#but this is the closest thing I've ever heard to my experience with sleep paralysis | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

icarus-suraki · 2 years

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firework and dahlia?

firework: have you ever had a supernatural experience? I fucking wish. The closest thing I can think of was when I saw a "shadow person" run across a friend's backyard late one evening. I was supposed to go collected my brother's bike (or something like that) from our friend's backyard and I was standing at the top of the hill that sloped down into their backyard and I thought I saw this gray, shadowy man run from the trees on the right into the hedges on the left--a ways ahead of me, not immediately in front of me. At the time it reminded me of the 1990s Ninja Turtles when they would try to disguise themselves in trench coats and fedoras (such was the era and my age), now it reminds me a little of Peter Lorre in M. Just this…shadowy man, with his hat pulled low and his shoulders hunched, hurrying across my friend's backyard.

It did scare me, but mostly because I thought it could be a burglar or murderer--a very corporeal Bad Guy, you know? I wouldn't go get the bikes without a grown-up but I also didn't want to say what I'd seen because my parents were always telling me that I worried too much about this or that or the other. I'd say I thought I heard something and they'd just sigh and say with so much exasperation "What did you hear?" or "What did you think you heard?" So telling them "I think I saw a robber in [friend]'s backyard!" wasn't going to go over well.

The whole "shadow person" thing didn't come up until a few years later when I was in my early teens and got really into paranormal stuff (and, I am sorry to say, some New Age stuff). I figured my Peter Lorre ghost could be called a "shadow person," which does work as a nice kind of shorthand when talking to people who know paranormal lingo.

Oddly, only a year or two ago, I told my mom the story and we had a good laugh and she said that she'd seen The Hat Man (what she called him; not the same as The Hat Man from sleep paralysis) walking down a side aisle at church once. Our descriptions matched and everything and we had a good wonder about what it is in the brain that makes people see this fedora-wearing figure--whether it's cultural or physiological or suggestion or what (nothing supernatural/paranormal because we're both skeptics). I told her story to some fans of all things paranormal and they were a bit baffled. "I've never heard of him going into a church…" Yeah, well, now you have.

Anyway, I guess that's the closest I've got, unless you count me asking Saint Aidan to hold back the tide just long enough, just long enough, so I could get to Lindisfarne because I would have to get there that afternoon or not at all and I actually got there. (Did I leave a decent donation in the box at the chapel despite being nearly broke? Yeah, I did.)

Oh, and except for all the times I was trying to get a cosplay put together in time for a con and I kept hollering at one of the main characters from the series to "help a bitch out!!" when shit was going wrong and that seems to have helped. Does that count?

I hear about other people's supernatural and paranormal experiences around here on Tumblr and I'm just like damn, I want that. "Oh yeah, I see the Fae all the time. It's cool." TEACH ME YOUR WAYS, DAMN IT.

dahlia: describe your ideal house / apartment This is so hard because it changes all the time. No, seriously:

Sometimes I'm like, yes, I want a tiny little cottage in the woods. And then I'm like, actually, I want a super-contemporary apartment. And then, actually, I want a super-cheap, possibly-haunted $90,000 traditional-style house in Japan (how cool would that be?). And then, wait, no, I want a weird hyper-modern Kerala-style house. Wait, no, maybe something totally PoMo--a house or an apartment, either way. A tiny house cottage would be neat, if it’s large enough and not on wheels. Or maybe a cottage that deserves to be on a historic register, something with half-timbers. Or I'll take a 1970s faux Tudor, if it suits me. Maybe I do just want a house like the one I grew up in. Or maybe I want the actual house I grew up in. But that would require me to take care of a yard, so maybe a funky renovated factory-turned-apartments with exposed brick and Edison bulbs so everyone knows I'm fucking hipster on the inside. Black-and-white minimalism appeals to me sometimes but then so does balls-to-the-wall maximalism. Occasionally I'll see an Italianate-style house (accurate or not) and I just fall for it--we've got a handful of Italianate, Spanish Colonial, and French (Normandy and Provençal) style houses around here and I love them. I have a mental list of favorite "ugly houses" in my area that are just…weird in some way that makes me love them. There are a few of these oddly dark brown houses with green shutters in some of the 1970s-era neighborhoods that I didn't like until I went to Switzerland in 2004 and suddenly I'm like "Swiss house yessss." Sometimes I see fucking…movie sets and I'm like "yeah, that's my house."

Like, even McMansions have their charm because they're so fucking awful. If you just lean into the fuckery, it becomes camp and kitsch. Stop pretending it's Fine Craftsmanship and just embrace the Weird.

But all of that is architecture and style. My Ideal Place to Live is a place that's mine. Ideally, it gets sufficient natural light that I can make it through the winter and has AC and is close to the places I need to go. But, really, I'd like a place that I can mess around with--paint walls or change floors or emphasize something weird about it.

But seeing as I'm a Millennial, I won't have to worry about any of this :)

Summertime asks!

#ask game #ask me things #anon is on

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