Shadow People

[NobodySpecial268]

The cat my granddaughter and I saw the other night made us think of my white Persain. When he passed away my gr,daughter was not quite two and I had picked her up in another town for a weekend visit.
I didn't tell her there would be no kitty at the house, but as we passed by where I had placed a statue atop Schplatt's grave she said 'Aw...kitty's sleeping".

The kid gets it. 

They do, more than us adults : )

[NobodySpecial268]

Good thread and some interesting commenters. When I find a particularly insightful post I like to mine their profile to find more insightful posts they've made.

Carlos Castaneda's method, or his shaman Don Juan's, for seeing energy involved open eye meditation in total darkness along with some physical ritual. I recall the physical stuff as being similar to some of what the Taoists do. There may be some similarities with Hindu ritual, but I'm not versed enough in that to know.

I've used low light conditions and Ganzfeld fields in training certain mental disciplines.

From memory, ol' Don Juan suggested gazing at the shadows in trees, to not focus on the bright leaves, but rather to look at the shadows. My opinion here is our attention focuses on the colours more than the shadows. That would equate with using the cones of the eye, rather than the rods. I think the point was to practice focusing the attention on the shadows.

In a later book, Castenada wrote of one of the sorcerer girls trimming hanging plants of the veranda to cast shadows. That is another practice that shifts the attention from admiring the green plant to admiring the plant's shadow cast on the walls.

From your link on "Ganzfeld fields" :

The induced state is phenomenologically similar to a transition state between wakefulness and sleep, characterized by alterations in attentiveness, perception, and awareness, as well as by a compressed sense of time.

That suggests to me that the focus there is the transition between being asleep and being awake. Which isn't really the physiological perception of the eyes. I used to write about that back on ATS. Dreaming while awake and interactive shared dreamscapes. But that is different from seeing the shadows using the eyes. (geez that PubMed article uses a lot of big words . . . : )

[Michigan Swampbuck]

"From Out of the Corner of Your Eye" -- yep, that is exactly it, and what I want to explore here in the next few days. That is the peripheral vision and the rod cells of the eyes as the physiological receptors.

Your ATS thread opening post explains the rods and cones, an is a part of what I wanted to write about here. Would you like to post your opening ATS post here? I was going to cover that next, and you have done a good job.

I will go through that thread, edit it some, and post it here for you. I wanted to add to it after a while and publish a whole article anyway. There are a number of quotes and links that are important and I only posted the opening paragraphs as a teaser.

There are circumstances when the rods can pick up on the infra-red spectrum and see it as a cyan color. It may be that ghosts radiate in the infra-red light frequency and that we can see them under the right conditions.

[Ksihkehe]

(geez that PubMed article uses a lot of big words . . .  : )

I just posted it because the abstract has a decent vanilla description of it. I wasn't even sure the article itself was accessible.

On a sunny day, with the right trees with a nice big open canopy, the patterns of shadow move like water. It's easy to fall in. That sounds like what they were doing sculpting the plants. The Dreamachine was a lamp with a spinning shade, which is viewed with the eyes closed for a sort of strobe effect.
  
Sufficiently chaotic light patterns, thought not exactly like a Ganzfeld effect, can help induce altered states too.

[NobodySpecial268]

I will go through that thread, edit it some, and post it here for you. I wanted to add to it after a while and publish a whole article anyway. There are a number of quotes and links that are important and I only posted the opening paragraphs as a teaser.

There are circumstances when the rods can pick up on the infra-red spectrum and see it as a cyan color. It may be that ghosts radiate in the infra-red light frequency and that we can see them under the right conditions.

Cool! I had a read of the thread and I can enlarge on a few points. With the ghosts and infra red, A cold spot is often reported with them.

[NobodySpecial268]

I just posted it because the abstract has a decent vanilla description of it. I wasn't even sure the article itself was accessible.

On a sunny day, with the right trees with a nice big open canopy, the patterns of shadow move like water. It's easy to fall in. That sounds like what they were doing sculpting the plants. The Dreamachine was a lamp with a spinning shade, which is viewed with the eyes closed for a sort of strobe effect.
  
Sufficiently chaotic light patterns, thought not exactly like a Ganzfeld effect, can help induce altered states too.

The article abstract was interesting from the point of view of RV'ing. While I can't speak of the methods of Rv'ers such as Joe McMoneagle, because I haven't met him, the so-called "Ganzfeld" technique is familiar to me.

If one learns to dream while awake, a whole new world of exploration opens up with other, often non-human Beings to meet. But that world is certainly not benign, to put it mildly. The technique is one thing, and navigating the shared interactive dreamscapes is quite another.

The article is an interesting find. Perhaps something for a future RV'ing thread.

[FCD]

I haven't fully digested every comment in this thread yet, but I have skimmed over all of them.  So, if I'm repeating something someone else said, my apologies.

I think we're dealing with three, possibly four, distinctly different things or phenomenon here:

1. Something which IS there, but a person only catches a glimpse of it.

2. Something which is NOT there which a person 'believes' they saw.

3. Something paranormal, or not a physical thing, which a person DOES see, but there doesn't appear to be anything material there.  And...

4. Something someone thinks they see which is not 'paranormal', but rather 'para-noid'.  (i.e. somebody's watching me).

Now, at first glance you may be thinking about thanking Captain Obvious for pointing these things out, but my intent is a little deeper.  When you combine ALL four of these things together the probability of seeing one of them quadruples.  I point this out because I have scary-good peripheral vision, sometimes to the point of being very irritating.  If there is movement at the extreme right or left of my field of vision, my eyes will immediately jump to whatever that is.  Strangely, one of the most notable things I see are very tiny.  As some may know, we live way out in the country, and wild rabbits are very common here (they're everywhere, in fact, we're being invaded with the dang things).  Against a backdrop of dry winter grass a cottontail rabbit is all but invisible, yet I will see something move.  After spending some time figuring out what I am actually seeing I've realized what I see is not the rabbit itself, but the rabbit's eye.  So, for example, I'll see something and look, only to see nothing there, but if I sweep back across the same area more slowly I'll see the eye of a rabbit...even sometimes 60-70 yards away.  Now, this thread isn't about me, but I point this out to illustrate what many of us see...'out of the corner of our eye'.

The human eye spots movement, even when not directly in our field of view.  But in order to spot movement there has to be something there.  This brings me to 'shadow people', which is essentially #3 on the list above.  I too have seen such things, but I often wonder if what I saw was really a mental image from my memory rather than something actually in my field of view.  I say this because, at least in my experience, I've never seen something I wasn't already thinking about, even if indirectly.  This type of experience more resembles #2 in the list above.  So, you can see that when all four of these possibilities are combined the frequency of possibly seeing something like this increases 400%.  And, because of the close relationship between item #2 and #3 above, differentiating between any of them can be difficult.

No overall conclusion here, but just some points of reference to help clarify various phenomenon.

[Nugget]

Excelent analogy, FCD! 

I always look for a reason why something strange occured besides the 'paranormal' explaination, since I have a gut feeling most are 'created' or 'allowed' to transpire by us, albeit without even being aware of the part we're playing.

My SIL and I were sitting across the room from each other, visiting while the menfolk were gone. We were discussing strange things and the paranormal, but each of us would pause mid sentence.
I asked her if she was 'seeing' something and she said "Yes! Every..."
I told her to STOP right there; I'll get some paper and pens. You write down what you're seeing and I'll do the same, then we'll compare notes.

Turns out we wwere 100% seeing the same thing; bright, tiny silver specks daarting rapidly above each others' heads.

Now, did we somehow create this event from our subconscious minds? Did another demension interact with ours since we somehow opened a door?
It was 50 years ago that this happened. I've since come to believe everybody has some strange, unexplained event in their history.

I've long believed the fine line dividing all of the sciences to be the reason we never get any answers to what is considered paranormal. I think it's a very normal part of our existance that never gets properly studied because the 'paranormal doesn't exist'.It's though to be looney fringe science.

AI just may inadverntly uncover some inconvient truths nobody is expecting if they ever decide to cross-reference all of the data.

[NobodySpecial268]

I haven't fully digested every comment in this thread yet, but I have skimmed over all of them.  So, if I'm repeating something someone else said, my apologies.

I think we're dealing with three, possibly four, distinctly different things or phenomenon here:

1. Something which IS there, but a person only catches a glimpse of it.

2. Something which is NOT there which a person 'believes' they saw.

3. Something paranormal, or not a physical thing, which a person DOES see, but there doesn't appear to be anything material there.  And...

4. Something someone thinks they see which is not 'paranormal', but rather 'para-noid'.  (i.e. somebody's watching me).

Now, at first glance you may be thinking about thanking Captain Obvious for pointing these things out, but my intent is a little deeper.  When you combine ALL four of these things together the probability of seeing one of them quadruples.  I point this out because I have scary-good peripheral vision, sometimes to the point of being very irritating.  If there is movement at the extreme right or left of my field of vision, my eyes will immediately jump to whatever that is.  Strangely, one of the most notable things I see are very tiny.  As some may know, we live way out in the country, and wild rabbits are very common here (they're everywhere, in fact, we're being invaded with the dang things).  Against a backdrop of dry winter grass a cottontail rabbit is all but invisible, yet I will see something move.  After spending some time figuring out what I am actually seeing I've realized what I see is not the rabbit itself, but the rabbit's eye.  So, for example, I'll see something and look, only to see nothing there, but if I sweep back across the same area more slowly I'll see the eye of a rabbit...even sometimes 60-70 yards away.  Now, this thread isn't about me, but I point this out to illustrate what many of us see...'out of the corner of our eye'.

The human eye spots movement, even when not directly in our field of view.  But in order to spot movement there has to be something there.  This brings me to 'shadow people', which is essentially #3 on the list above.  I too have seen such things, but I often wonder if what I saw was really a mental image from my memory rather than something actually in my field of view.  I say this because, at least in my experience, I've never seen something I wasn't already thinking about, even if indirectly.  This type of experience more resembles #2 in the list above.  So, you can see that when all four of these possibilities are combined the frequency of possibly seeing something like this increases 400%.  And, because of the close relationship between item #2 and #3 above, differentiating between any of them can be difficult.

No overall conclusion here, but just some points of reference to help clarify various phenomenon.

It all adds to the discussion and topic. Yesterday I could hear a strange rustling in my house. That turned out to be two mice fighting on linoleum flooring. (Where did I put the traps . . . ) So yeah, one should explore the mundane explanation.

On the other hand kids grow up in haunted houses, can see things and the adults ignore them. Not so long ago kids would get into a lot of trouble for speaking of it. I spent my first first six years in one of those houses, back in the early 1960s. My uncle could see them too. Dead drunks who would walk through the house between the brewery and the bottle shop. They would soak in the vats at the brewery and do their 'walks' from bottle shop to bottle shop. Not much of an afterlife for them. But geez they do like to terrorize kids.

I think psychology and religion have a great deal to answer for in dismissing a lot of cases. This is where we need serious investigators who can solve these problems.

[NobodySpecial268]

Excelent analogy, FCD! 

I always look for a reason why something strange occured besides the 'paranormal' explaination, since I have a gut feeling most are 'created' or 'allowed' to transpire by us, albeit without even being aware of the part we're playing.

My SIL and I were sitting across the room from each other, visiting while the menfolk were gone. We were discussing strange things and the paranormal, but each of us would pause mid sentence.
I asked her if she was 'seeing' something and she said "Yes! Every..."
I told her to STOP right there; I'll get some paper and pens. You write down what you're seeing and I'll do the same, then we'll compare notes.

Turns out we wwere 100% seeing the same thing; bright, tiny silver specks daarting rapidly above each others' heads.

Now, did we somehow create this event from our subconscious minds? Did another demension interact with ours since we somehow opened a door?
It was 50 years ago that this happened. I've since come to believe everybody has some strange, unexplained event in their history.

I've long believed the fine line dividing all of the sciences to be the reason we never get any answers to what is considered paranormal. I think it's a very normal part of our existance that never gets properly studied because the 'paranormal doesn't exist'.It's though to be looney fringe science.

AI just may inadverntly uncover some inconvient truths nobody is expecting if they ever decide to cross-reference all of the data.

Perhaps something attracted by the emotions and visualisations of talking about the 'paranormal' -- like moths around a flame?