Survey Time

[Michael D. Mearls 97]

Weird shit that's happened to me:

When I was a kid, I used to have this recurring hallucination/vision. I'd get a
very strong feeling that I was being watched. Sometimes, if I whipped my heard
around fast enough, I'd glimpse what looked like a man in billowing black robes
somewhere behind me, about 20 feet away. Probably just a hyperimagination at
work.

Another event that stands out in my mind occured when I was in junior high. My
class went on a field trip to a revolutionary era fort in Boston harbor. Two
friends and I were exploring the cellars beneath the fort when something
strange happened to me. The three of us were walking abreast when I felt a very
chilly breeze that seemed to pass through my body; it was a very strange
sensation, as if the inside of my chest was freezing up. It passed rather
quickly. Neither of my friends felt anything. Later, we were told that the
cellar was supposed to be haunted.

During my first week wandering around NYC when I moved here, I was at an
intersection waiting for the walk signal. I wasn't paying too much attention to
where I was going, so when I noticed that the people around me were starting to
cross the street, I ambled across after them. The next thing I knew, a voice in
me head shouted STOP, and I found myself standing on a dashed line between
lanes as two cars careened past me. Turns out the light hadn't changed; a few
people had run across the street during a gap in traffic and I just moseyed out
after them.

Needless to say, I am now a total freak about waiting for the walk light.

I used to have a pretty good talent for reading people's emotions and state of
mind, which I thought may have been psychic or something like that when I was
younger, but I finally figured out that it's just a byproduct of simply paying
attention to the world around me.

I don't pay any attention to religion (christianity, islam, wicca, whatever). I
guess that's a result of going to Catholic schools as a young 'un. I did have a
religion sort of spring up around me during my sophmore year of college. I even
got my own newsgroup out of it, though you have to be at Dartmouth College to
subscribe to it.

- M. Mearls