Cryptoanthropology

Sometimes I see people, that other people can't see. I see them before my eyes, but somehow my eyes have very little to do with what I'm seeing. They are not actively imagined, although I might try to affect them or manipulate my experience of them through imagination-- that has never been effective with these otherwise invisible people. And I see them: they have color, size, and location. I can see specific features about them.

One had gray freckles on paper-pale skin, very dark eyebrows and dark matted hair like a haystack, and was completely nude. Its eyes were yellow, its nose large and flat, its pointed ivory teeth making its mouth look like a venus flytrap, and its body was a doughy sort of build with slightly stubby extremities.

Another is a visual warp or blur under a luster, as if seeing through flowing water. The shape of this one is humanoid, also with two arms, two legs, and a head. A bald and faceless oval head, like a wooden mannequin without the joints, and it definitely looks like it's wearing some sort of tuxedo... but the details of the clothes are different whenever I try to pay attention or remember them: it wears spatterdashes-- no, no shoes at all-- and no trousers at all but legs like a waterfall-- no, a body like a waterfall and no tuxedo at all-- no, not a tuxedo, but a suit and a bow tie outlined in seafoam, the color is always lake black-- no, not lake black but ocean blue-- turquoise blue-- very pale turquoise blue, too, not black at all. (Somehow, the frequency of this change is not the question. It was always the same, never changes while I'm paying attention, but it's vague in my mind even though I see it clearly. Whenever I look again, it's just as vague but I'm moved to describe it completely differently from before. Yet, I feel like it hasn't changed since the last time I looked.)

Yet another wears a loose, pale purple robe. The robe is patterned in swirls and lined in some glossy fabric, and suggests that the body underneath is humanoid, buxom, and womanly. It definitely isn't headless, but I've never seen its face or even a lock of hair from its head. Despite what I said about definite size and location, I somehow aren't able to see its face even if I looked further up. But as I said, it definitely isn't headless.

Other times, I sense people, and "seeing" is too clear a word. I don't see them. It's almost as if I can't see them. It's like I smell their personality. I sense that they are massive, permeable, and autonomous intelligences. And I sense sometimes that the presence coalesces into a location and something suggestive of a form-- but still not really something I can see. I don't consider it merely personifying wonder or a marvel at, say, a natural phenomenon-- because I don't feel as if it's coming from my reaction. Still, the closest description I can get to how I perceive such a presence, is the feeling of a specific natural phenomenon: waking at sunlight, anticipating a deafening clap-and-roll of thunder, the loss and grief and abject fear of any natural transition. When they communicate something to me, I hear it as if I caught an idea from what somebody else said-- without the words. It's a very different feeling from "thinking" for myself, or even hearing what I consider "the little voice inside".


Usually, I consider the ones in clear vision as folkloric beings: a bangungot, an undine or "water elemental", a tarot deck spirit.

The more massive ones, I consider deities: of the sun, or the storm, or death, or water (but who weren't water elementals, and were different from storm deities even if rainstorms do physically involve water).

But some entities that I've identified as deities, I've also seen with some clarity. And some entities that I've identified as elementals or folkloric beings, I've experienced their presence the way I have usually experienced deities.

All of these meetings can happen while I am not in a meditative mindstate or initiating any kind of out-of-body experience.