Another landing stuck.
Field Notes of Nobody’s Ghost - 20261014-S9
Another landing stuck, if you count the back as a landing gear. Come in the way a ghost should, unannounced, unrecognized, and already moving before anyone thinks to ask.
Last Saturday, 20261010, I had my usual extended afternoon meditation and immersive altered-state session. This time around I decided it was absolutely worthwhile to revisit the earlier tapes of The Gateway Experience. Instead of starting over with Wave I and making my way back up to where I left off, right before the Voyager series, I began at Wave III. I remember having trouble with this specific set, so it feels like the correct place to pick it all back up.
I was right: Wave III is where I tend to get bored quickly and don’t see much progress, or so I think. A lot of the issues for me arise from the language: float up, rotate, move, etc. Those are physical-reality verbs, and my weird and confused mind that fancies itself intuitive and analytical stumbles around and freezes with such directions. Later waves lean far more on intuitive capacity, and that’s where I find the most success. My task here is to ignore physical-space directions and translate them into non-physical processes: “move, float, rotate” turn into “phase, adjust, focus.”
After practicing the “Vectors” track, I had time for a few passes at immersive altered states on my own. I put everything away and turned over for my first pass. It yielded nothing, and I ended up in light sleep for about twenty minutes. I turned to my other side and took a while to get comfortable. I felt myself slipping into sleep and decided to engage with the random visualization the mind was spinning up anyway, against the popular advice of leaving all of it alone. Note to self: this is the fastest way to sleep… but there’s absolutely no threshold hunting with this one.
Quick note: the difference between sleep and an altered state, by way of engaging with hypnagogic imagery, rests on intent. Make it specific and communicate it clearly in your mind (to your mind and subconscious).
I found myself in the garage, which is always a familiar place. I was looking at the phone in my left hand, reading either something I wrote or an edit to a draft, and fiddling with another device in my right hand. Little details like this made this by far the most “faked out” I’ve felt by one of these altered states.
An aside: I’ve made it a point to focus on my hands when I project; the plan is for it to be the first thing I do and an extremely habitual reflex. Well, I’ve failed to remember more times than I have fingers. When I came to in the garage, I was walking around and reading on my phone. The story here is that the subconscious nailed the assignment for me in the saddest way I could ever imagine. “Well, this guy isn’t remembering to look at his hands, so how do I get him to see his hands? What does he do with his hands more than anything else? Phone, perfect.” So, good job, subconscious. That was a good reminder that I spend too much time staring at the rectangle of doom.
I had a thought in the garage that I needed to get going on my meditation right away, so I started to walk briskly toward the door that leads into the house. I have tried on a few occasions to meditate within Locale 1 to transition to Locale 2, so the desire had a functional intent. I stopped short of the door and stood still as I looked up at the clock above it. Then I noticed the garage was aglow in the orange LED strips hanging from the rafters, but the time on the clock did not match the window when the LEDs are automated to be on.
The moment I began to interrogate the clock and the mismatch with the environment, I felt the familiar sense of “being pulled back” that means the session is about to be over. It starts in the chest at Anahata, the center where it all originates, and spreads evenly through the rest of the chakras. “I’m meditating here,” I said out loud, and then I smiled and jumped backwards onto the cold, hard floor. In physical reality this would hurt immensely… but as I hopped up, I felt myself slow down before coming gently back down to the floor. In that moment I absolutely knew what would happen.
As I hit the floor, the exit sequence began, and I was quickly teleported back to my physical location on the daybed.
I am more than certain now that this was a projection into Locale 1, and that I’ve been projecting into Locale 1 often for a year or two. Why do I say this? Because every single time there is a slightly dramatic transition, a felt “click” back into my physical body, with full awareness carried between states, and I arrive already awake. My lucid and vivid dreams have none of that whatsoever; they simply end.
While most of my trips to Locale 1 are brief, I now understand how to make them last longer. As long as I’m engaged with objects and details, the experience remains stable. The moment I stop, pause, ponder, or let the analytical mind interrogate what is going on, boom, I’m done and being pulled back.
This is the same quality I find in most things in consciousness exploration: lead with intent, believe it without hesitation, be clear on what you want to do, BUT don’t do any of it whatsoever when it’s happening, because then it’s all over. Yes, I just said to stay engaged. Both are true at once, and I can’t tell you exactly where one ends and the other begins. In other words, borrowed from every dog in the world when it comes to playing fetch: “NO take! ONLY throw!” The joke is that it’s nearly an impossible situation, slippery, as I often say.
When you pull this off, you will know, and you will find it just as difficult to talk and write about. For a long time I’ve suspected that language is the bottleneck in all of this.