keeps me awake at night
The eyes of starlit heavens
following me secretly
So I'm going to preface this post with the admission that I - like so many others in this world - was very, very stupid as a child. So that's out of the way. Now, I've hinted obliquely and outright stated most of the content in this post in other places on this blog, as well (yes that's me, yes I know what I'm saying, writing backwards isn't that hard until e starts looking like it's supposed to be ɘ).
TL;DR: Jibber-jabber about crazy metaphysical stuff. Wall of text inbound, though there are pictures at the end.
Let's get started. Alpha, hon, you'll probably want to stop reading about here. (I know, you don't use that name anymore.)
Tarot
So some of my first experiences with any kind of mystical, magical stuff, other than the rites and rituals associated with organized religion, came from tarot cards. Innocent, easy tarot cards. Even hardcore anti-pagan Christians will sometimes get a tarot reading, or their horoscope did. It varies from case to case.
I tend to have about a 75% accuracy, I'd ... wager, anyway, though I'm horrible at answering questions with it. But then, that's partly the kind of spread I prefer - the standard Celtic Cross 10-card spread seems to generally assess the entire situation and give a full breakdown of the entire life, up to the moment in question. Mom is better, and that's part of the reason I never have her do a reading on me.
There are such stories there.
Nowadays I do a simple one-card draw almost every day, for general guidance. Since getting obsessed with the Slender Man mythos I tend to draw the Nine of Swords with alarming regularity - which is kind of fitting: this is the card of fear and nightmares.
When I was younger, I had a tarot reading at a local Renaissance fair, done at cost from a professional. My question was fairly simple: what is my power/strength/ability?
I have a tendency to attract cards from the Major Arcana. Of the entire spread, I only remember one of the cards now, and that one The Magician. The answer, as the tarot reader interpereted it, was that my power was the ability to change others' perception - to effectively appear how I want to other people.
The "Spirit" and the Rain
So this next bit is going to be from the gullible mind of an impressionable, sensitive child. Take it for what it is.
I've known Alpha most of my life, though we've only really met face to face the one time. At one point (I was in college, I remember), he got caught up in this ... pseudo-cult thing. It was headed by a girl who I spoke to once over the Internet and then never again, really. He's since stopped talking to her, and he requested not to talk about it with him ever again. She was rather persuasive, and they had this belief that he was some sort of angel-knight to protect her. (Emphasis on the first part.) She was some kind of figurehead magic-woman. I'm fuzzy on the details, partly because he didn't really talk about it much to me at the time, other than to suggest I was supposed to be some kind of seer, and powerful besides.
He wanted a taste of power, of better control, himself, and told me he had contacted a dark creature in order to get the training he wanted. (He gave it a specific name, but I don't remember.)
This is all relevant to a couple of specific incidents. One: he challenged me to try and develop the power he believed I had and use it.
He did this ... well, let me transcribe the conversation as well as I remember it.
Him: "I want you to picture someone. Anyone, really."
Me: "All right I've got something ... " It was a man-boy, a teenager or young adult, maybe, with dark hair and a denim jacket, seen from behind. Like a photograph.
Him: "All right. Now what I want you to do is I want you to make it rain. The [spirit] will know if you're successful. If you don't manage it within three days, that person, whoever it is, will die."
Me: "What."
In all honesty, in perfect honesty, I didn't care about the boy/man. I should have, but I didn't. It was an affront to my pride that he thought I couldn't accomplish this impossibility he presented me with, that there was some kind of condition for failure in this agreement. So I set out to do it, without the first inkling of how I should begin.
I'm fairly confident I did it wrong.
I'll admit, I was angry, a little, and prideful, and stubborn.
I took what I knew of how storms were born, how water is drug up from the river (and other bodies of water, but seriously, I live right on a river) to the clouds, gathering there until it becomes too heavy and falls. I took that knowledge, and I tried to force it along, to grow a storm as organically as possible. I had a pad of paper, and I like to draw, I focused my will through that, scratching dark circles with an ink pen onto the paper, representative of the storm's mass. From above, all storms make spirals, so I made spirals, concentric rings made up entirely of smaller rings, ink like water.
And then I focused all my will, and ... nothing happened.
A great big nothing, no storm clouds blocked the sky, though it was humid and there were some clouds. They just weren't right.
I kept at it, persistent.
It rained, a light sprinkle from an almost clear sky. Not enough to be serious, but enough to let me know I did something.
Maybe.
For the next week or so after whatever-I-did, I was laid low with some kind of illness, Mother Nature's fond "Fuck you," for tampering with her. I'm given to understand that whatever it was I did, I probably shouldn't have tried it.
Or, y'know, I could be crazy and caught a weird summer flu.
About Cat
This was actually when I met Alpha's friend Cat.
Cat and I talked over the internet, after the incident. She suggested that I'm a new soul, with only a couple of reincarnations to my name. She didn't like what I told her about the [spirit], or about Alpha's bargain.
She also said I had a dark green aura which ... might be a difference in perception, or she might be a manipulative bitch, I'll get to that in a minute. At the time, I had this belief that I had a black soul, black energy and that there was something horribly, terribly wrong with me. She also suggested that the [spirit] took advantage of me while I was working my 'spell,' that it ripped a chunk out of me, but she was going to heal it. I felt a weird, stabbing pain/tingle on my arm for the duration of her 'healing.' It was weird.
Energy Flow
The second major experience that I had with this kind of mysticism, before Alpha got out of it and I stopped really thinking about it much, came one night after a series of bad decisions. It was before talking with Cat, but after the rain incident.
Alpha was operating under the belief he was some kind of angel or higher-plane spirit, coloring his soul a brilliant white in contrast to my 'black.'
He said that he was able to change how his 'soul' felt and appeared, and that I should try it, since I was supposed to be this 'seer.' But that I wasn't supposed to try to imitate his energy, since he was an angel and that wouldn't work at all, with consequences.
You can probably imagine how that suggestion went.
I tried to mimic what I felt when I reached for my dear friend's energy, but I never quite succeeded. I determined that the issue was one of proximity - he was too distant, and the power I was reaching for was too vague and indistinct.
So I formed a lance of mental energy, with barbs in it, and I pierced the core of that fiery ball, telling myself I'd take only a small bit, for comparison.
Well, to my perception anyway, I succeeded well enough at bringing it closer, to examine it.
Now, this wouldn't be something I'd list here if there weren't at least a little evidence something happened, so this is that: while I was 'examining' my trophy, Alpha asked me what the hell I just did, saying that it hurt and he had no idea I was capable of anything like that and to never, ever do it again because it hurt.
But since I had a chunk anyway, I figured I'd try the other forbidden thing, to warp my energy to cause it to read like his.
My own power rolled under my examination, thrashing and twisting, never settled or still as I focused, fighting it to make it clean, a ball of milky white, rather than the black waters I normally envisioned. I burned off a lot of my black 'ball' of energy trying to perform this transmutation, but I succeeded ... for a moment or two, anyway.
Predictably, I got sick and nothing else came of it.
Aura Picture
I mentioned also that I was going to cover the 'aura color' a bit more thoroughly, and so I shall.
After college, I went to this psychic convention Mom had been invited to. It was in a small room, and I had a buzzing in my head, like all eyes were on me, picking at me and trying to make me give up my secrets. Among other things I looked into there, there was a little photo booth thing.
It took pictures of auras. Now, I've always believed in auras. People give off energy, especially electrical energy (which is how your iPhone works, by the way - capacitative touchscreens work off of the electrical energy and heat your fingers give off, not pressure. That's why it's nearly impossible to purse-dial with a touchscreen). A cloud of imperceptible energy surrounding everyine is plausible to me, because of that.
There've been studies on this matter - the aura is part of why amputees have phantom limb pains, in theory. An aura-reading machine took a picture of the aura of a leaf that had been cut in half before - and after - it was cut in half. The leaf retained its full-sized aura after the cutting.
Another important thing to note is that the pictures were all different. There were about six taken of different people, lying on the table by the machine's booth. Some were less intense in color, some more intense in color, with all kinds of different swirling hues overlaying the image of the person captured underneath. It was about $10 to get a picture taken with an interperetation attached, and mine didn't match anyone else's either. I think the woman doing the pictures was a little surprised at how intense it was.
The Aura Picture - exactly as it is in real life, more or less.
My computer doesn't know my scanner anymore, so I took a picture of it -
it's so glossy I can see a reflection of my phone and my thumb.
The color interperetations attached to the image follow:
Center: orange, creative, artistic
My left: yellow; sunny, exhilaration
My right: red, force of will.
(My) Left side: Future Influences; yellow
Your future is bound to be thought provoking. Like the rising sun, yellow brings warmth. Yellows are representative of the intellect. Each shade or tint of yellow expresses a type of function, ability, or expression of the intellect, from the craftiness of a mustard yellow to the high thought of a golden yellow. You approach the future with a sense of excitement and joy.
Center: orange represents energy with mental direction. You are ALIVE, artistic, perceptive, creative. Constructive self-expression is important to you.
(My) Right side: Expressed Energy; red
You work hard at what you do. Intensity of experience and fulness of living. Conquest, energy-expanding, you put the energy out. The world sees you as alive, outgoing, sexual, and powerful.
Other colors:
Violet: intuition, art, creativity, supernatural abilities, faith, imagination, incorporeality, reticence, mysteriousness.
Lavender: mysticism, magic, profundity, obsession, intolerance
(I can't tell the difference between violet and lavender. I'm sure there is one, but I can't, so I threw them both in.)
White: developed intellectuality, spirituality, vision of God, higher consciousness, dreaming, energy build-up, pain.
So that's interesting, and seems fairly accurate, too.
Assuming Cat wasn't entirely full of crap - which is a huge factor to consider - my only theory as to why she thought 'dark green' goes thus: A) these things change. The first half of the machine reading was 'incoming' or 'future' energy, after all.
As for B) ...
The original aura picture, with inverted colors.
Sure it's mostly blue, but there's some dark green there.
Remember to ignore that top spot - it's a
reflection from the overhead light.
