333
First contact at the edge of awareness
As the month of January of 2025 kicked off I was enjoying a quiet moment stargazing from my back patio. It was a clear and crisp Winter evening, the sky had a few clouds but for the most part visibility was excellent. As I sat there watching satellites and planes pass over I remember thinking, “What the hell am I meant to even do here?” It was a very heavy question, a question I haven’t found an answer to since the day my grandmother asked me if I knew what my “god-given” talent was nearly 4 decades ago. I still don’t really know.
About the only thing that I can claim to know is that I’ve found happiness in creating, writing, philosophy, putting something out there that I made. A former manager of mine once said, “Anton, you’re a builder… You build shit!”
A thought came to my mind while I was about to freeze my ass off during that January evening and that same month I silently launched Percept Index as a project under my personal brand and website.
That wasn’t the end of new beginnings. In February of 2025, shortly after unofficially launching Percept Index, I had my first “Liminal” experience. These experiences occur at the threshold, the in-between of two states of awareness. The direction doesn’t matter: waking -> altered, altered -> waking, altered -> altered, etc.
Over the remainder of the year the liminal space itself became a sought out destination in my practice. It’s that brief moment when you’re not in either “location” and by focusing on that gap you can alter time to allow for something to come through. It’s in these liminal states that I began to receive very specific and targeted messages.
The first time that I learned about this phenomenon was during grade school. To fight the irresistible urge to sleep or get up and run around I would hyper-focus on the clock in the classroom while daydreaming about things I would rather be doing instead of whatever boring nonsense was going on around me.
I noticed that after a few moments the seconds hand would freeze… I didn’t think that I was stopping time (that would be crazy) but I also knew that I wasn’t just seeing things. A few decades later I learned of this very peculiar effect for the second time while reading “Stalking The Wild Pendulum” by Itzhak Bentov. That wonderful book gave me terms and the rough understanding of what was happening.
These subtle spaces provided a sort of window, a portal if you will, through which communication can occur. From who/what? I don’t know for sure yet, but I think I’m beginning to arrive at some sort of satisfactory explanation. While I’ve been documenting and tracking Liminal contact I’ve been fairly casual about the process. My laid back approach is strategical for a couple reasons.
For one, I do not intend to dive right into psychosis and thereby unleash hardship and problems for my family. That is the most important reason.
The second reason is pretty obvious for anyone who engages in deep meditative and altered states: you approach it mostly like you’re dealing with a cat, you’re supremely interested but excessive excitement and focus will drive it away. So, I tread lightly, subtly even.
The First Liminal Encounter
Today, and for this Reverie Compendium entry, I wanted to honor the very first contact while in a Liminal space from something undeniably intelligent.
February 01, 2025 (First “333”)
Having said all of that something interesting did happen as I came to. In the last moment of the process from lucid dream to awake I saw a void with stars and then what appeared as burning with intense smoke being illuminated as it moved across making marks that resembled letters. The “smoke” was more like bright white light/energy but it was also fleeting. Anyways I couldn’t make out what the marks were until the very end where it burned the number 3 a few times (3 times).
The number 333 has since followed me, it’s a story as old as time really. I started to see it on receipts, clocks, devices, number blocks, you name it. It’s been particularly fond of pointing out synchronicities, as if to say, “Hey! You’re on the right track buddy!” Again, this isn’t a new concept when it comes to numbers that are seemingly given to you.
I won’t spend time discussing synchronicities as others have done a phenomenal job of doing just that, much better than I can. So, instead, if you’d like to learn about synchronicities and things associated with that please check out Sebastian Case’s article on this very topic:
https://substack.com/@sebastiancase/p-186077657
I originally planned a much longer entry which outlines all of my Liminal encounters and links to them from one document. I still plan on doing that, just not today. For now, if you’d like to read about my other experiences of this realm please take a look at the illustration section of my publication. A longer writeup will be coming in the future.
https://perceptindex.substack.com/t/illustration
The most important takeaway, right now, that I hope is understood and remembered about my Liminal encounters: they are as real as you and me, they behave intelligently, they are not frightening, they appear kind and often happy, a lot of times they are simply some sort of living/moving structure, there’s 100% a trickster element to them, they seem to know me… and I assume others who find them have the same exact impression toward themselves; lastly, I cannot shake the feeling that what I am seeing are 3D shadows of higher dimensional entities/beings/processes.
Illustration Process Documentation
The blocks are back because they never left, however these blocks are fancy because they have magnets in them.
If you’ve missed my previous “staged still life” illustrations, check them out:
https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/the-inversion
https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/the-wall
https://perceptindex.substack.com/p/reverie-compendium-20260117-pious
As you may notice I have begun to employ the element of shadows with this new “333” piece. The shadows add to the “illustrating qualia” mission that I’ve been on since embarking on the Reverie Compendium series. They also bridge the notion that Liminals are some sort of higher dimensional byproduct.
The action figure armatures aren’t anything new really, the very first illustration in this style featured a praying skeleton figurine. I am happy with how the introduction of shadow to the composition turned out and will be diving deeper into that aspect for future work.
To close out this edition of Reverie Compendium, here are some pictures (everyone likes pictures).
I started to plan this concept a week ago. The current cadence is an illustration every week, usually Thursdays, based on the most recent Field Notes entries.
