My Explanation of the Mindscape Concept: My First Spirit Journeys

In one of the first e-mails to Richard on the subject of mindscapes and remote energy work and prayer-directed healing, I described for him my first encounters with mindscapes. Here is the discussion. Please see if you have anything to add, via the Comments section below.

As far as I can tell, each person has a mindscape, a personal world, which is, on average, a subconscious place, and may be a part of the dream world - nightmares and all. So far, I've seen mostly welcome things in mine and in those I've visited. I have normally visited only the mindscapes of consenting friends and family, understand.

I mentioned that my roommate at college was the first person with whom I knowingly engaged in mind travel. It happened one night while we were sitting in her room (this was my first semester, before we were roommates), relaxing. I was writing a novel, and Mirranda was building a motorcycle out of Legos. (She loved anything tactile.) Suddenly, I saw in my mind a hallway with wood paneling. It encircled a room I couldn't seem to get into, and I walked around it twice or three times before I realized where I was.

I was, in fact, in a house in Mirranda's mindscape.

She never let on she knew I was there until afterward, but she said she could literally feel me running around in her head.

We dabbled a lot that winter, and discovered not only several rooms in our respective houses (which don't seem to be quite the same as Relationship Houses), but also several different personalities in each of us.

Regarding these personalities, we thought at the time that there were just three basic forms, and for simplicity's sake, labeled them "Me", "Myself", and "I". "I" is the most grown-up of the three, and usually, the most proper - in a British sort of way. "Myself" is average - just a regular person, with flaws and also joys, who sometimes laughs at bad jokes and sometimes seems witty or wise. "Me" is a bit of a goofball - in my case, strongly resembling a Kender (from Dragon Lance), topknot and all.

The third form was the one Mirranda was most likely to meet if she came to visit me. (My husband, on the other hand, doesn't seem to recognize this form exists at all; he thinks I have no viable sense of humor.) It is possible that there are dozens more personalities, exhibiting changes over time, or different angles of existence or mood, but these three were all we found.

We didn't then know about spirit animals. It's entirely possible we saw some, and took them for regular beasts. It's possible none made appearances; I don't remember clearly.

I don't know exactly what the rules of mindscapes are, though I'm sure there is such a thing as rules. I don't know how normal physical rules, like gravity, apply. It is possible (and not hard) to warp from place to place.

Here's how I learned this:

Mirranda wanted to do an experiment to see if things behaved logically in her mindscape. We had been gallivanting around her mindscape, and had met odd things at every turn. She had giant hot-pink flowers growing up a granite mountain, and had supped on Ent Juice with an Ent (the Tolkien creature, you know). He had invited her to his home, and a charming place it was. It would have made all the environmentally-conscious builders positively green with envy.

We had come to a wide river, running fast, and had managed to step across it in a sort of warping gesture - very scary the first time, I found. After that, if we wanted to skip ahead to somewhere, it took but a thought.

Anyhow, we found ourselves at the last in a little hut out in the middle of a strange meadow. We sat down opposite one another at a tiny kitchen table, and Mirranda pulled out a deck of old Rose Bud Casino cards (she grew up on the Rose Bud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota). She used these cards all the time in "real" life, playing mostly Solitaire. For us though, she dealt for Pinochle, and began watching to see if cards ever repeated themselves. Alas, she never got to find out. She had not announced her intentions to me, and I thought to myself, "What are we doing? We can play cards anytime!" and got up and walked out the door of the hut to further explore...warping ahead to something interresting. Mirranda, after she caught up, made it clear she was disappointed, and especially when we never had a good opportunity to re-try the experiment.

I'm thinking, in Mirranda's mindscape, there's no telling whether the cards would have behaved logically to the end of the deck. She was a person brimming with possibilities, logical and otherwise. I'd say, in general, the logical aspects of a particular mindscape depends on the persons to whom it belongs - a logical person is likely to have a logical mindscape, and vice versa.

Practically all exceptions to the "consensual" part of my experiences have occured with those bent on mischief or outright evil. I have more than once glimpsed the mindscapes of clinically insane people, without meaning to, and without being officially invited. In the instance of one woman, I knew she talked regularly with demons, though she wouldn't have called them that...to her they were "friends", and inhabited her large Teddy bear collection. I saw through her eyes what it was like to live in a world strange with terror and blackness, populated with grotesque spirits of many kinds - literally behind every building. I suddenly understood her fear of the trains which pass through my town several times a day, as harrassing evil spirits traveled on them, and regularly jumped off to fulfill appointments in homes here.

Another negative experience involved my little sister. I was searching for an answer to a problem with my infant daughter - she had become inexplicably frightened at night, and no measures had thus far prevailed to calm her enough to sleep soundly. I was abruptly bombarded with images of a mindscape I didn't recognize. I established that it was my sister's, and the portion I saw looked demon-infested and extremely dark, like a black-velvet painting. I found myself among an old-wood forest - great, twisted oaks stood at intervals as far as I could see, with a black-velvet night hung between them. However, I didn't stick around to see whether my assessment of her being a deliberate demon-friend held true...especially after the Grateful Dead style Teddy bears showed up from among the trees. That was a bit much. They came in all colors, and seemed to be congregating, and I left immediately.

I later concluded that my sister - who had hard feelings for me after I refused to be friends with her husband - had it out for me and my daughter, and I had not so much intruded on her space as she had sent herself and her dread world to us. Knowledgeable prayer shared with another sister cured the matter.