Like many people right now, I’ve been experiencing the last few weeks as something almost “out of time,” liminal even. I know that the effect of disorientation is intended by those who are intent on destroying the world we’ve all collectively created, so for me, the challenge has been to work on not actively panicking about it while helping to build my contributions to resistance.
As mentioned in a previous video, it’s helped me quite a bit to think of the changes as akin to the disruptions and risks that took place during the pandemic. The only difference is that the changes are deliberate with malice aforethought, so, in that sense, the trauma is more personal, especially if it affects you directly. This is more like a nuclear war of the mind and heart–a disaster in smaller, incremental portions, yet buoyed by a psychic poison that is just as radioactive.
My first response to it all was to go directly into meditation. After all these years it was automatic, not because I’m so noble, but because I’m not on medication and really can’t drink alcohol anymore. From there I began to get guidance, which is really all I need; i.e., the next thing to do and then the next thing.
Guidance pointed me to a book that has been on my shelves for many years, which I’ve read a number of times. This is Time Storms by Jenny Randles, one of my favorite paranormal writer/investigators from the UK.
Time Storms is a fascinating, rambling collection of experiences, both individual and collective, which involve the losing or gaining of time, or the displacement of people from one place to another without any obvious means of transport or both (when time and space appear to be altered together).
Randles explores the possibility that many of these experiences, some of which are, or have been, mistaken for UFO abductions, even when no obvious light or craft was observed, constitute a genuinely separate phenomenon that is natural, if intermittent, and that has been recorded throughout human history.
Although she can’t get to the “why” of the experience exactly, Randles does connect some interesting dots using the New Physics, the Many Worlds Theory with and the speculations of CG Jung and Wolfgang Pauli drawing a thread between the experiences of time loss/gain, synchronicity and deja vu.
My only quibble with her approach is her definition of science which she describes as being a combination of data, reason and intuition. In fact, modern science combines data, reason, intuition, mathematics (which is a distinct form of logic–and not identical to reason) and experimentation. It is, admittedly, difficult to experiment with the kinds of experiences she collects here.
Randles divides Time Storms into the following broad categories–however, as we will see, often the boundaries between the categories are not sharp–lots of overlap.
Losing Time/Gaining Time
Spatial disturbances/Appearances and Disappearances
Synchronicity
Dreams/OOB
Deja Vu
The term “time storm” is sometimes used in science fiction stories to describe any kind of temporal/spatial displacement. In fact, I was rewatching a Star Trek: Discovery episode the other day and this precise term was used to describe such a phenomenon.
I know the phrase was used by science fiction writer Gordon R Dickson in his 1992 novel by the same name. I presume that Randles is familiar with the term due to its usage in this genre.
If you think about it, storms are caused by contending or overlapping forces that are seeking equilibrium—and this is pretty much how Randles seems to see Time Storms. If one lives in a universe where multiple realities might converge, and all is, in fact, energy and frequency, then it isn’t too far fetched to speculate that there are times when these realities might meet or clash in some way.
Of course this doesn’t explain all components of such experiences—it’s just a launching off point. Randles doesn’t really try to explain everything she’s describing precisely.
I’ve experienced multiple instances of all of these, so much so that I’ve come to not fear them overly much. While others have had many UFO, Bigfoot or ghost encounters, I have had so many Time/Space Storms that when I sit down and try to remember or record them, I simply lose count.
In some ways, this would seem to confirm, at least for me, Randles’ assertion that these kinds of experiences are much more common than are generally considered because they tend to be discounted.
Time/Spatial Displacements
The first instance of my “gaining time” happened in the first grade. I had trouble figuring out how to tell time from a clock (we didn’t have digital clocks at the time) and learned gradually how to “tell the time” based on repetitive things that happened and were said by others to be at certain times:, i.e. some TV shows came on at the same time each week, father left for work by a certain time, the school bell rang for lunch or recess or at end of day at certain times.
Whenever the repetitive thing happened, I would look at a clock and try to memorize the position of the hands. The whole thing honestly made no sense to me. It seems strange and interesting to me now, given how meticulously I’m able to make it to work at about the same time each day–that I ever had problems with this.
When we were out at the farm I was able to figure out when lunch or dinner was because of the position of the sun in the sky. That’s literally how I did it. But I knew I was supposed to figure out this clock thing–so I just worked at it and kept my ineptitude to myself.
What that meant was that I paid a lot of attention to our class schedule and how it corresponded to what the clock said.
I went to a private school and we would always have a bit of a break in the afternoon. It wasn’t recess, as afternoon recess came not long after lunch–but it was kind of a short nap time, we’d put our heads on our desk for about 20 minutes at, what I now know was, 2p. We got out at 330p (or that’s what the clock said), so after the break, we didn’t have much time left in the day (although as one might imagine, it seemed like an eternity sometimes).
Anyway, one day, we were following our schedule, nothing unusual. Time came for us to put our heads down on our desks and I glanced up at the clock to register the “time.” It said 2p.
I put my head down and actually fell asleep, which was a little unusual–normally I just kind of dozed, but was aware of what was going on around me.
I woke up twice and checked the clock each time, and the hands were slowly moving forward. My fellow students had their heads down.
I was awakened by my teacher’s voice and sat up. My fellow students sat up. We’d all had our heads down. I noticed that something seemed a little unusual because normally, the teacher would kind of wake us gently–and pause, but this time, it was like she just started talking.
Actually, she seemed somewhat upset with us–and as my brain cleared, I glanced at the clock and it said 1p. Seriously. The teacher told us that we shouldn’t be napping during class because that would mean it would be hard for us to rest when the time came.
Then we continued with a lesson–as if the lesson had begun, but it hadn’t. My books, all of our books, were in our desks–and the teacher didn’t notice.
I was completely confused–but paid attention anyway. When the time came, at 2p, we all put our heads down AGAIN, exactly like we had previously. This time I didn’t sleep–because I was trying to figure it out.
To this day I have no idea what happened here or why–why my fellow students and I seemed to share this experience–although when I tried to talk to a couple of them about it they didn’t know what I was saying–and why the teacher didn’t notice.
Since then I’ve gained time a couple of other times–once at work and once while I was teaching. It’s very strange to go through the same sequence of events twice and you’re the only person who notices.
I’ve lost time (and I mean actually lost time–more than just a perception, but measurable) at least 3 times that I can recall off the top of my head. But the most consequential instance, especially since other people were involved, occurred in 2011-2012 while I was out with my two partners at the time picking blueberries in the Mohonk Preserve, in the “Gunks,” Mid Hudson Valley, NY.
There are several ridges in the Mohonk Preserve that are known for the amazing abundance of wild blueberries, about 4-5 varieties can be found and in the late 19th, early 20th century, poor folks would comb the site to collect the berries and sell them to the rich resorts that served rich city people just down the hill.
Local small forest fires are relatively common on these ridges and wild blueberries flourish in the soil and forest openings created by the fires. One has to watch for rattlesnakes and bears, but it is incredibly easy to pick literally a year’s worth of fruit to freeze in just a few hours walking up one of the hidden trails along the hills. Many of these trails are not official, not marked, but are known to locals, the results of both long indigenous and then working class usage.
This time I decided rather spontaneously to go blueberry picking as a celebration of my birthday–which, in summer, often falls right during the height of the crop. My two partners at the time were going to accompany me.
Everything was very normal at first–we got to the hidden trailhead that we knew about–it’s off the beaten path and over a creek bed that is itself rather hidden by brush. The trail is rather steep and rocky (the Gunks are formed of a metaphoric conglomerate that is very durable–harder than concrete–and so it doesn’t break down into nice little pebbles), although there are places where the ascent levels off and one can spread out to pick.
(I already know what the 411 people are thinking-berries, rocks, bad.)
At one point, while we were picking, I got this, retrospectively, strange impulse to go further up the trail by myself. This is actually rather unlike me for many reasons, including my incipient caution about the aforementioned beasts, as well as the possibility of meeting other humans with poor intentions on isolated trails.
But for some reason I said I wanted to go up the trail a bit and that I would be back soon. My partners said they’d wait for me and pick where they were and more gradually ascend. There were plenty of berries around right there.
So, I started up the trail. Originally, I didn’t intend to go very far. I would walk a bit and then stop and pick, walk a bit further and then stop and pick. What I do remember is that at some point I felt like I was seized with a strange euphoria–it felt like a sudden fever had come on (often when I get sick with an acute illness with fever, I will feel euphoric). I began to ascend more rapidly and pick less–it felt like something was driving me toward something. It was very strange.
I tried to stop myself several times and settle down to picking in a specific area but it was like something inside kept pushing me forward. I started to feel light headed (I had brought water and did stop to drink). I also checked my time as I went–had my cell phone on me and my coverage registered as good. My physical responses seemed curious to me–it was as if I wasn’t in complete control of my own body.
Finally, I forced myself to stop–according to my phone I’d been climbing for 30 minutes. I was on a more level area and could see a field of blueberries and other vegetation climbing up another rise to the west. I noticed that the air seemed both very still and charged–there was no breeze, and my skin kind of tingled and prickled like there was static in the air.
I wondered if a storm was picking up because it felt a little like another terrifying experience I’d had in Estes Park years earlier when I’d gotten caught in a pop up thunderstorm above the tree line and had to literally run for my life as lightning struck around me.
Then I saw one of the strangest things. As I was looking on to the west, over the berry bushes, I saw a strange motion coming through the vegetation. At first it looked like just some weird breeze, but then it sped up and looked like it was parting the bushes in front of it–think if how the bow of a boat or ship parts the water it races through–this was exactly how this “wind” or movement looked–but it was sweeping down the rise, through the bushes, toward me.
This happened so quickly and was so strange that I just stood there and watched it approach–I could only discern the movement of the wind by the vegetation that it was moving through.
All at once, there was this presence–I can’t call it anything more than that right above me–probably not more than 20 feet or so. I had broken out in a cold sweat and felt this incredible pressure from above like something pressing down–and, while this sounds incredibly bizarre, whatever this presence was, I knew that it was alive.
I felt it looking down on me–and that it had a power I didn’t understand. I also kind of felt like an invader. My eyes could see nothing definitive–it was more a powerful feeling.
I suddenly remembered that I had some tobacco with me. I’d started carrying some with me whenever I went into the woods at the suggestion of one of my Indigenous teachers. I reached in my pocket, dug some out and rapidly did blessings to the directions and then to whatever it was above me.
As soon as I did that, the pressure released, I felt and heard a kind of whooshing sound and I was left with my sweaty self. I was also really freaked out, so I decided to get back to my friends as soon as possible. I started to run back down the trail–as fast as the rough rocks would let me–without spraining my ankle.
I stopped briefly at one point to check my phone and it told me that only another 10 minutes had passed–so I figured I’d be back to my friends pretty quickly.
However, it seemed to take a lot longer to get down than it had for me to ascend, even though I was going much faster. At one point I passed a couple who were slowly ascending the trail and I thought for a moment that I should warn them–but about what? How weird would that be?
I was starting to get frustrated with the apparent slowness of my descent when I heard shouting. I kept going and was met by both my partners who were both relieved and distressed. Apparently, I’d been gone for almost 4 hours–and they had started coming further up the trail to try to find me. They thought something had happened to me.
When they told me that, I looked at my phone–and it registered the discrepancy–according to it, by the time I reached them, only about 90 minutes had passed. The phone didn’t correct until that evening.
Now maybe the phone was malfunctioning in some way–although I had my GPS on and it had never done that, and never did it again–and it registered cell coverage the whole time. It was very difficult for me to believe that I’d been gone that long–but when I observed the lengthening shadows as we walked back to the car, I had to admit that, at least for them, I’d been gone longer than I thought.
Something happened. But I don’t know what.
Disappearances and object displacements
This is another phenomenon that has happened to me multiple times–although fortunately it’s not involved a whole person or anything terribly important.
One of the most notable examples occurred not long after I graduated from high school and was attending a Community College near me in Overland Park, KS. At the time I had moved back in with my mother pending my relocation to a new apartment. I also worked at the Community College in the acquisitions department of the library.
Even then I was a bookhound and would always be coveting books I couldn’t afford–especially at the college bookstore.
Since I was an employee at the college, I was allowed to put deposits on books and they would be held, so I could pay for them over time.
I spied a book I really wanted–I can’t remember what it was about now. But I didn’t have the $10 needed to have the bookstore hold it for me.
So, I decided to ask one of my older co-workers in the library if she would lend me $10. It took a little convincing as she was a single mom who didn’t have much money herself–but she finally relented.
She handed over a $10 bill and I folded it and stuck it in my left jacket pocket. At that time in my life I wore army surplus clothes and this jacket was one of those simple olive green overcoat jackets that didn’t have all the complicated compartments in the pockets. The pocket did have a button though and after I put the bill in my pocket, I fastened the pocket shut.
I then walked straight to the bookstore–which took about 10 minutes from my location on the 2nd floor of the library.
The route took me down some stairs, out the front door of the library, across a small courtyard and into another building where I eventually (the building was long) came to another staircase which descended to the level of the bookstore and cafeteria.
It was straightforward and I didn’t pause to talk to anyone or to do anything else on the route.
I got to the bookstore, went and found the book, and unbuttoned the pocket to pull out the $10 bill so I could take it up to the counter to reserve it.
Except the $10 bill was gone.
I frantically started looking for it around me on the floor–I was the only person right in that part of the store. I looked under the shelves, around the books–and it was nowhere to be seen.
I remember getting an incredulous cold prickle up my spine. I checked my pocket–there was no hole, no secret lining in which the money could have gotten stuck or was hiding.
I retraced my steps multiple times along the route I’d taken, back and forth. While I had no idea how the money might have gotten out of my pocket–I wanted to check to see if it was on the ground or floor anywhere–even though if it had been, obviously someone would have picked it up.
I even looked around my co-worker’s desk–I mean–who knows?
The money was never found and I had to pay my friend back without actually getting the book in question. When I paid her back, I told her what had happened. She was a rather suspicious person (not of me, but of the spirit world) and declared that I probably wasn’t supposed to have that book.
I guess in some way–I had concluded that myself.
In the intervening years I’ve had several things like this happen to my stuff any number of times. Only occasionally have the disappeared items been of importance.
In one instance, many years ago, when I was living in one of the many haunted dwellings I’ve seemed to occupy, my wallet disappeared very suddenly. It had money in it and all my ID–and it took weeks to get it all figured out.
A couple months after the disappearance, the damned thing showed up again, stashed under the cushions of a couch in a room I never went in (it was a storage area that was maintained by the landlord–but she was never on the property–so it wasn’t a case that she or someone took it and put it in there).
The only reason it was found was that a member of her family had decided to use that couch and came over one day to fetch it–pulled the cushions off and the wallet was there.
They looked in it and found it was mine and returned it to me. All the money and ID was there.
FFS.
Simple physical displacements have been less common.
The most recent was about a year ago. I’d come down in the morning to make my coffee–it was on a Saturday so I wasn’t moving quite as quickly as I do during the week while prepping for work.
I remember I was a little annoyed with myself because I hadn’t set up the coffee the night before. As I stood by the sink washing my cup, I noticed that my partner hadn’t put something away that he said he would–whatever it was, was next to the sink–and of course now I don’t remember.
Whatever the item was, from my perspective, it should have been in the sink–maybe to soak or something.
What I remember is that I saw it, while standing at the sink, and instantly felt a very intense and deep sense of anger and frustration–it was the kind of thing he might complain to me about doing, and here it was he was doing it himself.
My eyes flicked back to the item I was washing for a moment and then just as quickly returned to the item which had generated this intense (but now rather silly it seems) emotional reaction.
However, when my eyes returned to the object, I noticed that it was no longer where it had been, but was in the sink right underneath my hands which were finishing up the cup I’d started to clean. I had not moved it and it had not been there literally a second before.
I remember standing there very still for quite a little while, trying to figure out how the object could have simply moved its position without my having manually done anything to effect that change.
It was creepy–and interesting–and popped me right out of my bad mood.
My favorite story of displacement comes from an acquaintance of mine, who I still consider a friend even though he has fallen off the face of my Earth (and I’m sure he’s still around–just hiding from the Feds, as was his tendency).
According to Steve (as I’ll call him), he and some friends were taking a spontaneous road trip through an extremely rural part of Kansas (in rural Kansas, all journeys from here to there could be considered road trips). They were going down county highways and side roads, some only half paved, others gravel.
Eventually, several of them agreed that the group should stop to walk around, answer calls of nature and such like. Problem was–they were very far away from any facilities, small towns were few and far between and it was the weekend, so even when they got to a small burg, many places to rest were closed.
Finally, they drove through a construction site along the way and noticed that there was a porta-potty–so at least, they thought, they might be able to take advantage of this–as calls of nature come in several forms.
Steve remembered being the third guy into the porta-potty–and he said he was impressed that there was still some toilet paper left. He settled in to do his business–and could hear the guys outside. It was hot and smelly inside the shit cubicle (as he called it), so he didn’t want to stay in it any longer than necessary.
As he was finishing up, the following things seemed to happen:
Initially he noticed that it was suddenly very quiet outside–he assumed that something had gotten the attention of his friends and so he was very eager to get out of the hot stinky rectangle.
Then-as he stood up and reassembled himself, he was struck by a sudden bout of dizziness and nausea. He said it quickly passed through his mind that maybe the heat inside the toilet was to blame–but then it was as if he blacked out.
The next thing he remembered was awakening face down in the dirt. He said it was as if he had suddenly awakened from a sleep, so he kind of jumped a little bit. He had no idea where he was and no memory of how he had gotten there, so he just lay there for a few minutes. He was soaking wet.
When he finally sat up he realized that he didn’t recognize anything around him.”I looked down at my clothes–and my belt was still unbuckled. I immediately thought this was some kind of practical joke–but none of my friends were around-there wasn’t any sign of them.”
Steve told me that as he gradually rose to his feet (and buckled his belt) his sense of confusion began to transform into a bit of panic, because it seemed like he was all alone in the middle of nowhere. Had his friends dumped him for some reason to leave him to find his way back? And Why? And how had he gotten so wet? It didn’t seem like it was sewage that soaked him.
He said his brain felt fuzzy–almost as though he was high, and although he was known to be 420 and hallucinogen friendly, he was not using at the time-and that wouldn’t automatically explain why he was face down in a ditch.
He then noticed that there was a road to his left–so he walked over to it and surveyed it first one way and then the next. It seemed unfamiliar and he had no idea in which direction to go. After standing there for a while, he just picked one and started down it. “I had no idea where I was going,” he told me, “but there was a road and it was the only thing I could think of to do.”
After walking for a while (he estimated at least 45 minutes or so–he didn’t have a watch–so it might have been shorter), he decided to take a bit of a break under some trees at the side of the road. He was beginning to get worried. It was Kansas hot and he had no water and was in an isolated area.
“At this point, the real issue for me was making sure I could find other humans–I would figure out what had happened later,” he told me.
Steve started walking again, and this time, after about 10-15 minutes by his estimation, he heard voices in the distance. The voices were raised, people shouting. They seemed to be coming from in front of him–so he began to quicken his pace.
All at once it seemed like he suddenly recognized where he was. “I was kind of jogging along and I saw this busted up tree and some road machinery that looked familiar. I jogged on a little more and saw some construction cones and barrels up ahead.
“The yelling was getting louder and as I approached and passed the cones I realized that I did recognize where I was–because right up the way was the porta potty. I think I hadn’t recognized where I was before because we’d all been talking and laughing up to the point of the construction site and I probably hadn’t paid attention.”
As he approached his friends crowded around the porta-potty, he realized that they were trying to break into it. He’d locked it when he went in and he began to see that they thought he was still in the cubicle–that something had happened to him and they were trying to get him out.
None of them saw him until he was right up to them–and when they did, all of them pretty much freaked out. All of them had seen him go into the porta-potty and all they knew is that he had never come out. They had been trying to get into the Johnny on the Spot for well over an hour (without dumping it of course).
Steve could tell by their reactions that none of them had pranked him. They gave up on the porta-potty and, after consulting a map so they could get to a more populated main road as soon as possible, decided to forgo the remainder of their trip–and get to a proper rest stop.
As they returned to civilization, Steve told them what he’d experienced and his friends shared theirs. According to Steve, everyone was pretty quiet after that–and they never traveled in that part of Kansas again.
Years later, they could laugh about it–and Steve called it “the story of how I teleported out of a porta-potty.”
He would always add at the end, “Thankfully, I don’t know what would have happened if I’d walked the other way down the road.”
OOB/DejaVu/Synchronicity
I have had so many of these experiences I really can’t number them.
Of OOB experiences, I think the most notable have occurred connected to sleep, although I have had a few during deep meditation practices.
Among these have been apparent excursions to events that, in our terms, were in the past–but in which, I was given, or gained, information I could not have known otherwise, but which was later verified by historical/documented sources.
I provide some detail about one of these experiences here.
In at least two instances that I remember distinctly, I had the experience of being out of my body, and then being “re-introduced” back into it–but awoke a little too quickly, resulting in my being “out of sync” with my body–something which was very uncomfortable and took at least 24 hours, each time, to correct ( by going back to sleep).
I have had MANY instances of deja vu whereupon, not only did I experience that sense of “having done things before,” but received an interior “time-stamp” of when I dreamed it. In other words, I had seemingly dreamt the events before they happened–and for a moment could vividly remember the dream of those events.
Usually in such instances, the deja vu goes on for a really long time–and anything I do to “change” the unfolding events are actually part of them.
And synchronicities? Too many to count–almost weekly, particularly when I, or the world is going through many, many changes. In fact, I rather depend on them to give me a sense of how the world around me is going to go. I think that’s part of the purpose synchronicities serve.
Now listen to the accounts that Randles shares in her book. The time stamps for her accounts occur at 15:12, 23:10, 37:52, 48:22, 1:00:11.
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