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. 

Crescent Moon in the Window, Crescent Moon in the Sky

Sometimes it feels like something is about to happen, but nothing happens. I wonder if I missed it, made the wrong move at the wrong time. Perhaps something did happen, but it's too subtle to register in my dim understanding. Maybe I stepped across the line into another dimension, which is so like the previous one it's impossible to tell. Maybe I'm like the foolish protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, who comes to believe that the extraordinary thing that was going to happen to him would be that nothing happens to him (spoiler alert - he was wrong). 

On nights like these, I go outside and look at the sky, hoping for insight to descend. It is out there, waiting, but I can't reach it - there is something in the way.

Sometimes, twilight clouds hang heavy over the house. The cat hides under my bed at the sound of thunder. Sometimes, the wind from the lake batters my west window like a ghost demanding entrance. Erie/eerie. 

One night in the dead of winter, my housemate and I were lying on my bedroom floor, drawing. Far above in the icy sky, we heard the sound of a plane. "I'd hate to be up there on a night like this" he said, and for a moment our imaginations drifted along with the pilot, mapping the edge of the atmosphere. 

Last Thursday I went to a lecture at the planetarium. I felt dizzy as the projected sky spun around and around. The astronomer pointed out what the astrologers call fixed stars. I remembered watching the sky night after night from my altar rock, and later, when the world was very different, standing by the gate and gazing between Aldebaran and Pleiades.

My own past words come back to me, here in her future. "The word on the astral is things will never be the same. You may not notice, though. They've always already been forever changed."

What I Did On My Eerie Vacation

This year I spent Halloween further afield, seeking signs and wonders in the mysterious Midwest. Despite being a weakling who can't travel more than a few blocks without becoming deathly ill, and having to wheeze my pitiful way around the buckeye state, I was not disappointed.

(Fair warning, the next few posts will be devoted to posting vacation pics, but they are eerie ones, at least.)

Work and Non-Work

With apologies to Broadcast, the Mothwing Collective has been busy with...work? Or is it non-work? In any case, we've been the nicest kind of busy. A few items from our rapidly expanding collection here for your perusal, composites of our individual work and pictures made on our search for the bright side of the eerie.

"Send a few clicks into the unknown, see what comes back."

The Opposite of Absence

It's high summer and the landscape is breathless. Even the cicadas have gone silent. We move in slow motion if we move at all; I feel like a photograph that's been captured mid-step.

The hallway light flickers, the dishwasher churns, a patch of sun creeps across the face of the kitchen clock. The kids tell me about the hum of the powerlines on the corner, but I find that I'm too old hear it now. 

In the bath, a stray yellow leaf clings to a hand towel on the rack, its parched edges furled like wings. There's a vibration in the air that feels like waiting. It's nebulous but heavy, the opposite of absence. 

In The Weird and The Eerie, Mark Fisher asked "who or what is the entity who has woven fate?" 

I listen to the soundless space where the hum used to be. I get the feeling I might know the answer. 

The Edge Of Autumn

Just days before the equinox and blazing hot. Autumn merely a celestial notion.

I'd been expecting a package and news had reached my ears that it had been delivered that very afternoon. Fantastic. With hope in my heart, I walked down the road. 

It was the same walk I'd dreamed of once long ago, and though now I was wide awake in the sun, a subtle hallucinatory quality had  nevertheless begun to steal across the land. 

Most of the time, it's not so obvious that this place is on the edge of the desert. In the brutal last days summer, though, with no soft greenery to cushion it. a barren moonscape reveals itself. Layers of memory (it seemed to me) had become exposed like rocks jutting above the surface, the bleached and jagged bones of the earth. 

I remembered my father, my siblings and the neighbors we'd had, and the games we'd played, among the limestone outcroppings that had their own names and the dry creeks and river bed. The agave, a huge, old towering thing, reached its spiky leaves to the sky. The needly hooked tooth edges snagged my attention, the way things do when the world goes strange.

Yes, the landscape was feeling restive, and really, who could blame it? It had been a relentless season

I was halfway down the road and the wind was picking up. Shades of the old dream again, but this time the wind was scorching, hot enough to distort the air. It rattled and hissed and shook the trees. Soon, like the dream, it began to howl. 

No sooner had I reached the place where the two roads met than I felt it, that mysterious, indescribable sense of another reality overlapping my own. I stood there for a while, half-hypnotized by the spinning vents on top of old Mrs. Kirtchner's house, wondering what it was that I felt, and how to even talk about it. But all I could articulate to myself was that I was standing at the edge of Autumn.

Well, hang around a crossroad long enough and you are bound to discover something.

My package was in the mailbox. What was in it? Eh, just stuff. A red herring, as red as my dress in the equinoctial wind.

I walked back home, once again full of knowledge that was beyond me to explain

The Waiting Landscape

There is something eerie about an empty field in the noonday sun. As if it's waiting for something to appear out of the heat shimmer and cicada hum.

Echoes

Much of my childhood was spent in the dimly lit netherworld of movie theaters and skating rinks. One of the theaters my brother managed had a rather eerie atmosphere. These pictures are modern - the building has undergone quite a bit of renovation in recent years - but it gives a hint at least of how it looked back those days. Despite any resident ghosts, the place was a sort of safe haven for me, a place of endless Twizzlers and SweeTarts and fizzy orange soda. 

I originally posted the tale of my experiences at another site, which I've reposted here:

Back in the 80's, my brother was the manager of a movie theater. It was a huge old building, built during the age of the silent movie palace. I spent a good chunk of my childhood there - bro would put me to work cleaning the auditoriums between shows and making popcorn at the concession stand. The rest of the time I'd roam the place, which was full of nooks and crannies. It was a bit maze-like, so that was pretty fun. I was quite fond of the place.

Probably all theaters have a creepy feeling after hours. When my cousins would visit, we'd listen to what my cousin Nancy called "theater echoes" - those sort of faint, disembodied voices you hear in a place like that. I suppose it's the acoustics that cause it, I liked to imagine it's some sort of trapped sound that just bounces around for years and years. Anyway, that's probably not too unusual in a place like that, but it did add to the atmosphere.

Sometimes I'd get the distinct feeling I was being watched, but I put that down to the cranky old projectionist - he'd been working there since the 1920's and I was forbidden to go into his booth (which was covered in nudie pictures the times I did sneak a look!) But some other things weren't so easy to pass off.

One was the thing we called "the bat" It wasn't a real bat (though occasionally one got in) because it would have to have been huge, able to move at warp speed and disappear from even an enclosed space instantly. The thing we would see was a large black shape like a wing that would appear in the corner of our eye. Turn to look at it, and it would appear in the corner of our other eye. I recall sitting on the stairs one day for ages, intently watching the thing flit through my peripheral vision - I was determined to look at it properly, you understand. But no luck.

This wasn't scary at all, just weird, and I thought it was just me until one day the staff were standing around and started talking about it - same large black shape, same peripheral flitting.

Then there were some nights, at 12 or 1 in the morning, my brother would be up in the offices finishing the day's paperwork when we'd hear distinctly human sounding footsteps slowly pacing the roof of the building. I recall bro saying that this happened all the time, and not being especially concerned about it. The roof wasn't flat though, so it couldn't have just been someone taking a stroll up there.

the basement

What was somewhat scarier was the basement. That's where the marquee letters were kept, and we'd have to go down there late at night when it was time to change the sign. The basement had a dirt floor and was always cold. Some of the older staff members attributed any haunting activities to this place, because years back one of the workers, a janitor who'd been allowed to sleep there, had died of a heart attack. I tried to stay away from there, not the least because the basement door was inside the men's restroom - the horror stories practically write themselves.

But the thing that really, truly convinced me the place was haunted were the candy machines. For decades, there'd been a couple of candy machines in the lobby, selling gumballs or candied peanuts for a nickel. Probably these machines has been used thousands of times over the years, but while my brother was working there, they'd decided to remove them. Still, after hours when everything was quiet, you could still hear them loud and clear - non-existent coin going into the slot, turn of the invisible crank, immaterial candy rattling down the chute. Over and over, clear as a bell. Everyone who worked there knew the sound.

This is probably the most harmless and innocent of all ghostly manifestations, but very convincing to me. 

Looking back, I think this place wasn't seriously frightening because any hauntings were strictly of the Stone Tape variety.

Edit - I've just looked it up and found an article claiming the theater is haunted - but blaming all the haunting on the ghost of the pervy projectionist! Silly. They should have asked me. Although I'm sure his shade is still hanging around.

Crow Moon Rising

On the night of the crow moon, I came out after sunset. It was later than expected and there were eerie, red-rimmed clouds in the west.

As I stepped onto the lawn, a small dark shape streaked past, low to the ground. Cat, rabbit, fox? It seemed the wrong size to be any of these. I looked back only to see it dissolve into nothing. Strange.

My teenage son comes up the path and says, mother, there's some odd stuff happening out here. Like what, I ask. He says, well there's owls hooting in the trees, and weird creaking sounds, and a rock just came out of nowhere and hit me on the shoulder.

He showed me the rock. It was light, but big as the palm of his hand. I said, well, squirrels will pelt people with objects, maybe owls do, too. I didn't mention the dissolving dark shape - no reason to add to any flights of fancy.

I sat down near the oleanders to watch the rising moon. On the road I saw someone walking, though in the blue dusk I could see little more than a man-shape. I peered into the road, wondering if it was someone I knew, but as I looked it also dissolved into nothing.

Two dissolving shadows, I noted privately. Uh-huh. You should never trust your eyes at twilight, it's notorious for playing tricks. The eerie sky and night noises might be causing our imaginations to play up. Of course. But when you're a born witch (or a viewer of Twin Peaks) you know that owls, or anything else for that matter, may not be what they seem.

I didn't feel anything was too awry, though, nothing I couldn't handle, so I went back to watching the moon.

Teen son sat down beside me to watch, too. The crow moon rose, in a lovely silvery light.

We sat and talked about cheerful things to dispel any unease. I took some photos. It really was a nice night, breezy and warm. Suddenly, son jumped up. He said, mother, come in the house with me now, please.  I asked, what's wrong. and son says, mother, come in the house with me now.

Indoors, he said he'd felt something cold touch the back of his neck and a female voice had spoken right into his ear, "Go back inside."

He was really spooked, but I told him there's no reason to worry, no reason to assume it was anything nasty. Maybe it was just nerves, maybe it was his intuition that he happened to perceive as a voice. Of course, if your gut - one way or another - is telling you to get the heck out of Dodge, then it's generally the wise thing to do.

And anyway if something sees fit to pelt you with rocks, whether it's squirrels or Sasquatch or vengeful revenants, it's always best to move along.

I felt a bit bad, though. I should have been more alert. My mistake was in thinking I could dispel anything by distracting with cheerful talk. All I did was distract myself.

Later that night, when there were no more sinister shadows or a sense of unease, what my dad always called a buttermilk sky appeared.

We went out and lay on the ground to look up at it while the cats studied us, wondering what the silly humans were up to. All was at peace now. The luminous sky had become a shelter, and all was well as the crow moon shone through the clouds.

Down In The Canyon

A while back, we went for a walk in a nearby canyon. It's a public hiking trail, but it was an uncomfortably eerie experience. We all felt it. Maybe it was being hemmed in by the narrow canyon walls. Maybe it was vibration, echoes, infrasound, or just being in the crevice of this long dead fault. I don't know, but here are some pictures.

Really it's just like a river of rocks, rocks and more rocks, but we kept getting dizzy or feeling a squeezing pressure on our eyes like we were in a fishbowl. Teen son said he felt the place was very negative, even sinister, but again, that could be down to infrasound...

 But I suppose one never knows.

The Inconstant Muse

1. Something Happened

It was a cold, lightless day, perhaps it was January; the weather had that distinctive, hopeless feel. I was in my mother's car, coming back from San Antonio, I think. On the corner of Magazine and Butcher streets, I remember seeing black branches and telephone wires outlined against the sky. There was nothing special or unique about this moment. There is no reason it should have lodged itself in my memory. Bur there it is.

The moment fades, or rather fails to continue to exist.  I am sitting in my apartment. Through the windows I can see remnants of the lowering gloom. Fear is running though me like electricity, like a red-hot grid of nichrome wire. There'd been no segue from there to here, no awareness of movement, only nothingness, a numb and fathomless void.

I take out my notebook and write the words "something happened", as if this could help me reconstruct the missing time. It couldn't, of course. It still can't. I can only recall suddenly being there, in that dismal place that smelled of rat-chewed paper. What can you construct out of nothingness, beside the alarming certainty that for a moment you had ceased to exist?

2. The Curious Tale Of The Invention Of Prozac

It was a couple of years later, in the middle of summer, I caught a bus to Waco. It was hot and sunny that day. I wore a crop top with a sunflower print - sunflowers being the thing that year - and jeans with navy blue flats. I had a tiny handbag and eyeliner that matched my shoes. It was an ill-fated romance I was having up there in Waco, though it might be more accurate to call it a waste of time. Whatever it was, the ride to get there was 6 hours of sheer and utter boredom, although if you think about it, the sort of excitement you'd get on a bus is probably not the sort of excitement you'd want to have anyhow.

I've never been able to sleep in a moving vehicle, and back then there were no clever phones to occupy your time. On the way to the station, I'd stopped at the new grocery store on the south side of town to grab a bag of Gardetto's and a magazine from the rack. There was no sense in being hungry as well as bored. Thus fortified, I got on the bus.

It wasn't until halfway through the trip I'd started flipping through the magazine. That particular bus took a long and torturous route once it left Travis county, so unless you enjoyed looking at dilapidated buildings and cedar brakes there wasn't much to see. Memory tells me it was beginning to get late in the day, although that might have just been dimness from the tinted windows. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about 4 o'clock.

That was the year Prozac Nation: Young And Depressed In America was the hot bestseller, which I hadn't read because I was already young and depressed in America and didn't feel the need to read about it. Elizabeth Wurtzel was everywhere though, and she was in this magazine, too. I remember her photo next to her byline, wearing a lavender-colored blouse. The article was about the invention of Prozac, how she'd gone to research the story of the drug that had saved her life. I read the article, which was somewhat of a disappointment, and nothing much interesting happened on the rest of the trip. I left the magazine on the bus when we got to Waco and that was that. Whatever else was in the magazine, barely a hint remains with me now.

...

Years pass. Waco, with its dour atmosphere and concrete skyline, recedes into my history. The dismal apartment recedes, too, thank god. I move away, and life goes on.

And yet. The memory of that bus ride and that article come back to me again and again. They show up in unguarded moments, prodding at me like a troublesome ghost. Here is where I wish I were a better writer, because how can I truly describe the eeriness of these moments? The way it brought to mind writing in my notebook that "something happened"? The way what should have been a simple memory seemed as if it were hiding something I should have known all along?

Around 2010, with growing uneasiness, I finally decided to look up the article. Perhaps it would give me a clue as to what was wrong. The magazine had a large and thorough archive that was easy to search. Nevertheless, I could find no such item. I looked up everything Elizabeth Wurtzel had ever published. Again, there was no such thing. I searched for other writing on the subject, but there was nothing that was familiar in any way. Frustrated, I looked up the actual history of the invention of Prozac, and discovered that almost everything I'd remembered reading in the article was wrong.

And then comes the funny part - because the Cosmic Joker has a way with these things - I realized that the author photo I so clearly remembered wasn't of Elizabeth Wurtzel at all, but Elizabeth McGovern, the actress. No sighted person could possibly mistake one woman for the other, but here I was, with both images in my mind, somehow without questioning it. How could this happen?

There was an obvious explanation. I must have fallen asleep on the bus, even though I'd swear I hadn't, and dreamt the article. No, this isn't a usual thing to happen to me, but who's to say it can't, after all. Nothing mysterious then, only an ordinary foible, mistaking a dream for reality.

Except...except...I realized (and records bear this out) that the store where I'd bought the magazine and snack hadn't even been built until a year later. This is the point where the dream theory falls apart. I rarely went to that side of town unless it was to go to the bus station. I only used the bus when seeing Waco man. I was no longer seeing Waco man by the time the store was built. And the only time I'd buy those kind of snacks or that certain magazine is for a road trip. Anyway (for what it's worth) I remember it as clear as day: me in my sunflower top and my navy blue shoes, excited about seeing my boyfriend, waiting in the express lane, plucking that magazine out the rack, the smell of the brand new store, the high windows, the light on the south side of town.

There is no boredom, road hypnosis or toxic traffic fumes to confuse this part of the memory. It is untrammeled. And here the eeriness comes over me again. I would swear - will swear - I got off the bus with the memory of reading that article. But now I have to ask...when exactly did the false memory sneak in and replace apparent reality? And what happened to the reality?

Where does memory go when it disappears?

I suspect only Mnemosyne knows.

Ghoulies, Ghosties And Long-Leggedy Beasties

What, you say, it's the wrong time of year for ghosts? Nonsense. It's always time. And it's always time for a few spooky gifs.

It might be February, but the wind is murmuring eerily in the eaves, and I don't feel as if I'm quite alone here...