Parallel Realities?

This is a subject that seems to keep intruding upon many areas of anomalous encounters, but is, for me at least, impossible to get a handle on. Events occur, apparently with solid testimonies, in almost every "collection" of types of anomalous incidents, which give one the creepy feeling that the answer to them doesn't quite lie "here" [that is in this mundane world]. But who knows? I'm going to present a scatter of things culled from different sources to illustrate these sorts of tales. They may well have nothing to do with one another [or the Helen Lane encounter of last time] but they may have everything to do with these high strangeness incidents.--------------------------------------------------------Carl Jung visited a historical tomb in Ravenna, Italy in 1913, and was impressed by "atmosphere" of the place. Twenty years later he returned with a friend. This time he experienced a "mild blue light" permeating the room, and could not comprehend it because the windows that he remembered from the previous visit weren't there anymore, replaced by four huge mosaic frescoes. Jung and his companion spent a good deal of time discussing the frescoes in detail which impressed him greatly. Leaving the area, Jung tried to find photos of the frescoes but couldn't do so. In a rush, he let it go and returned home to Switzerland. There he tried again, but could find no recorded photographs. Finally, on the occurrence of a friend traveling to Ravenna, he asked if photos could be purchased again. The friend upon reaching Ravenna found that no such paintings existed in the tomb at all. Jung and his original companion had mutually witnessed something that was "not there". An alternate reality? Jung said that this was the most puzzling experience he had in his entire life and never felt he could properly explain it. ------------------------------------------------People less famous than Jung have these experiences as well. There is a relatively well-known lengthy "vision" shared by two women in 1901 [called the "Trianon Adventure"], in which they seem to have witnessed 18th century persons while walking in the gardens of Versailles. In the 1930s, a young girl was cycling in Wiltshire and saw a cottage off the road, and asked for shelter from a quickly breaking storm. An old man allowed her in and she entered to find herself in an environment with absolutely no noise, not even from the storm. The man never spoke and merely stood silently the whole time. Then, without knowing how, she found herself back on the road. Despite the drenching storm, she was dry, so she must have sheltered somewhere. Her friends informed her that no such cottage existed, but there was a derelict cottage in that area, long in ruins. She cycled back to find the derelict ruined just as they said.---------------------------------------------------------------The scientist, John Burgeson, doesn't claim appearing and vanishing cottages, but he claims that his own house, as a child, would "change orientation" to the surrounding structures and roads in ways that he still finds difficult to describe. "Things looked different, but the same....The neighborhood 'looked different', some streets which were only a vague part of the world I knew as a boy came into sharp focus; others I knew well were hardly perceived....it was as if I were actually moving from life to life, yet always the same person. There was something transforming about these experiences--I always felt [at least after they happened] that there must be something more to life than what I perceived."---------------------------------------------------------------A rugged outdoorsman and writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, Tom Stienstra, was camping, fishing, and walking trails in the Klamath National Forest usually encountering nothing but the wildlife. Going out a dead-end trail in their vehicle, he and his buddy were appalled to find they had a flat tire and in the attempt to fix it, the jack broke. They knew they were, to put it in the vernacular, screwed. But "immediately" [less than 20 seconds] of the jack breaking, an "ancient pickup truck" came from behind and out disembarked a man and a woman dressed in Native American clothing and of astounding handsomeness. Without saying a word, they got a jack and changed the tire. They returned to their truck, still no words, waved, drove past, and went on down the dead-end road ahead of them. Stienstra and his friend were flabbergasted but got in their own vehicle and continued after [their helpers now out-of-sight somewhere up the road]. Stienstra drove on right to the dead end. Their helpers were nowhere in sight and there had been nowhere to egress from the road. Their trip to the dead-end was only two minutes long--they were sure that they could not have missed them. --------------------------------------------------Perhaps not surprisingly, there are many incidents where a person experiences what seems to be an alternative reality while walking in a deep woods. Ron Quinn in his book, Little People, retells a couple of these. In 1977, a man named Ned Grimm was walking into a forest that he knew very well, as he had often gone there to hike and just be in nature. A hundred yards in, he felt a brief tingling sensation pass through his body. The sensation stopped and he walked on. Gradually as he hiked, he noticed that the surroundings didn't have the same character that he associated with "his" woods. The plants were of a different type. The area was more "open". The nearby cliffs shouldn't have been there. Even the color of the sky seemed slightly off tone. Sure now that he was lost, Ned tried to "walk out" using dead reckoning. Around an upcoming bend he heard music. Yep, you guessed it: there by a waterfall were a group of "little men" playing on flutes and gathering water. Ned had the calmness to get out his camera and take pictures. The little men ultimately took their water and went away. Ned again tried to retrace steps using dead reckoning, and after another hour, spotted his car near some trees. At this, he had the tingling sensation return. Looking about, the strange elements of the countryside were gone and even the sky had regained its proper tint. Neither his wife nor anyone else believed him. Upon developing his film, every picture except those taken at the "little people spot" turned out fine. On those shots there were only out-of-focus shadows with a greenish tint.------------------------------------------If that was the only tale one ever heard like this, of course you would never consider it. But there are several that even a non-collector like myself has stumbled across. The "olde Irish" call this phenomenon "The Stray Sod", and Diarmuid MacManus has a chapter on the topic in his The Middle Kingdom, a book I very much recommend. Here, from a completely different direction, is another incident: It was 2004. The place was Imlay City, Michigan. A father and daughter were driving home at 1:09am. Things went normally on this familiar road for a while. Then, "the road ahead instantly fogged and then immediately 'pixilated' back into clarity". Though clear, the road and surroundings were no longer recognizable. Both father and daughter noticed the strangeness at once. Perhaps having nothing to do with the rest of the experience, it was nevertheless true that a large number of animals [deer, skunk, raccoons, etc.] were walking alongside and occasionally crossing the road. They kept driving until they bumped into a cross road with a sign informing them that they were on an entirely different roadway and heading in the wrong direction. With the precision of the engineer that he was, the father noted that they experienced no loss-of-time [for you "abductions" buffs] , but the commonplace UFO quality of "no traffic at all" had been true of their strange odyssey. On arriving home both of them felt mildly sick to their stomachs.-------------------------------------------------------------------As I said at the beginning, I don't know what any of this is about, nor even if these various events relate to one another, let alone begin to make a case for parallel reality interfaces. But there is a "feeling" about that in all of them. Nature writer and college English teacher, Peter Wild, has expressed in the environmental literature his frequent feelings of being very near something uncanny when he is in the deep woods. He has had several "encounters inexplicable" as well. He quotes another writer, "There is another life, but it is simply this one" and then adds," Implying that another dimension lies just beyond the surface of what we call reality. Quite frankly, I'm perfectly happy staying on this side of the curtain. The penetration of other worlds I'd gladly leave to more adventuresome types". Hmmm...I don't know...maybe just a little peek?