u/sac_boy

I'm not a lighthouse keeper, I live off the Creggan road. Nobody has to row out to my island to deliver post. But despite this I seem to receive post in a bundle every couple of weeks.

I got a text notification of an electric bill due in 2 days--I wonder if I'll get the letter (likely sent early August) before the actual due date. I'm also waiting on another important bit of post. Haven't seen a post van on this street all week.

Meanwhile packages arrive daily. If the same letters had been sandwiched between two bits of cardboard they would have been flung in the direction of my front door a week ago.

This town has 4.7% unemployment! Why are the roads still fucked, why are the letters un-delivered? Are these essential services all just total nightmares to work for? How do we change this?

I'm new to CW, pretty good at receiving, and trying to find my groove when it comes to sending. I am not new to using my hands and brain, just in case anyone jumps to that assumption.

People seem to like iambic paddles and I had some store credit to use, so I picked one up. A basic but quite nice heavy metal unit that can be adjusted to be just about touch-sensitive. As far as I can tell, the key itself works great. The operator, unfortunately, is having trouble adapting to it.

Here's what I've found so far:

• Slower is not better (in terms of feel). Below 20 WPM is horrible as you start to feel the lag built in to using the keyer. 24-25 WPM actually feels like a sweet spot.
• But then, Iambic B gets sloppy (or at least, stressful to create characters reliably). I need to be very fast on the release to create an A as opposed to an R. I feel like I'm withdrawing my fingers after each character to make sure they don't send an extra dit. Despite being able to make single characters quickly, the idea of actually stringing characters together with proper spacing while using Iambic B feels utterly beyond me.
• I'm a bit more comfortable with Iambic A--it stops when I stop. But it also feels like it's going to be sub-optimal to go deep into learning A if I'm learning an iambic mode.

I was feeling frustrated, so went into my garage and made a single paddle key. Just a sawblade set into a rectangle of cork, some crimped heatshrink for ergonomics, with a couple of adjustable posts on either side. Not the prettiest key in the world. It is unlikely to hold up to much abuse. But the experience of using it was night and day! I nudge it in one direction for a dit, another direction for a dah. Nothing inserts extra dits or dahs. It seems absolutely optimal. I can use it at 25 WPM without feeling like I need to take my hand off the paddle between letters. I feel like I'm working with the timing of the keyer rather than fighting it.

What are your experiences here? I get that I could learn to use the dual paddles if I gave it more time, but is it worth the investment just to have an easier time calling CQ? Should I just pick up/make a nice single paddle and go with that?

Hope this doesn't come across as a whine post--of course this is all just fun in the end, even when it's driving me crazy to reliably make an L with the paddles--I'm hoping that you either ran into the same problems and just broke through with time, or you and your single paddle setup have had many happy QSOs together and you would never think of using iambics.

Another data point I'd love to get is your handed-ness. I'm left handed but I do most things (other than write) with my right hand. Wondering if this is a factor.

I found it interesting, anyway.

Context: I went upstairs to my spare room at about 9pm as I was feeling dead tired, and set my alarm for 90 minutes.

I've recently been dealing with an absolute wall of delirium encountered just minutes into my OBE sessions. It feels almost like a test: can you navigate this without blacking out? It's like this wall of cognitive noise exists to scramble you and put you to sleep. (Thoughts that do not fit into my brain. Ideas that are not shaped for this reality. Nonsense.) And it's very easy to lose yourself in it, especially if you are physically and mentally tired, and just black out.

My awareness of it may be related to my constant hypnagogic vision practice. Where the visions/clairaudience are coherent, this 'delirium' is not. (Though...it has given me some ideas for work over the years...you can sometimes get the faintest fingernail-grip on an actual idea in the noise.)

So my practice has changed tack. I'm riding the waves while maintaining a thin lifeline back to normal cognition, in the shape of a simple mental visualisation. In this case, it's an actual lighthouse, held as a simple mental symbol. I'm not trying to block out the delirium, not at all. I let it play out, and overlay this simple mentation on top. Both modes become active at once: the focus on this lifeline thought, and the cognitive noise that surrounds it. To give a snapshot of my inner experience at that time: there's the delirium, the lifeline thought that protects my attention from the maze that surrounds it, and the insistent scream of my inner sound.

Then the noise abates and I'm left in the OBE state. Nice! The useful thing is that this works even when I'm very tired, so it feels like an advancement.

On to the experience.

The OBE:

I float out into my street. It's a dark, foggy night (which became true in the physical world a couple of hours later). After a moment or two of acclimatisation, I was drawn to the house across the street, and entered through a wall. Within, I find that it's well-lit with warm yellow light. I'm not alone in the house. There's a little being.

This being is maybe three and a half feet tall, with skin that reflects the golden light. Big head, little body. It's hard to describe the face; the eyes were like long angular slots of darkness in its head, rather than eyeballs. The nose and mouth features were not in the human arrangement, and I have a feeling they were more vertical than horizontal. It's wearing a skintight suit that ends at the neck, wrists and ankles.

It's friendly and invites me to talk. I end up touching it, and it touches me back. Then I have this odd sense that I am not interacting with a being that is conscious in the same way I am.

So I ask it outright: "do we have the same kind of existence? Are we equally present here?"

It's hard to describe, but my sense of touch was involved in the inquiry. Like my connection to it could prod it to produce the truth. It wouldn't answer the first time, but I insisted through this touch.

Then it tells me "No. I am more like a puppet."

I release my grip, then I stand and back away. I address my inner guide. I don't recall the exact wording, but I asked something like: "I would like to interact with a being that is equal in awareness to me, or slightly greater." I may have used a term like "equal in consciousness", with the sense that I meant 'equal in terms of development'.

My inner guide answers; it's my own voice, big and sonorous, welling up from somewhere within. "Trust me. You don't." Those were its words exactly.

(Now, it might have just been calling me an asshole, and suggesting that meeting my equal would be a downgrade from the kinds of encounters I have out there.)

I answered with something like you know I have to or you know my nature.

As if in response, a door appears in the nearby wall. It seems to grow there, unfold. A symbol that can be read as: this is new, it wasn't part of the environment here before. The door is ornate, apparently made of sturdy wood inlaid with dull metalwork. It has an ornate metal handle on the front, and several shelves of dusty books apparently mounted directly to it. A symbol of old knowledge, perhaps. I had the sense that this door was a threshold, and going through it would change more than just this one OBE. So of course I opened it and stepped through.

I'm suddenly back in my room. It feels very physical. I step out into the hall, down the stairs, and I'm met by an absolutely classic howling ghost--a misty humanoid form that is barely held together, but glowing white-blue. It's screaming insensibly at me. So of course I lean into its face and howl right back. "WOOOOOO!!! Go on! Really go for it! WOOOOOOOOO!!!"

I start making the same sound physically and this causes me to wake up.

End of OBE.

Hey, they're not all the coherent adventures that people like to read about. But I think there's a greater reality being described through the apparent strangeness. But I was most interested in that comment from the inner guide. It doesn't steer me wrong, but it does have a sense of humour, so I wonder what it meant.

I usually hesitate to share experiences that people would find 'scary' as I don't want to discourage beginners. Let me preface all of this by saying it was surprising, but really wasn't that big a deal at all. I'm mostly just curious to know if others have experienced the same thing suddenly shaking them out of their dreams and OBEs.

This is perhaps the third time in the last few years that this has happened.

In my case it went like this:

I was dreaming. It was a high-awareness dream (with some reflection on the dream state, though not classically lucid). In the dream, I was in an office (lots of glass, surrounded by what looked like jungle and rust-colored densely stratified rock). A friend waved me outside to look at the sun. I went outside and sure enough, the sun was odd: it was low in the sky, massive (about 3x the apparent size of our sun) and a bubbling orange color. I could see the swirling structures of this star's surface. My surroundings were lit in a golden orange hue. I remember thinking how much I love seeing other stars in dreams, and how rare this view must be.

Then: I'm attacked by something external to the dream. I'm suddenly very aware that I was 'wandering around' mentally pointed inward while dreaming, but now I'm aware of external tactile senses, astral tactile senses. An intense pain sensation from outside this dream world demands my attention immediately. The dream shatters. I am somewhere in the dark--downstairs in my house at night, I think. I've been wandering astrally.

Something has bitten me--a wide, gnawing mouth right on my left trapezius, between the shoulder and neck. It is painful, ticklish, electric. It's making a horrible sound too: "ngngngnggngng!"

"Argh ye bastard!" I reach back and shake it off, whatever it is, then I immediately wake physically, heart pounding. I can still feel the bite. It's like the lingering aftermath of being tickled painfully between the neck and shoulder when you were a kid. I've felt this way before after sustaining 'injury' during OBEs.

Curious, I lay there and mentally steer into the sensation, intensifying it with my focus. I want understand this strange sensation, to see how far it reaches. When I apply my attention to it, I can feel the tingle from the base of my skull on that side, right down to the tip of my middle finger. I can pulse it. Very interesting.

I could still find the sensation throughout the next day, and my attention would seemingly revive the ticklish sensation. Going to bed the following night I could still feel it. (It's gone now).

Interesting one from the other night, just wanted to get it noted down.

Normally if I have a lucid dream, it'll happen one of three ways:

• I'm already in a dream and I realise I'm dreaming (the classic lucid dream).
• I'm in an OBE session, the pre-AP state goes sideways for whatever reason, and I realise I'm dreaming.
• Self-induced WILD, which is a bit like the previous situation, but intentional. This is not something I do these days, but I'm including it for completeness.

But this was different, and hard to categorise. This was the middle of the night, I had already been asleep for some hours.

I became aware that I was in a dormant mental state in bed. So, I was aware that I was in a pre-dream or inter-dream state. I was aware of who I was, and I was aware that I was asleep. My POV was a couple of feet above my curled-up body looking down, so it was technically spontaneous OBE, but without any volition--I was in a resting state and had no intention to go anywhere or do anything. I can't say how long this lasted.

The interesting part was that I was able to witness the onset of a dream.

Something was overlaid on my mental vision: the eyes and feathery brow of an owl, painted in glowing white strokes like a sumi-e ink painting in reverse. It looked at me, and I looked back at it.

I said "oh, it's the Great Owl." I said it with a half-chuckle. Whatever it was felt entirely familiar, even the name I gave it.

Then the environment beyond those eyes twisted and changed: my view of my moonlight-blue bedroom (with my own body in bed) melted away and was replaced by a dark garden at night. Now there was gravity under my feet, dewy grass around my ankles, embodiment in this dream environment. There was also an end to that strange inter-dream lucidity. I was now fully involved in the dream. So it was a transition from that state of meta-lucidity, and then a voluntary handing-away of my own identity, the assumption of this dream life. My awareness (in the sense of my ability to experience and transcribe reality into memory) did not dip in this transition process. It was a continuous stream of experience, just with so many of its variables changing at once, including the variable of 'lucidity'. It felt like lucidity was happily handed away as part of the process: like I was curious to inhabit this dream identity. So on another level it was like a ride-along witnessing the normal flow of dream onset.

(The actual dream was interesting in itself, and I have clear memory of the whole thing, but it's not interesting to a wider audience.)

I thought the owl imagery was interesting. Like this was a minimalist visual representation of an intelligence that creates/delivers dreams.

I had a strange restless night (dreamed about drinking petrol and the medical after-effects, which seemed to stick with me from dream to dream). I ended up waking with a headache and desperately needing another couple of hours in bed, which makes me glad my work is very flexible.

At one point during that couple of hours, I was awake in bed and realised I could just AP if I wanted, so I AP'd from my side and stood up in my bedroom.

I turned to look at my wife (also having a lie in this morning) and she was unconscious. She dreamily gave me the instruction "...help...June..."

Then I saw her: the woman apparently sitting on the end of our bed, on the side facing the window. I presumed her name was June. Let me describe her:

• Mid-brown hair, straight, kind of a choppy haircut. I'm no expert on women's hair but I can say it looked dry, split ends perhaps.
• Quite slim, good looking, a slightly pointed nose.
• I would have put her age in late 30s/early 40s, but it's hard to say.
• She had a tiny dark mole low on her right cheek, closer to her chin than her ear.
• She was wearing denim, I think. A denim jacket, potentially a wide-collared shirt underneath. Denim skirt.
• She was sitting hunched over. Her demeanor was one of shock, disbelief. Like someone who had just walked away from a car wreck unhurt but shaken up.

I sat beside her and took in her features in the white morning light. She hardly looked at me, if she looked at me at all.

Let me preface the next bit by saying I am not a therapist, not qualified at all to deal with bereavement or assisting the dead (if indeed that's what she was), and I can be extra blunt in my interactions when I'm out of my body. Stupidly so.

I put an arm around her shoulders because that felt like the thing to do. "Hi June. I think you're dead."

At this, she sobbed loudly and seemed to fold further into herself. I felt a huge swell of emotion from her, right in my gut, rising into my chest.

Then I said some simplistic things about reincarnation that I don't even believe. Ending with "...so who knows, maybe you'll be ugly next time!"

Brilliant.

With this, the environment shifted. The pressure of June against my side and under my arm faded. I was alone in a very run-down building, flaking paint on the walls, swollen mahogany window-frames. I knew I had to remember the encounter and so I tried to scratch the information into one of the window-frames with my thumbnail. Then I woke myself physically and wrote it all down on my phone.

Very odd. Of course I did an obituary search for anyone called June who died recently...and there were a few, but not in my immediate county. It doesn't help that June is the current month. And of course, I don't believe that these interactions are limited to the local area and time, so who knows.

I don't have more to add, it's kind of a dead end in terms of finding this person, alive or dead. Just an interesting encounter, and yet another signal that I am pretty bad at helping. Can you imagine you are stumbling around confused in some kind of afterlife condition and suddenly you are in some middle-aged bald guy's bedroom being told you are dead...surely there is a process for this!