The Mantis and the Masked Man.
Field Notes 20260703 - Friday
I woke at 4:20 and made the mistake of not getting out of bed immediately. Woke again at 4:55, too late for the morning run, so I went back to sleep. Long story short, if I sleep for eight hours or more I feel like absolute shit. Hungover without the drinking, headache and groggy. My max has always been six hours; four to six has been the working duration since high school, for a little over twenty years now. When this body gets more sleep than it requires, this is the bill. No self-flagellation over the missed run, it clearly wasn’t in the cards.
The interesting part came out of that extra sleep. Either before I fell back asleep or after, I had a dream that something possibly wanted me to remember. I’m no stranger to remembering dreams, this whole practice revolves around strengthening awareness and lucidity, but this particular one carried a hint as to why.
The lucidity arrived when Kim and I were inside our house looking at a plant. She pointed to a leaf: “look, it’s a baby mantis!” I leaned in and sure enough, a baby, bright green. It instantly turned and looked at me, as if in recognition.
I stretched my hand out toward the little being. To my surprise it rapidly grew from a bright green baby into a large adult mantis, then climbed up on my hand. I could feel its feet. I could feel the weight of its lower body on my skin. It turned its head at me again, tilted it as if studying what I would do.
Here’s where I think I may be picking up on something. I have a very strong and human reaction to insects, a problem with things having more than two or four legs. I’ve been working on this fear for years, I know 99.99% of insects do not seek me out to hurt me. I leave the spiders in the house alone; I think word has spread, none of them fear me anymore. This lucid dream felt like someone was testing my fear response. Would I freeze, run, shake my hand and throw the mantis across the room? I held it there, I let it move freely on my hand and forearm. I didn’t love the experience, but I understand I’m not a target of malicious intent. It’s just the presentation, it’s different.
Somewhere in the holding I said, “I won’t hurt you.” Tough but genuine — and I think I was saying it both to the mantis and to myself.
Worth stating for the record: I deliberately don’t seek out mantid literature, experiencer reports, podcasts, or videos. I don’t want to contaminate my mind with their image so it leaks when there’s no need. I’ve encountered mantids in trance, but they typically hide. Curious in me, but they don’t approach, at least not completely. This one initiated, escalated on my gesture, and made sustained contact — a reversal of the entire filed pattern. And I seldom have lucid dreams at night; they’re mostly afternoon, coupled with trance sessions preceding them.
Today’s Field Notes illustration:
My own composition of a mantid in a palm of a hand, or just the mantis itself. The moment of contact: feet, weight, the studying tilt of the head. Held, not thrown.
Afternoon
Meditation
- 40 minutes.
- Expand app, timer section, F21 (the bridge).
I laid down completely exhausted… because I slept eight hours the night before. Ridiculous. The 40 minutes meant for tuning to F21 ended up being a clearing-the-field session instead. I felt I needed metaphysical hygiene; I’ve been following this pattern weekly, just a little later in the week this time. Never made it beyond F12, but that’s where I clear the field anyway. I wished for more energy to push through, recognized I’d spent enough time in trance, and made my exit. I set my mental timer to 40 minutes before the session and came out at exactly 40. Efficient and effective.
Threshold hunting
The next hour was threshold practice as usual. First pass was good. I nearly caught the exit, the crack in the transition, but quickly found myself in a lucid dream instead. Very clear, waking-life fidelity. A nagging feeling said this wasn’t what it seemed; I reached down and shoved my hand through the floor. Yep. Exit was normal, portal/tunnel travel about the same as it’s been lately, except this time, falling through the floor of the dream, the movement suggested an upward trajectory, and landing back on the daybed felt like gently clicking into place from above. The felt direction doesn’t matter. Ever since I rejected the notion of an up or down vector, this keeps happening — like a subtle nod to the assessment.
The second pass delivered the more interesting situation. Missed the threshold again, immersed immediately in a lucid dream at 1:1 fidelity. My office as the initial setting, nothing weird. Daybed already folded into the ottoman, me standing near it, reviewing something on a shelf. That sensation is always hard to explain: you’re positioned in a familiar way, your short-term memory has no record of how you got there, and you don’t question it. I never questioned it until I learned to catch cues that aren’t visible. The essence of qualia is still present, and all you have to do is stop, be extremely present, and detect it. Then BOOM — lucidity.
Now lucid, I noticed a strange situation outside the office window. A black Toyota Tacoma parked right at the front door of our house, the front door of all places. I leaned to the window for a closer look, and a person walked out from behind the truck and up to the front of the office window.
The person: slightly taller than me, heavier set but not overweight, bland baseball cap with no logos, bottom half of his face covered by a dark grey bandana, skin darker than mine, and piercing blue eyes. What made me pause was his shirt. Black, with black-and-white artwork depicting a mantid, a grey, a human, and a mushroom.
“What the hell is the meaning of this?” I gestured wait a minute with my index finger and walked out of the office toward the living room. As I did, I recognized just how real it all was. Carpet under my feet in the office, cool tile in the hallway, sun casting shadows through a bright and comfortable house, the AC breeze as I passed under the vents. I nearly second-guessed the lucid-dream assessment, then remembered the masked man with his truck parked right at the front door. Alright. This isn’t what it seems. None of it is.
I wanted to open the door and inquire, but the obscured face, only eyes and part of the nose visible, changed my mind. Concealment isn’t the same as a false face or a mask, but it drops trust below the engagement threshold. Contact declined.
Then the test I run when an immersive state feels very immersive: jump and observe. Quick return to the floor means familiar physics, probably a fake-out. Drift upward means I’m operating in a simulation. I jumped, hovered briefly at the living room ceiling, came down. Noted. Next jump carried the intention to move through the ceiling and the roof. I did. I kept soaring until the house disappeared from view, transitioned to exit mechanics, traveled the light-colored tunnel, and was gently clicked into place on the daybed — where I was just waking up.
The shirt
The one thread from today I’m closing rather than leaving open. Every figure on that shirt comes from my own inventory. Mantid, grey, human: contact taxonomy, a lifetime deep. And the mushroom is the deepest of the four. A great-grandfather who was a mushroom hunter, lineage older than my practice. Psilocybin work at least twice a year. A Liminal contact with a dancing mushroom. Decades of mushrooms in my hand as an illustrator. Nothing on that shirt is foreign data, which means the shirt can’t discriminate between self-material and Other — a self-projection would wear my catalog, and an Other flashing credentials would flash exactly this set.
What the composition does read as: a contact-modality lineup. Three entity classes and the one vector that’s chemical rather than encountered. My channels, worn as a chart. Though for the record, I’ve never held these figures as related. All encounters and work have been one on one. Someone, or something, grouped them for me.
Whether the figure itself was self-material or Other stays open. The discriminator now sits where it belonged all along: conduct and behavior. Non-reciprocal, watchful, honestly concealed, no approach past the window, no speech. If it recurs, if it initiates, if anything in-state references the encounter unprompted — that’s the data that moves this.
