Crossing Many Rainbows

Okay, it’s taken an age and a day to answer this.  Terribly sorry!  I haven’t been up for talking much lately; been going through some stuff offline that’s been eating my ability to form coherent responses. @_@

Anyway.

Here’s a little thought experiment for you.  Picture the colour red in your mind.  Get a good focus on what that colour is, pure and undistilled with the associations you might have with it.  Now.  You know what the colour red looks like, right?  (Or what any colour looks like, or what a specific sound sounds like, or whatever sense you are most familiar with and most comfortable focusing on in your mind.)  But even though it’s clear and vivid in your mind, you aren’t actually seeing the colour in front of you.  Your brain is still reacting as if you’re seeing it, and what you’re getting is the impression of the colour, formed from familiar experiences and pathways connecting, and it might as well be tangible and in front of you, for all the ways your brain is reacting to imagining it.

It’s a little like that.

It comes from without and within at once.  I can’t actually see them where they are, not in the physical sense, but at the same time, it’s not a projection of my mind or images in my head.  It’s an impression of their images.  It’s as if they’re there but on a plane slightly above or below or to the left of the one I’m in, and if I could see through that veil, I’d be able to physically see them.  The same goes from when they’re talking.  I don’t actually hear their voices outside of myself, but it’s not exactly in my head either.  It’s in that strange state in between.  (Thor very rarely talks to me, actually—what I get from him is not the impression of his voice, but the impression of his touch—a hand on my shoulder or an arm around me or the like.)

So what it boils down to is that they are right there with me, just…not quite in the same realm of reality that I am.  At least, that’s the way I interpret my perceptions of them, because it seems real in every sense except for the physical, and really, if my brain is insisting it’s physical when my eyes disagree, who am I to argue?  I figure my brain (and whatever part of me could be considered to perceive the spiritual) knows better than my eyes do about this anyway.

I hope that clarification makes sense!  If it doesn’t, feel free to ask again and I’ll try to explain a little better.