It is such a glorious day that Skinny and I are drawn outside by a welcoming, beckoning, warm October sun. We take our usual route down the lane between the fields but this time feeling drawn away from any potential encounters along the way, we walk far out into the stubble field. The sun is so warm, the air so clear, I have a strange feeling that I am walking through summer and not Autumn. There’s a slight breeze and I breathe in deeply and suddenly I am hit by a strange feeling. I have a strong sense of others who have walked these fields in days gone by. Carried on the air, I sense men in old fashioned farm clothes with flat caps and cloth trousers, neckerchiefs around their necks and straw between their teeth. I smell the sweat of the giant horses, straining to pull a plough, leather harnesses, greasey reigns rubbing across sweet smelling hair. And then it’s gone. There’s just Skinny and I and the sound of my footsteps as I stride through the dry stubble.
This strange feeling of the past comes to me unbidden and unexpectedly from time to time. It comes from the air itself as I breathe it. I see it as some kind of long forgotten, little used sense that we all must have to some degree or another. Often it is a faint, wisp of something I can’t quite make out, as illusive as a word on the tip of your tongue, so frail that if you dare to think of it, it will be lost to you. Sometimes what I sense is strong and consists of many thin threads that weave into a picture. I see a knight on a horse, men in a battle, monks in a monastry all of which could stem from imagination and prior knowledge or at least be inspired by surroundings. But whilst I am imaginative, these things usually come upon me when I am thinking of nothing whatsoever. When I am just soaking up the environment, the warmth of the sun, the sound of the birds, thinking nothing at all. Over time I’ve learnt to distinguish the differences and fine lines between a spooky feeling, a chill up my spine or a sense that I am not alone, and this particular sense that comes along unattached to any pre thought or suggestion.
It is odd, I know. It doesn’t happen too often either but always takes me completely by surprise. It is more of a feeling rather than a thought. I have always thought of it akin to a dog’s ability to sense things on the air and I think our ancient ancesters would have had a much more developed sense at their disposal. It is similar to instinct and gut feeling but not quite those. sometimes it is so strong and others a mere ghost passing through my mind, leaving tiny footprints that I cannot follow. A pale wash of something and nothing.
I’ve always been very sensitive to my environment. I always said I could never live anywhere ugly. Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder but for me, ugliness lies in modern, bland, functional buildings; 1960’s tower blocks and social housing, municipal buildings, green/gray paint of hospitals and courts and police stations. I lived in a tower block once in north London. It was up on a hill overlooking the city in a bleak landscape of smaller blocks. These were places of despair to me. Poverty was everywhere from crying babies to cars up on chocks with wheels missing. The corridors were painted the inevitable gray/green, ill lit with ugly strobe lighting and the lift was covered in grafitti and stank of urine. I sensed the underlying violence and hopelessness in the ugly words and dreadful smell. It was winter then and the wind whistled through the building clearing the smell of a million lives in tiny shoeboxes. Smells of cooking, spices, fat fryers, sounds of TV’s echoing, children shouting and adults arguing. I had to get out of there. I was so afraid. Afraid to go home at night on my own, afraid of the anonymous people that wrecked their own lifts and corridors and cars and families. So strong was the sense of awfulness that had I stayed there, my own soul would be lost along with theirs. I did leave.
I’ve written previously on my blog about ghostly experiences I’ve had and I do believe that I am slightly ‘sensitive’ to ghostly goings on. Mediums and psychics say that everyone has some psychic ability and it is a question of developing it. I think this is true and I think this mystery sense that I have from time to time is similarly something we can all feel and is left over from when the human being was more in tune with instinct and senses and nature, more like animals still are. We are all animals and we share the same sense of fear, loneliness, joy. Some of our ‘animal’ senses have diminished as our lives have changed and we have lost those that are less obvious and well hidden deep within ourselves.
People think of ghosts as imprints left within the atmosphere where an incident has occured, especially a violent episode which gives the feeling strength and the emotions left to be felt by others. I wonder if, in fact, there are invisible holes where these past existences are being played out in another dimension and occasionally, when the wind is right, the magnetic fields in place, I sense them around me but not with me. Maybe that is an explanation.
I can see that people might be wondering if I’ve lost my marbles at this point. Maybe I have but in that case I never had them to begin with. We are, according to another commenter on a different blog, in ‘Mercury retrograde’, though I don’t really know what that means. It can, apparently, account for strange happenings and we are also coming up to Halloween so if nothing else, it’s a good time to be discussing the unusual. If anyone else can relate to what I am talking about, let me know. I’d love to hear about anyone else with stories of the unusual. Tales of the unexpected perhaps.
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