I’ve started to believe in destiny.)

We know we are very significant to each other and play an important role on a spiritual level in each others lives and past and future lives as well. (Oh yeah, I’ve started to believe in reincarnation.) We’ve most definitely met before. And will meet again in every lifetime to come. We’re sure of that. We’re also sure that we were meant to meet each other here and help each other with our quests whatever they be. We both feel strongly that we’re spiritually bound together forever, but it’s unclear exactly how. What’s this all pointing to? I don’t know. I just know something is doing the pointing. I felt so relieved to have her to talk to about these things. I don’t know a lot of spiritual people in my life to go to with this sort of problem. (Or perhaps I do but they were keeping it to themselves as I was..)

It wasn’t until I met her here in New Zealand that weird shit started happening on a daily basis though. To both of us. We knew it was a sign.

First was the daily deja vu. Multiple times a day, the two of us would talk about something in private and within the next day or two, someone else would bring up that same exact topic! She recommended the book ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’ by Harari to me and we met a couch surfer later that night and he also recommended it to the both of us. That in itself isn’t weird or significant, but the sheer number of times this repetition would happen was alarming. After the first week, we’d just give each other ‘the look’ from across the room whenever it happened. We’d talk about the most random things, but they’d always find their way back to us in the next conversation we’d have with someone. Strange. Very strange. But it didn’t seem to point us in any particular direction..if there was some higher power up there pulling the strings, it seemed like more of a practical joke than a helping hand..

But it didn’t stop there. I grew a lot spiritually in a short time. I looked at my horoscope for the first time in my life and started learning about the character traits of a Virgo and who I’m compatible with and how the planets really do have a powerful impact on all of us. I’ve started star-gazing every single clear night and have become fascinated with the constellations and planets in our solar system. I’ve just started to learn about who I am really. Like my favorite color is purple. I get easily frustrated at myself, but not with others. I don’t like clingy people. I’m very detail-oriented. I care more about beauty, both mine and others, than I care to admit. I’m indecisive. I’ve learned so much about myself, I’ve felt like such a child. Like why do I not know myself better?

I was reading a book that said humans are so strange because we can read a book about astronomy and buy a telescope and look at the planet Jupiter. And even though we didn’t know anything about that planet a few days ago, have never been there before, and can’t even see it in detail with the naked eye, we can be completely certain and know without a doubt that we are looking at Jupiter based on its position and description. We can describe everything about the planet from its atmosphere and weather conditions to its chemical make-up with absolute certainty. Yet if we’re asked the question “What is your soul like?” We wouldn’t have any clue where to begin. No one knows. We don’t have the information for that one. We have self-awareness, but we don’t really know ourselves. I am a soul, but what is my soul? Where is it? Who is it? I don’t really know..

One day when we bought a car together here in New Zealand, we had so much luck, we really should have bought a lottery ticket. We were supposed to meet this man to buy his car in town but halfway there, I realized I forgot my phone at home and we were freaking out on the roof of a parking lot and right then, a Kiwi couple said “You guys alright?” and ended up driving us all the way back home and all the way into the city to meet with the seller. Then when we bought the car and didn’t have enough money to fill the tank, we realize he’d sold it to us with a full tank of gas! Such a serendipitous day! We seem to be extra lucky when we’re together too. Hmm.

I told her that I’ve had several sober hallucinations since my lucid dream many months ago. I’ve been seeing things that I know aren’t actually there and it freaks me out. They’re not scary things or anything that interferes with my daily life, but more just gentle reminders that nothing you’re seeing is ‘real’. After all the deja vu of repeated conversations during the past several weeks, learning about ourselves more and more everyday, hallucinating while sober, meeting heaps more spiritual people recently, and most of all finding each other here and now, I decided to do a test. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I had to keep it to myself in order for it to work. I was just so mesmerized by all the events in the recent past, that the logical girl in me was still a little unconvinced that all this..life as we know it...isn’t as it appears. I made a silent wish that night. ‘Please if there is something out there, just let me know. I feel as if I’m going crazy, but I have a feeling I’m not, and there is something I just don’t comprehend. But I’m so desperately lost. Please help me understand. Let me know I am on the right track. Give me a sign! The word is...FROG. If that comes up again soon then I’ll know. I don’t know who or what I’m talking to, but I hope you hear me.’ Then I went to sleep.

The next day, we drove to a nearby beach to see the sunset. On our way there, we talked about all the weird and inexplicable things that have been happening to us lately while we drove on the curvy road down the mountain. It was all very trippy, but then around the next bend there was a meter-high boulder on the left side of the road. On it was spray-painted ‘FROG!’. A shiver ran down the length of my spine, and I told her right away about my wish the previous night.

We brought a joint and decided to smoke when we got to the beach at sunset. A minute later, I looked at the pink and purple sky as it turned dark blue. Strange things start to take shape up above. An apparition appeared before us in the clouds around the moon. I have never hallucinated after smoking marijuana, so this was very strange indeed. But then it started to move! The clouds parted in the perfect shape of a man digging a hole with a spade. He dug the spade into the ground in the sky and threw it over his shoulder several times. Then just like that, he disappeared. I stood there and said “Well that was fucking weird” to her and it turned out she was seeing the exact same thing! What?? Shared hallucinations don’t exist..but we just had one. What the hell does that mean?

And what was the man digging for..?

I can’t be sure. I have no experience with the occult, so I can only turn to google. But googling meanings of dreams and significance of symbols in the sky give some weird responses. The answer I felt most resonated with us said we’re searching for something important, and a big change is happening. Well yes, both those are correct, but the skeptic in me is saying “I could have told you that..”

But yet more things happened. I never stopped hallucinating and dreaming. They didn’t happen 24/7, but they happened enough to puzzle me. And seemingly with the most trivial things. I dreamed I was in the car looking at Little Dragon’s ‘Ritual Union’ album cover, studying it for several minutes in silence. I didn’t realize it was an album cover, but I was wondering who the people were and how they were all connected. The next day, my friend plays that album and says how the people in the photos on the album cover are all the band member’s parents. I immediately turned pale, being able to picture in my mind perfectly the album cover despite never having seen it in real life before. My mind starts to race, thinking “HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE??” and coming up with explanations like ‘Calm down, you probably saw it a long time ago and forgot, but your brain just remembered it all this time’..but I’m still not convinced.

And yet more strange things happen to me..I constantly run into spider webs that can’t physically be there since I’m walking behind someone on a hiking trail (this has been happening to me my whole life, but I never realized how strange it was until now). When I was on a ferry recently, I saw a kaleidoscope of bright lights take over my vision, drenching my world in a scifi acid trip of color that lasts for a full minute. Sometimes when I’m alone in the forest staring at trees, I see tree bark start to move in strange patterns as if it’s melting. When I was working at a warehouse a little while ago, I saw a man walking down one of the aisles who wasn’t really there. I could go on..

The strange keeps building on itself and I can’t seem to figure out why. It’s like I’m attracting more and more strange people and things in my life..but in a good way. Everything has been working out for the best, even suspiciously so sometimes.. But who knows, because now I’m expecting weird things to happen so often I’m almost looking for them. But regardless, the things I’ve seen and experienced and learned over the past months have radically changed me. It’s even made it difficult at times to relate to my old self and old life..

If you’re hoping for a storybook ending for this post, you’re out of luck. (Or I’m out of luck?) I still feel lost and confused about life and well, everything, but I also have a hunch that that’s all part of the process. I see things differently now. I’m meant to go through this. I have to get broken down and rebuilt. What for? I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s something. I know it.

In the meantime, I’ll just happily continue to work on improving myself and be the best Amanda I possibly can, learn as much as I can, experience this life to the fullest, and somewhere along the way, I’ll understand why.