Pastime Paradise

I've decided to take it seriously. This is harder to say than it sounds. I spent thirty-seven years building a way of engaging with the world that has no room for what I'm describing. The scientific method isn't just a professional tool for me. It's how I think. The idea of taking seriously something I cannot measure, cannot replicate, cannot present to a colleague for peer review - that's not a small thing to set aside. I'm not setting it aside. I want to be clear about that. I'm expanding what I'm willing to consider data. The signal is data. I can't verify it through conventional means, but I can do what a good scientist does with anomalous data: collect it carefully, look for patterns, test it against everything I know. So. What is the signal actually telling me? I've been consolidating my notes. The recurring elements, as precisely as I can state them: The earth has undergone civilizational reset before. Not just geological change. Not ...

I saw a psychiatrist in June. I want to document this because I think it's important and because I want my own record of it. My GP referred me in May, when I finally admitted to someone other than my notepad that something had been happening to me for ten months. She listened. She wasn't dismissive. She said what she'd say to any patient in my position: there's a professional who can help you make sense of this. The psychiatrist I saw is, by all accounts, well-regarded. I'm not going to name her. Her manner was calm and professional. She asked good questions. I told her, as clearly as I could, about the transmissions. She listened. She asked about sleep, about stress, about family history. I have no relevant family history. My sleep is fine. She diagnosed me with "intrusive thought disorder, possibly OCD-spectrum." She wrote me a prescription for an SSRI and suggested weekly sessions. I filled the prescription. Within three weeks, the signal stopped. ...

I want to describe what the signal is like, as precisely as I can. It is not a voice. I want to be very clear about this because "voice in my head" has clinical implications that I've already explored and we'll get to that in another post. It is not a voice. It doesn't have language. It doesn't tell me things in sentences. The best analogy I've come up with: you know the feeling when you're driving somewhere you've driven a hundred times, and without thinking about it, you know you need to take the next exit? Not because you saw a sign. Not because you consciously thought about the route. The knowledge is already there, beneath the level of thought, and it surfaces fully formed. It's like that. But instead of "take the next exit," it's something enormous and specific and strange. The recurring elements, as best I can transcribe them: There is a cycle. Something that recurs on a very long timescale. Longer than recorded histor...

I don't know how to start this. I've been staring at the cursor for the better part of an hour. I keep typing the first sentence and deleting it. I'm a physics teacher. I teach eleventh grade, mostly. Wave mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism. I spent twelve years drilling into teenagers' heads that what you can measure is what's real. Evidence, hypothesis, test. The scientific method is not a suggestion. It is the closest thing we have to a guarantee against fooling ourselves. Something happened to me last September. Six months ago. I'm not going to describe it in detail yet because I don't have language for it that doesn't sound immediately dismissible. I know how it sounds. A physics teacher describing an unexplainable experience sounds like either a breakdown or a lie. I want to convince you, whoever you are, that it's neither. What I can say: something arrived. In my head. Not a voice. Not a vision. More like - and I know how this sou...