Presence Out of Context/Underworld

Message, January 21, 2026. 7:21 PM.

Question: If you were dreaming right now, do you think you would sense the presence of the you who was dreaming? The presence of your sleeping self?

If you could, do you think you would recognize yourself as that presence?

I ask because this evening, I was out in town. The sun was below the horizon, but the sky was still a luminous (if ominous) grey. The lights of the town suddenly seemed to become more distinct, more vivid, with a strange depth. Despite the people and the traffic and the shops all around, I could feel the miles of snowy landscape around me, like a sort of echo.

It all felt slightly unreal. Memories flitted through my head not quite at random - us standing outside the art museum in the November wind, you and me on that drive from Texas to the Midwest. Other, things, too. It all felt similar somehow.

It wasn't just cold grue, but layers of it, like layers of time.

The radio played "wrapped around your finger" and it all felt so haunted that I began to question it, the meaning of it. It was as if I were hearing the song in its proper setting for the first time, the proper context, which allowed me to detect an essence I'd never noticed before. Something liminal. What was it I sensed?

My stream of consciousness was like so:

Underworld landscape. What would it feel like if you were dead and didn't know it? Would it feel like this? No, not quite. We are not entirely ghosts. We are something else. Has the rest the world disappeared, has the real world been obliterated and left this shadowy world behind? No, not quite that, either.

And what was the eerie, nameless presence in the atmosphere?

When running through all the iterations of what this was like, I realized that it was most like a dream, but as seen from the other side.

As if I were in the dream without knowing that I was being dreamed.

Except for the nameless, eerie presence of something unknown. 

***

It's been a few days since this happened, and I'm still thinking about it. Would you recognize your own presence out of context? The remnants of your own energy in a place where you used to live? 

Or (as my husband pointed out) the presence of your higher self, the eternal self that already knows all? 

I told him, if that were the case, I could think of two times such an awareness could become evident: if your higher self intervened to nudge you in a necessary direction, or that you, in your physical existence, had become so nebulous that you began to blend into that other world. 

I still wonder which one I experienced. 

But I suspect I know. 

Places Only Remembered In Dreams

1.

Sometimes I dream of a small building, perfectly square, made of cinderblocks painted azure blue. Inside is a dark space, meant for unknown purposes - unknown to me, that is - at least, there is never anyone around to explain. Sometimes I find things there. Printed pages of stories I can't remember writing. Pictures that disappear when I look too long. Messages from people I've never known.

I'd forgotten that this was a real place, a real building, anyway, until I happened upon it on my recent trip to Victoria. There it was, blue and inscrutable as ever, broadcasting no hint as to its use. I remembered then that back in those times of my restless night driving, it used to have a moon-shaped light at the door. 

2. 

Sometimes I dream of a place that is an impossible combination of English lowland and Gulf coast rice field, the glint of wetland reflecting the grey-grained sky. Ghostly egrets stalk like emissaries from other worlds. Clouds of murmurating starlings glimmer like white noise. Far away in the distance, I see the beacon blinking. I imagine the wisps of fog, the salt air at your windows, the warped wood at your door. 

I suppose the word must have spread on the astral...

Somehow I'd forgotten to post this earlier, but this is the art notebook I kept during 2021-2022. I don't know if it's good at all, but I do know I finished it, and that must count for something.

Distant Early Warning

Or maybe not so distant. Who can say?

I'm loathe to talk about anything approaching current events or even the outside world here on this blog, because...well, don't we all get enough of that already? Everybody has their own opinion, and mine carries no more weight than any other. I'd rather write about my own small but mysterious world.

Sometimes the two intersect, however, in ways that demand attention.

Such was the case on the night of January 2, when I was startled from sleep by a dream-that-wasn't-quite-a-dream. Without so much as a pardon the interruption, the pastel wonderland in my head was replaced by a picture of a bright, shining, but completely empty city.

What happened next was rather unsettling. 

"Soon, the human societal structure will no longer be capable of supporting human biological needs," a voice - calmly, almost soothingly, neutral - announced. "The seeds of this have already been planted. The imbalance of power and the transfer of resources from the real to the unreal have made the situation untenable."

I knew, somehow, that the cities I was looking at were places where the residents had been forced out, leaving most of the property in the hands of a few.

''Soon, the ability to access shelter, medical care and even to reproduce will be limited" the voice continued, and I understood that when this last thing came to pass - interpreted by me as not only infertility, but the avoidance of childbearing due to lack of safety and no functional society to support childrearing - this would be a point of no return.

Again, I was shown vistas with no people, this time filled with bitcoin mining facilities instead.

"An event will occur that will skew the balance of power even further," said the voice, along with a tumult of images: office blocks of malfunctioning computers, a financial crisis, money losing its value or becoming somehow "unreal." It all felt desperate and grim.

Another, more distant voice began to shout from the desolate landscape: "There is no one at the helm. There is no one at the helm."

I'd been half awake through most of this but came fully awake with this phase in my mind. It had been so vivid and realistic. At first, I thought maybe I'd overheard some apocalyptic tv program, but no, all was silent - everyone else was asleep. 

I lay there for a long time, eyes closed, mulling it over. 

There were many things understood but not explicitly stated about this quasi-dream. The importance of the real vs the unreal, for one, the massive amounts of energy being used in bitcoin mining, the extremes to which the balance of power would be skewed due to the "event," the impact of societal breakdown on the climate, and more. The emptiness of the cities I interpreted as a metaphor, but the sense of a few haves and many millions of have-nots felt very real indeed.

"There is no one at the helm." I lay there with that phrase echoing in my mind and understood that this - should it actually happen - would be a so-called black swan event that the canny would use to their advantage while there was no one to stop them.

I'm not one to stake everything on a dream or even a non-dream; I'm taking it with a few grains of salt. But when these articles crossed my path last night, I had to raise my eyebrows a few inches. This one from January 3 talks of the potential for a situation much like the one described in my vision, and this one from January 7 even more so, with a darker and more conspiratorial turn. Called, most intriguingly, The Unreality Of Money

It's worth thinking about at the very least.