Channeling

Last night, I texted Matt in my sleep.

Me: Does H113 or H1-13 mean anything?

Matt: Not that I know of. Why?

Me: *no reply because I was asleep*

Matt: Babe?

Me: *sleeping*

I remember losing consciousness and suddenly my mind was filled with my voice repeating, "H one thirteen, H one thirteen, one thirteen, 113, H113 ---"

Does H113 or H1-13 mean anything...?

Evidently, I grabbed my phone and sent out a message just before 1 am.

Well, I did a little research after that; barely any was needed.

Ever heard of Strong's Concordance? Me neither, until tonight.

It was created by -- you guessed it -- a man by that name, James Strong. He basically traced every word in the King James Bible back to its original text and language. So if you're reading the Bible and need/want to know a specific word, find your way to another phrase, understand how it was translated a certain way in a passage, and so on.... you use that as a reference. It's pretty much a thesaurus.

It's actually called Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. And it is quite exhaustive, as there are 8674 entries in the Hebrew version and 5624 in Greek (according to this website). That's right, guys, he did it twice in different languages.

This is what people did for fun in those days.

(But it's really quite interesting, I'd like to look at it more.)

Well....can you guess where I'm going with this?

H = Hebrew

113 = the number in Strong's Hebrew Lexicon.

H113 - 'adown

1. reference to men

- lord, master, king

2. reference to God

- Adonai (Yahweh)

Do you think it's a stretch?

I don't know, but it's the second result that came up in Google. And, strikingly, it's at the top of the list when I search with the hyphen included.

I once had a dream a few years ago whose details are now all muddled up and lost in my memory. All I remember was that I was speaking some strange language that flowed naturally. There were a lot of guttural pronunciations and not enough r's, and the only word I woke up remembering was Adonai. At that time, I was just barely in high school and didn't know the word (or maybe I did and it just didn't stick). So I did the same thing that I did this time: spelled out what I heard, and did some homework. And my mind was blown. Adonai's a real word? And it's spelled that way? It was like that time in sixth grade when I thought I made up the name Zagari only to find out it's real and from Persia or somewhere like that. I wrote an entry about the dream in my Xanga (back when that was super cool and I wrote all the time)... but I can't seem to find it.

Apparently I can speak Hebrew and channel something while I'm dreaming.

And I can text about Strong's Concordance in my sleep.

What can you do?

Praying Up Dreams

Since that last post, I haven't been able to trigger sleep paralysis again. Does anybody out there have any suggestions?

I know you can do it by setting your alarm clock in the early morning for a few days to get used to waking up. And my sister says that if she takes a nap in the middle of the day, she will most likely get sleep paralysis later that night.

I need to know how to turn it on and off. I can't get anywhere if I can get anywhere.

I actually thought that it might happen last night. I spent the majority of yesterday in the city and came back home kind of late. Fell asleep for a while, then woke up. Sadly, I couldn't fall asleep again until after 6 am, and then the most that happened was I had a weird dream and woke up thinking there was a man hanging on my door.

Pssh.

This doesn't usually happen, but when 5:30 rolled around, I thought of praying the rosary. So I took it off of my shelf and began. It helped me fall asleep (actually, I started dozing off halfway through, but wanted to finish it). Throughout the decades, my mind started making up words and rhymes, as if starting a dream. Some of my silent prayers came out like this:

Hail Mary, full of grace,

27, 28, 29.

What? No.

Hail Mary, full of grace,

The Lord is with the man in the race.

Something's wrong there. Too many words....

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Prey: fortune singer's

mouse in the owl's mouth of the dog....

It took a lot of effort to think the right words without moving my lips.

When I finally fell asleep,

I sat up in bed and went to the other room. An other room. There were kids playing in the street of my old house, mostly girls but with a guy or two. They didn't seem older than freshmen in high school, and it was late outside. One of the girls let out what sounded like a genuine cry for help, so I ran down the stairs of my new house and went to the door.

I'd just barely touched the deadbolt when I heard the sound of scraping metal on the other side.

A key? Not just any key. But also not the one for this lock.

Voices outside broke the silence of a moment as the children whispered to each other. I started to back away from the door and meant to run up the steps like a ninja when I heard,
"Hahaha, hey! Psst!"

I stopped on the second step.

Tap-tap-tap. "Hey, I see you! Come over here...."

I heard that smile in her voice and knew I shouldn't turn around, but I did anyway. A girl was staring at me through the old glass window that wasn't covered by the blinds, teeth and eyes glinting in the moonlight. Please don't think to break it....

"Let us in. Unlock the door. We can see you."

All I really wanted to do was pull down the shade so that they were gone, but I was afraid of what might happen if I got too close, so I ran up the stairs, tripping on my way. Why are stairs always right in front of the door? I could be dead.

"MATT, CALL 9-1-1. NOW."

When I picked myself up and got to the second floor, I was in a combination of both my old and new house. I was on my way to the room at the end of the hall, where Matt was, when I saw Mom was in the old master bedroom, watching TV with kids.

The kids who were outside.

They were fine. They were nice.

But I didn't trust them because of how they watched me.

I opened my eyes in the morning and looked at my door.

There is a man there. Impossible, but he's half there and half not. Why is he so flat? But that's a man....

I took a picture with my cell phone to remind myself what I saw, thought about my dream and remembered hiding my family in a tiny alley lined with hidden doors on the left wall. Shiel was the farthest away from me, wanting to know if she should keep moving forward or if we should stop and listen to Anjel's suggestion of opening one of the red doors. I was thinking --

When I woke up again, I stared at the man some more. His head was tilted backwards and he had a nice shadow for half of his face. I should take a picture of this for later....

What did I dream? Something about Matt... Was I yelling? Or hiding in a small street with him? Kids.... I had a key, and was knocking on a red door....

I refuse to move in the morning when I can't remember my dreams. It came to me slowly, and then I realized that it was 11 am; that's enough sleep.

Now as for the man on my door. I never took a picture, but he was still there. So I made sure to really do it this time.

He's dead, like my clothes. He is my clothes. I know that.

I took a picture, put on my glasses, and didn't understand how I saw that at all.

Just like in the morning.

The other night -- and I mean the night before last night -- I found myslef trapped. Sleep paralysis, you've done it again!

But I think I've finally figured it out.

All I have to do is open my eyes to trigger it. Sounds kind of funny, right?

Well, the moment I open my eyes and realize I'm paralyzed,

I feel like I'm gonna die.

My body is surrounded by that pins-and-needles feeling, and I can't do much else other than freak out in my head.
I was suddenly aware that I was stuck, but I know this feeling all too well. I also know how to get out of it without using too much energy, but I wanted to know how quickly I can do it. So I scrunched up my whole body, fighting what I could only imagine looked like convulsions, until I successfully moved. Only, it was just my head that I was able to turn towards my pillow. It was enough to wake myself up, but I was left with my heart racing and temperature rising. This doesn't happen to me much, but when I have sleep paralysis, I end up with that feverish feeling. It's not fun.

The next morning, I did some research about SP to learn about other ways to snap out of it. I came across an interesting article in which the author explained that "out-of-body experiences" could be brought about by using SP to your advantage. Most of the essay dealt with how to get yourself into the sleep paralysis state (at which point, I thought to myself, Who in their right mind would want to put themselves in that position? But then I looked at myself. Guilty.) Fortunately -- in this case, anyway -- I already know how trigger it.

So I read on.

...Focus on your awareness on your face and concentrate on breathing slowly
and easy. Don't be alarmed if you feel vibrations or a rapid heart beat, this is
normal. If you let this scare you, you'll blow it, so it's important that you
don't let this freak you out. After the vibrations and sounds disappear, you'll
be able to get right up out of your body just like you would get up out of bed
in the morning.

Bullshit.

1. If I don't feel the vibrations anymore, I must be awake. I've done that before.
2. If I'm lying still in bed and then suddenly move, I'll trigger sleep paralysis all over again. How can I sit up in bed when I know I can't even move a finger?


So I let it go and forgot about it, until last night when I tried to reach for the cord of my earbuds wrapped around my arm. I couldn't move.
Fine, then. Let's try it.
I opened my eyes and immediately heard in my ear all the buzzing that my nerves were creating. So noisy....
It's okay, you're fine, you're just temporarily paralyzed. Don't freak out, just stay awake. Stay awake. Don't lose it, stay.
I knew my door was locked, but I felt someone's gaze focused on my back.
Nobody is there. Your door is locked. Just stay calm, you're fine. STAY AWAKE.
And sure enough, the buzzing subsided and my body felt fine. Whoever was watching me decided to leave me alone.



And I sat up in bed.

I felt dizzy and light-headed, kind of groggy in a strange way. But nothing too unusual. Just still in that dream-like phase because I just got up.

I walked to my door and unlocked it, not looking back at my bed. If there's anything I know, it's not to look at myself while I'm asleep. If you're not trained to withstand the shock of seeing yourself, then you'll lose lucidity and wake up. And I didn't want to lose the undeniable control that I had.

Not that I thought I was still asleep. I was so sure that I was awake. I just didn't want to face the facts yet. Because there's no such thing as an "out-of-body-experience," that's just silly.

So I unlocked my door and stepped out into the hallway barely lit by the night sky. I still felt strange, so I decided to test myself even more and wake myself up by walking downstairs. From the third floor to the second floor, and from the second floor to the.... third floor to the second floor, and from the second floor to the.... third floor to the second floor, and from the second floor to the.... living room of my old house.

Okay, so there's a glitch or something. I figured my brain was just being super slow in processing things. I'm all the way downstairs in my house.
Then I noticed that the stairs were different, the last time I went down them. Different, but I still knew them. It wasn't until I reached the bottom of the staircase that I realized where I was. And even then, it took a while because

the furniture was different

the set-up wasn't the same

the lights were off

where's the piano?

where's the entertainment center?

I felt the carpet beneath my feet when it struck me:

I'm in my old house. But it looks as if someone else is living here.

I finally blinked and found myself in bed again. I shocked myself awake. I looked around. I felt the cord still wrapped around my arm, my blanket still draped over my shoulders, and my door was still closed. Still locked. I didn't so much as shift, let alone sit up in bed and wander around.

So I was asleep the whole time.

Come on. There's no such thing as an out-of-body experience. At least, none that you can induce yourself. Right?

I had sleep paralysis two more times after that. And two more times, I held onto my awareness and simulated lucid dreams. Both of them were ended when I gave myself a bit of a surprise at seeing my hand or "feeling" a sort of trigger.

In the second one, I brought back Alex. I'm not sure if we had a real conversation or if it was just based on thoughts we exchanged without forming words. But he told me that he left because he had nothing else he could do. He'd done all that he could.

In the third one, I just wanted to be somewhere I felt a familiarity. I ended up riding my bike in the school yard of SCIS.

In my first attempt to achieve this so-called out-of-body experience, I actually sat up in bed without waking up. Was that real, or did I just dream it up, like the other two dreams?

Was I just influenced by reading the article? Maybe I thought I was in control when, "in reality," I wasn't.

I want to know if there's a difference. I want to know what I'm capable of doing.

So I'm going to experiment further.

Tonight.

The last church on Earth

The undead are back again.

Everytime I dream of them, though, it's different, with the most recent episode having played out the other night.

Zombies were now in the water, polluting it with their infected bodies. I panicked because I knew that we were all screwed, as this was a worldwide epidemic. There was nowhere to go to for clean water.

There were three ways to die:

A. Be the victim of a zombie.

B. Drink the water and slowly become infected.

C. Die of dehydration.

With this in mind, I knew that as the survivors began to dwindle, more people would revert/convert to Christianity. In the beginning of the apocalypse, there was still architecture. Funny, but at the same time it wasn't. So we were all going to die -- I thought, Might as well keep myself busy and do my job: serve the people. It kept me sane, and I was sure that I wanted my last project to be a truly meaningful one. For my own sake, if no one else gave a damn.

My self-assigned project was to create a church/sanctuary on the top of a nearby mountain. With no actual solid walls, the space was enclosed by a series of crosses. They were tall enough that they blended in with the surrounding trees, fitting the context of the natural forest while simultaneously bursting through the canopy of leaves. They were all huge crosses, each one at least 50 ft high, but they were to be arranged around an enormous central cross about twice as tall as the rest.

This sanctuary was meant to be seen from everywhere in the valley below, a symbol of hope and a reminder to stay faithful. It was designed to be accessible by foot, greeting weary travellers and refugees at the end of a winding path riddled with hairpin turns... I never thought that zombies would make their way up there.

Construction was never completed.

Funding wasn't the issue, it was the end of the world.

Tons of people volunteered to help out, wholeheartedly praying and working hard with one goal in mind: to finish the project. But one by one, the team fell apart. Some were lost in the woods never to return, a few foolish people drank water from sources they believed to be clean, and yet others were pulled away as the infected began to spread out from the city walls. Whatever happened, in the end only a little more than half of the church was realized, and the grounds were littered with fading shadows of what used to be my crew.

Over time, the iron crosses rusted to match the color of the tree trunks around them, a beautiful design detail that I'd thought to incorporate. Vegetation wrapped around their trunks, adopting them into the family and burying the dead undead out of pity. Even half finished, my design looked like what it was meant to look like.

There they stood for years.

And then they fell in silence.

Imperfect Bride

Last night I dreamt that women would submerge their faces in bowls of scalding hot oil to ruin their features when they got married. This would be part of the rite, which took place the morning after the man and woman became one. It had something to do with keeping other men away from someone's wife.

I was in line waiting to dunk my face in boiling oil. I passed by women who were sitting with their eyes still shut from when they put their face to the liquid. They waited in painful silence to go numb; some of them tried to cry, but couldn't anymore. Others were trying not to scream. And others were probably shivering with piercing hot daggers of pain.

I don't remember doing that to myself. But all of a sudden I was rubbing some type of cream on my face when a man came up to me and talked to me about how clever I was. He came over and started to wipe it off, and all of the blisters and blemishes came off with it. My skin was more radiant than it ever was.

It made me imperfect, dishonorable, and frowned upon.

Backwards Deja Vu

I haven't updated in a long time.

I haven't been dreaming every night since my last update.

But I've been dreaming.

It's getting more and more difficult for me to describe, in words, what I see when I'm asleep. More often, my mind is confusing dreams with reality. Not to the point where I cross the line and my life is suddenly The Science of Sleep (thank God I don't sleepwalk) or Inception (thank God my significant other never committed suicide or framed me), but I've had my moments when I think I'm awake... and I'm not.

I don't know how else to describe the sensation other than calling it a "backwards deja vu"..... I'm so familiar with what's going on, but it never happened. Come to think of it, nothing about these dreams is even normal.

Maybe it's happening because I want it to happen.

I'll try to share a dream sometime tomorrow. I have to get up early, so that means I have to sleep early.

Oh! By the way, I'm studying abroad in Rome for those of you who weren't aware. So even though it says the time is 6:45pm or something, it's really.... 12:45am.

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about this blog. :) I'll be back tomorrow night. Ciao!

Past the Paralysis

So while I'm feeling better and I'm mulling over my project, here is one more post for the night.

Yesterday I worked on my computer. Slowly and painfully. I really need to get better at these programs, even as simple as SketchUp.

I gave up after a while because I'd been tired all day, despite catching a few hours of sleep (obviously not enough). I fell asleep around 11 and woke up around 12:30. Worked for a little bit and passed out again, with my arms feeling numb and my legs feeling like I'd been walking all day..... woke up around 4am, worked until 6:30, and gave up for the rest of the night/morning.

Thank God I didn't have to go to work, because I wouldn't have been able to go back to sleep.

So there I was in my bed with my laptop (I wasn't worried about it falling off my bed - I don't move at night when I'm so exhausted), books and papers all around me, half in my pajamas and half in the clothes I'd been wearing all day, with my glasses on my desk and my phone in my hand. I didn't even set my alarm for 10am before I started to lose consciousness.

I was in sleep paralysis mode already and I didn't notice until I heard scratching at my door. I couldn't move. Mere inches of solid mass separated me from something terrifying.

- What is that.....

The scratching grew louder and slightly clearer, as if it passed through the door. I imagined the shadow of a claw slipping underneath the door and turning itself right-side-up.

- Oh, that..... Okay...

I'm so used to creepy, strange noises in my fits of delirium that I wasn't so much phased by this as I was actually trying to study myself....

- And now, I bet.....

Shivers! Up and down my spine, then spreading throughout my entire body -- everywhere! Shivers! ....I felt like I was dying, as this shadow continued to seep into my room filled with light that I hadn't cared to turn off. But I knew it was coming, after all. The Shivers of sleep paralysis are the closest thing I can relate to Death... It feels like seconds, but those seconds are comprised of minutes. Time doesn't make sense.

So I let my body suffer from it while I held on to my awareness. It was fading fast, and I struggled to hang on. It's difficult to do, and tiring in a different way. With my body asleep, my mental exhaustion began to take on a physical sense...still, it wasn't quite the same. It seemed worse.

But I did it. I passed through the first window that always closes before me.

What happened next was completely new to me, after years of trying to get there.

The scratching changed, ever so slightly. The shadow dispersed and faded into the vent, the corners, and cracks.

The scratching turned into a printing machine's voice..

I only saw what was before me -- my hand holding my phone, my room filled with light, my blanket around me... but I heard someone picking up papers from the printer and tapping them on a hard surface to straighten them out.

- What do I do..? ..... .. . . .. Hey.......... .. . . .. hey... . . .. "Hey."

It's all I could do. But it was enough. The woman holding the stack of papers stood still, listening like a deer. I spoke to her and she heard me.

"Hey," I said again.

"What is that? ... Is she talking to me?" I heard her muffled voice, still forming in my head.

And another voice said, "Shh--" but I recognized him already.

"Don't talk, just listen," said Alex.

"But what did she say?"
"Shh!"

I tried to say something else, but the words didn't come out. I couldn't think, so I only repeated myself. This time, it came out in the wrong world.

"Hey," I said to nobody in my room. I could tell the difference. It obviously wasn't in my head that I heard it that time.

Stay still, I told myself. Just a couple of minutes and I'll be back again..

The printing resumed. I tried to talk. But the window closed, and I fell asleep.

An Idea or two (......hundred...)

Last night, I found myself running around outside in the middle of the day with my sister and dad. I knew that something was different, but I couldn't put my finger on it. All I knew was that we were running on a green plain that suddenly became the top of a hill.

I ran ahead when I saw a little stone building. Beyond that, the land fell.

It was a robot cemetery.

Not a junkyard.

However these robots "died," they were reconstructed for their burial.

But they didn't decompose. They were their own tombstones and memorials being slowly covered by vines.

I saw rows upon rows of these robots -- they stretched all the way to the bottom of the hill and beyond, growing into the valley below. The ones at the top of the hill were there first; I could tell by the way they were almost hidden beneath the creeping plants.

All stood silently -- a quiet, strong army of a continuous generation.

I didn't think in words (do I ever?), but if I did, it would translate to this:

Robots have souls..?

They must. ... because of this.

Now that I'm writing about this, I realize that a certain dream motif has come up again: the inevitability of nature's conquest. That no matter how advanced technology gets, nature will continue to run its course. Without maintenance, all that we've achieved can be covered up and reclaimed by the earth, forgotten in time.

I never stopped to think about what that must say about me, though.

Plants usually denote growth, fertility, creativity, or even freedom. The fact that I've dreamt of vines should mean that there's something that wants to get out. It's me wanting to be creative. My thoughts and ideas wrap around and around, entangling with each other and never fully developing or defining themselves. It's a mess, my brain....

I can't say I haven't felt that way about my projects this semester. I know I have good ideas. I know I can create something amazing from them, but something is holding me back.

I wonder what it means to have dreamt of vines over robots..?

And why robots?

P.S. - Don't say I'm being held back by procrastinating (aka writing in my blog), because that's not it. :p

I feel rotten.

Symptoms are coming back, and I don't know what else to do about it other than take Ibuprofen or Advil. It's difficult to focus on schoolwork when pain comes in waves and I find myself trying to time the bouts. There doesn't seem to be a pattern...... although, in more general time spans, I think I can safely say that it gets pretty bad in the cold weather.

Yet I love the fall.

A few nights ago, I fell asleep thinking about this.

I dreamt... that I took off my clothes

and I took off my skin

and underneath all those layers of epidermis and fat was rotten meat, with little snakes and parasites slithering between my muscles.

I feel like that's what I would find if I could tear away at myself. Too-red flesh, riddled with even darker spots here and there, some spots larger than others. Pain comes and goes, coursing through my body in what I can only describe as lines. I'm bruised somewhere inside, even though it doesn't look like it on the exterior.

Something is eating away at me.

Mountain Gem

About a month ago, I had a vivid dream of a massive, heavy building that rose out of the earth.

If seen from the front, it looks like a building.

If seen from the back, it looks like it's part of the mountain on which it stood.

September 10, 2010 __friday____

Me:	last night i dreamt of a student life center that was designed to cut into a hill.
Me:	it was more like a small mountain
Me:	most of the exposed part of the building was made of glass
Me:	there were at least 2 floors to it
Me:	if you looked at the mountain from far away and saw the building, it looked as if it was a diamond set in jewelry
Me:	it was lodged in the mountain, fully grounded and half buried beneath the earth
Matt:	I can actually picture that one pretty well :)
Me:	good, i'm really glad
Me:	it was beautiful
Me:	the floors were designed to blend into the mountain, they were dark brown or gray in color
Me:	the second floor (study rooms) became the awning of some shops or stores on the first floor
Me:	the main area of the building, down on the first floor, was exposed and set at a double height ceiling
Me:	so that the second floor looked more like a shelf
Me:	there may have even been a third floor designed similarly
Me:	and looking from the outside, it looked like the glass facade was there simply to house the shelves carved out of the mountainside
Matt:	:) :)
Me:	at one point in my dream when i was walking around on the second floor looking out, i became lucid and thought, "oh my god, i dreamt this?"
Matt:	hahaha
Me:	but then i fell back into the story that played out..

I remember walking on the second floor of the building, right beside the glass curtain wall that stretched from the floor to the ceiling and reached for each side wall of rock.

I walked away from the window towards the back area (which was blanketed underneath the mountainside). There, further separated into little nooks by bookshelves and other furniture, was a fully furnished and cozy-looking study area. Despite the open floor plan of the entire building and the fact that it was a student life center, the carpeted study was placed in a corner that was away from more distracting noise levels.

Directly beneath me were shops and small cafes that the students could access. In the middle of the building, greeting guests as they walked in through the entrance, was an information desk.

There were at least two entrances: the entrance on the main floor, and one on the second floor. I came in through the second floor entrance, which was more like a big balcony.......

The rest of the program can be figured out based on what I dreamt.... I should sketch it out to see if it makes sense.

Here is what it looked like from the outside.

There may be details missing. Perhaps if I drew it right when I woke up (instead of waiting a month and a half to do so), it would be different. But that is the form that I remember. From another angle, you can see more of what's inside. Meaning, more sketches are to come.

As I stood inside the building in my dream and I looked outside, I could see a town in the valley not far away.... That's when I became lucid and considered staying still for the rest of the dream just to hear my imagination create sounds based on walls and materials that I made up. Yet in these moments, rather than stay lucid and risk waking up, I find myself willingly choose to fall back into the story of the dream. I don't remember what I did for the rest of the time I was there. Only the gem remains in my mind.