How can this be? Did I actually experience it, or was it an imaginary event? If I did experience it, why did nobody else? I have thought long upon the two events in my life where this conundrum has occurred.
Like déjà vu, I reckoned my mind had malfunctioned, had used incorrect wiring, just gone down the wrong rabbit hole. Despite not having any explanation, the experiences have stayed with me, mostly unspoken, just sitting as unexplainable memories.
The first time it happened was in about 1977. My girlfriend and I were camping in the old Ayers Rock campground, settled for the night in our swag. I was awoken by an intense light shining down on the camp. I woke my friend, we both briefly talked about the light, and then went back to sleep!
I have a vague memory of asking other campers about it in the morning, but nobody saw it! We two did not discuss it further, and just drove back to Alice Springs.
The experience stayed with me, its factual base never questioned, just a residual memory that I occasionally shared with friends, on those times when ‘odd-things’ were being discussed.
Twenty-five years later, my camping friend and I met again. When asked about that Uluru experience, her rebuttal left me wondering about my state of mind!
Another fifteen years on. I noticed the mortar between the bricks in our house’s wainscoting had eroded. As I investigated under the house, I saw a large hole, about a meter in from the brickwork.
I have a distinct memory of crawling in under the house and looking down into an abyss; a deep, dark hole that I assumed was probably associated with the 19th-century gold mine that I knew remained under the houses across the street. Soil collapses happened periodically in Ballarat. I completed the reinstatement of the brickwork.
That hole continued to rankle in my mind. I talked about it with my wife, but it never went anywhere, save being filed as an ‘odd-observation’.
Why had I not pursued the hole, its potential danger to the house’s stability? Like that Uluru light, it just became an unusual phenomenon that never received the attention that I would have expected it to be given. But it did figure in a decision to sell that house!
Periodic contemplation, and the passage of time has had me determine that both events must have been figments of my imagination. Why else had I not conducted further discussions, investigations? To add further grist to the issue, how and why had both of these things settled so strongly into my psyche, as real events?
I have been unable to develop a rational explanation of why my brain has taken these two things and allocated ‘realty’ to what, in hindsight, and logically, must have been imaginings! Why?
Unproductive musings surface occasionally. I continue to acknowledge their semi-reality, but which I now generally accept are just part of the mind’s rich gymnastic capacities.