My Apparitional experience and phase...

In 2007 I saw what appeared to be apparition, and wrote about it on my blog a few years later. One of the things that I recalled about the experience was the interesting effect when moving my eyes away from the apparition...

On the evening of Tuesday 11th September 2007, I awoke in the dark in the middle of the night to see a full colour, moving image of an unknown 45-55 y/o black male from the shoulders up. The image was in absolutely exquisite detail and incredible brilliant colour, as if the sun was shining on him (rather like an actor picked out by a spotlight on a darkened stage). The image lasted for more than a few seconds, and long enough for me to carry out a quick experiment, despite it’s disturbing nature (The moving imagery started with the back of the males head towards me, then slowly turned its head round towards me, and then stared at me).

Moving my eyes left, away from the spot where the full colour ‘moving’ image had formed, I clearly retained a faded after-image on my retina, which was the same shape as the original image I had seen (similar to the after-image you see when you look away from a bright TV screen in a darkened room). What is strange, is that I could also see a similar ‘fixed’ faded image in my peripheral vision, this was in the position of the original full colour image, and did not move about, when I moved my eyes left.

When I moved my focus back to the ‘fixed’ faded image, effectively overlapping both faded images, the original image jumped back into full colour. I was able to move my eyes left and right several times, to verify this effect, before the image finally faded away.

My ideas have developed a lot since I wrote this article. However at the time it lead me on a journey to try and understand our perception of colour, and Edwin Land's brilliant work which shows that colour is not a property of the world, but arises from us. It also led me to new ideas on the phase properties of light... there appeared to be something about phase which might be involved in the strange effect I observed when I moved my eyes away from the apparition. One of the areas of possible interest were the very strange properties of Phase Conjugate Mirror's...



When the light strikes a normal mirror at an angle, it reflects back in the opposite direction, such that the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. However, with a phase conjugate mirror, light is always reflected straight back the way it came from, no matter what the angle of incidence.

This difference in the manner of reflection has significant consequences. For example if we place an irregular distorting glass in the path of a beam of light, the parallel rays get bent in random directions, and after reflection from a normal mirror, each ray of light is bent even farther, and the beam is scattered.

With a phase conjugate mirror, on the other hand, each ray is reflected back in the direction it came from. This reflected conjugate wave therefore propagates backwards through the distorting medium, in a bizarre time-reversed reconstruction, and essentially "un-does" the distortion, and returns to a coherent beam of parallel rays traveling in the opposite direction.

At the time, it was hard for me to to understand the strange behaviour of these mirrors without seeing them in action. Today I stumbled across a great video... demonstrating these amazing properties...

Neat effect. Reading your original blog post and this, though, I'm curious what implications you think this has for the idea of apparitions or OBE experiences being crossed signals across time.

Neat effect. Reading your original blog post and this, though, I'm curious what implications you think this has for the idea of apparitions or OBE experiences being crossed signals across time.

I was attempting to understand how I had an after-image that moved with my eyes, when I moved my eyes away, at which point the apparition just about disappeared too. I mean I couldn't see any bright colour or strong shape in my periphery vision when I did this, only a vague sort of smudge. But when I moved my eyes back to the apparition, it jumped back into amazing full bright vivid colour and detail (possibly too much detail, and too much colour).

I spent some time trying to understand colour, as it seemed to be important to understand how colour/luminosity just turned-off, when I moved my eyes away from the apparition. I discovered that Edwin Land had shown that colour cannot be a property of the world, it's an internally created perception. But looking deeper, there is more to it than even Land was able to uncover, there are still anomalies understanding it. The ideas of one independent vision researcher were interesting, suggesting that the retinal structures were actually doing more, they were sensing phase in some way, not just the wavelength... and he pointed towards Phase Conjugate Mirror's (something not at all well understood) as holding a key to these gaps in our understanding of vision.

My apparition couldn't really be seen when I looked away, and something like an after image followed my vision. When I returned my eyes back to the correct position, the apparition sprang back into full vivid colour, almost suggesting the information was unlocked only when my eyes were in the right position. I have no clear idea how the video demo applies to my apparition... there are elements of holography, coherence, interference, spin and phase etc. going on here... it seems counterintuitive that this video demonstration can occur... but it's clearly showing a different aspect of something holography-like...

As an example of what I mean... You can only see a 3D holographic image when you get the light, the holographic storage, and your eyes in the correct positions, otherwise the 3D information contained in the holographic storage remains hidden. That's not the process happening with my apparition... but... something analogous to that might be going on to explain how when my eyes were in the right position I unlocked information, that was hidden when my eyes were aligned incorrectly.

Note: My ideas about experience are very particular, my experience arises from shared non-classical processing of information that transcends our everyday perception of spacetime - which probably won't make any sense to you. I also suspect that this incident was someone else's experience from the past, but it's actually irrelevant to say the past, as the processing is non-classical and transcends spacetime. Therefore I suspect my experience of the apparition, also impacted the experient within the past in some way.

Note: My ideas about experience are very particular, my experience arises from shared non-classical processing of information that transcends our everyday perception of spacetime - which probably won't make any sense to you. I also suspect that this incident was someone else's experience from the past, but it's actually irrelevant to say the past, as the processing is non-classical and transcends spacetime. Therefore I suspect my experience of the apparition, also impacted the experient within the past in some way.

You're not wrong   But I think I follow the basic idea of experiencing someone else's sensations across time.

You're not wrong   But I think I follow the basic idea of experiencing someone else's sensations across time.

The only people who get my ideas are people I'm close to, who I can keep explaining them to... :-) There is even a reason why this happens... 'we can only share matching patterns'... lol