Well, I'd like to share my story of getting pulled into, and exiting, a group of practicing pagans, or whatever it is you may call it. My freshman year of college was a wild one, and it appears that I was heading down the wrong path at the beginning, as some kind of force pulled me entirely out of it.
One night, I was hanging out with a friend of mine standing outside our dorm smoking cigarettes when I felt the need to go walk around the corner of our dormitory quad. He told me he didn't want to, and we went up to his room, where I proceeded to convince him to take the walk with me. So we walked around the quad, and I looked directly into a piece of the street lined by trees. By this time it was about 1:30-2 a.m. There was an impenetrable blackness that was in the center of the trees. I attempted to talk Alec into crossing away from it across the grass, but he misunderstood me and refused, so we both walked up to the edge of the darkness. We stopped in our tracks and stared, both knowing we were seeing something unnatural. Some kind of writhing black mass was rising from the ground. I remember the feeling of a presence standing in the middle of the mass...in my mind's eye, I can see two eyes of light glowing out from it. I started to walk in towards it, but my friend Alec physically grabbed me and pulled me back. We then both ran back to the dorms as fast as we could, terrified.
The next night, we went back to check it out with a third friend. There was nothing visually there this time, but as we walked back from the area, we started talking about the plethora of ghost stories that surround the campus, one of them revolving around a picture taken of a fire in one of the dorms at our school in which you can make out a humanoid shape standing on top of the building. As we started talking about the picture, Alec spoke, saying "That person was dead long before the fire." Alec then told us that he couldn't see, and that some kind of weight was pressing down on his head. We walked him back to outside our dorm, and he refused to go in.
Without really discussing it, Justin (the third guy) and I went up to our rooms, got coats, gave one to Alec, and we all started walking towards the dorm that had burned down (it burned down about 50 years ago and has been rebuilt since).
As we walked, Alec had an entirely glazed-over look in his eye, and was telling us that he felt and saw presences around us, and then began going into a narrative about some Native American ritual that had taken place where the Dormitory had been built long before white people came to the continent, that involved coating a captured warrior's organs in wax and burying them.
About three weeks later, all of which we had spent trying to forget anything had happened, I had another friend come to me. She explained to me that she had been having a presence coming into her room and, night by night, getting more comfortable with her to the point of lying down next to her. It freaked her out, obviously, and the night it layed down with her she slept out in the hallway outside of her room.
She then told me that the previous night she had been studying for Latin, and decided to try and get some sleep before the test she had to take. She laid down at 5 a.m. to sleep and was awoken by 5:30 a.m. with images flowing through her head, too strong to be a dream. She then proceeded to sit at her desk, where the radio had somehow turned on, and try and write what was flowing through her head. She told me that somehow she knew I'd understand, and that I was the only person she had told. She gave me the piece of paper she ahd written on, and pretty much dropped the whole thing.
This led me to find a group of practicing mages because it was simply too much to have these two things jump out at me from two entirely unconnected friends. Many of the people in the group claimed to be able to visually see spirits and other types of presences, and they taught me "energy working," did some past life stuff, etc. But, the old cliche of one of them claiming to be a reincarnation of Merlin was there. I didn't really know this was a cliche until recently, but that was part of what got me to separate from them.
It's all still a mystery to me, and as I've said in other posts, my paradigm has kind of switched towards a more Jungian set. This is lead me to believe that most of what was experienced was due to the stresses of freshman year adjustment, and collective psychic energy kind of exploding all over the place. Despite this, I don't think that it makes it any less important, and I would honestly like to delve back into whatever part of my mind was active then.
Anyone have any comments, or any insight into what I experienced? Any direction to point in for re-awakening the now quiet magickal part of my mind? |
PlanetNiles: Where the weather is late