SO here we go…

I had a dream one night.

Memory begins I was rushing about, caught up in some commotion with others rushing around me; chattering, carrying things to here and there. It was dark out, black and blue. The setting, much like— but not quite— the back porch of a house I’d moved from a few months before in waking life; a scene likely provoked by the residual stresses of the (particularly stressful) move… Just a dream…

In a moment I stopped, looking up from the edge of the porch. Snap—cognition. The night’s sky filled with a massive planet, a relative stones throw from the surface I stood. The vision overtook the sky, how had I just now seen it? It was HUGE— to estimate I’d say probably the size of a healthy cantaloupe held at arms length. Behind it was another smaller body that, I got the impression, was its moon.

Though not fully snapping into lucidity, the sight thrust me to awaken further into the dream. I became aware I had just been droning about this dream world, amidst the pool of indiscriminate chaos. I had assumed I was seeing my way around via moonlight, not enormous-orange-planet-light! Was it there all along? Is it an ordinary part of this world? Or— are we about to smash into it?? I think it was the potential of impending doom that shook me awake. The other people didn’t seem to notice it or care… but then what’s all this commotion about?

The sun illuminated the side of the planet facing me. Big ol’ bright thing and a bright 'moon' behind. I could see details of the terrain. Brown mainly— rocky, dirty, sandy, earthly. Blue patches interrupted the barren, rusty browns. Almost 50/50, but more brown. No obvious greens.

In the midst of debating whether to panic or keep standing there in awe, I woke up. The bright orb of it remained, still glowing in my mind's eye— rare vivid visual detail for my average dream memory.

>>>>>>>

That day was weird. It was winter, mind swimming in my head, thinking about the dream and things, patterns in nature. Something about phosphenes. Rubbed my eyes, drew a few, drew the dream planet.

There was a seed in my mind already about microscopy, I had come across some really cool images during a brainstorm session at my job as a textile designer. Stuck there working on other people’s visions, I had dreamt about the potentials of using microscopic patterns for creating my own designs.

That day, all post-crazy-dream-bleary (you’ve been there), I went on Amazon. For sure microscopes with digital imaging capabilities had to cost thousands off dollars? Maybe one day… but wait! Found one for $300 bucks… felt like a discount after my assumptions… I went for it.

Turns out the $300 microscope isn’t quite as powerful as the ones used for the images I had seen. Visually my initial results were not at all what I expected. Aside from having a lot of fun watching single-celled organisms gloop around eating blue-green algae in some houseplant water (or uh… something to that effect), I was a little disappointed. To tell you the truth I still have no idea how they create these images, I thought things were going to look like this!

I tried all kinds of stuff, but it seemed everything I thought would look cool just was not doin’ it for this microscope. Finally I remembered this extract that would react, swirling, bubbling and spiraling when I dropped it into my tea. Might as well give it a try…

“Exo-Terra” © Mmicroww All Rights Reserved

Whoa! Viscous, spacey, flowing worlds— what looked like planets colliding, dividing, multiplying— magmatic eruption, formation of universes in hyper speed. Crystallizing city sprawl, terrestrial cross-sections, starry interplanetary abyss. Thissss was something! The macro-cosmic microcosms blew my mind, starting a slow spin of some of the rustier wheels in my head. (It was full of them back then).

>>>>>>>

It wasn't until (weeks) later, I listened to what was then the most recent episode of Grimerica where the boys mentioned that NASA had hinted they would be releasing some big news. (Why not just release it if you got it… but whatever). Since the episode had been recorded a couple days before, the news was out by then and I looked it up...

Trappist-1 System—Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Turns out they had revealed what they were calling the TRAPPIST-1 System, seven exoplanets, the largest group of planets found in the habitable zone of a star yet. One sentence in the article hit me like a ton of space junk,

"If a person was standing on one of the planet’s surface, they could gaze up and potentially see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear larger than the moon in Earth's sky."

While this is still an artist rendition and I am certainly not schooled in the methods of how these images are created, (nor am I of those out there deifying NASA), it was enough to instantly transport me back to that dream— looking up from the edge of the back porch, my eyes filled with OTHERWORLD.

And this. Third planet from the left. Blue patches on a rusty brown.

This struck a really weird chord, the feeling reverberated through me all day. This is probably the point where I lose anyone left, unless you’ve ever experienced synchronicity yourself. It really does feel like being struck like a gong in some cases. Meaning lingers, vibrating around you. If you’re lucky, you can extract some.

SO

It got me thinking... about why, how, why was it so vivid, why now, why that planet, how?? It sat in the back of my mind stewing, and to my recollection I was a bit slow on the uptake connecting that feeling to my budding microscopy. Writing this now, putting it into words, it almost doesn’t even sound connected. But something about having the dream, the odd microscopic impulse, then the synchronicity, helped me give context to what was being revealed on my slides. It bridged that gap over a stagnant bog of old washed-out brain waves.

>>>>>>>

Wondering about these outliers of the material world has become a constant in my life. Even phenomena as simple as the old classic of thinking about your friend right before they call or text, something is happening there. I think there’s no such thing as “just one of those things”.

Though I do hate all the incessant labeling going on these days, you can’t help but try to classify this stuff. Precognition, manifestation, ripple sticks, non-linearity of time, collective consciousness, holographic video game played by inter-dimensional pre-teens that should be playing outside???

Why things do things??

I’m not rushing to label this experience, because in a lot of ways I don’t think it’s over yet.

What “life” is may be looser than we think. I think we need to learn when to sit down humbly and say,