Tornado in Dimmitt, Texas.
Photo by Harald Richter of NOAA

Experiment 6 had no obvious results and I actually had nothing to report about it. Since I have no particular goal in mind for the time machine currently, I played around with the "sticky board" to choose a setting and got nothing in particular. I have no faith in the rubbing plate and believe that when my finger sticks that means I've been circling the plate long enough to burn off any oils on my skin, so it sticks. I have less tiresome ways of choosing random numbers.

I have two fairly interesting things to mention in regards to Experiment 7, which I powered up for more than 24 hours ago. Gibbs says results sometimes come in much later than the actual activation, so I'm counting both things. The first event came in dream format and wasn't too unusual except that in my wanderings I seemed to be someone else from another time period, back in the early 40's possibly. Times were hard and I was trying to scrape up money by gambling. One of the games was a radio game show in which contestants choose random products, disguised and labeled with letters and placed on store shelves, and tried to guess their prices. At the end, if you won, you got a fifteen minute shopping spree for free, with a catch. You had to remember the locations of all the products you'd guessed correctly and put them in your cart, or you won nothing. I was doing very well in the game but quit toward the end because I knew I had no chance of solving the final puzzle.

Follow up:

Out on the street I was walking along in the dark through a throng of people and considering what my next options might be, when I passed a woman begging for money. I told her I was broke, then relented and pulled out some coins. I noted several silver dollars among them and gave her two or three and some random change. She thanked me for it, and seemed a little embarrassed. I started to leave but when I turned my back a couple of her friends started asking her to lend them five dollars, because "we know you're flush." I turned around and she turned red and defensive, and I told her it's ok, I lied about being broke. Then I left. It was an interesting dream with no conclusion and a minimal feel of reality. I noted it because it included a few things from another era, not because it seemed accurate in most ways. I've wondered about the astral travel results other people get, and from reading accounts it seems that the experiences resemble remote viewing. Shamanic dreaming might be an equivalent, a mixture of fact and fantasy, partly real and partly not.

The second event came much later and was much more interesting. While asleep I came to consciousness during an unusual experience involving shapeshifting and flight. I was hovering a few thousand feet in the air over the central plains somewhere, watching some storms roll in. They had the powerful turbulent look of thunderstorms with tornadoes embedded in them and it occurred to me that in my present shape I might be able to survive exploring one. That's been an ambition of mine for some years, associated with the heyoka path and some other preoccupations I have. So I hung around while the storms built up strength, until on the base of the cloud nearest me I saw a ring of energy building, a latticework of bluish-white I wouldn't have seen except when out of body, and knew a funnel was about to drop.

When the tornado touched down the cloud turned black and instantly expanded, suddenly placing me at the point of no return even if I'd decided to back off. I was sucked into the whirlwind and down, which really surprised me. I'd expected to be projected upwards. Instead of darkness the interior of the cloud was bright yellowish-white light, and I was pulled down into its center. It was an interesting experience. Reminded me in many ways of preliminary things I feel when going out of body, but instead of going somewhere else I wound up back here.

So, experiment seven was great fun in several ways, and very unusual, but I'm still not sure it has much to do with the time machine. I'll try focusing on something in particular next, to see if I can get interesting results about a particular time and place. One success out of ten tries is supposed to be good for this machine, and there's no guarantee it'll work at all in the first ten attempts. I'm looking for something really unique, before I place any faith in the HDR.

4/6/2010 -- One day after writing this the first major storm of the Spring came through here. We had started off on a run just as the first thunder started. Alice was doing some hill sprints and I ran the back three miles and by the time we got home the rain had started and lightning was pretty close. It was one of those odd storms preceded by heavy sticky air and a greenish cast to the sky. We went in the house when we saw a wall of rain coming and a few minutes later the hail started, periodically quarter-sized or a little larger. As soon as the storm passed the warning sirens went off in the little town north of here, and the weather radio broadcast tornado warnings for our area. Like most of those warnings, we got the advice just after the storm went away, but Alice got some pretty good video of the storm off to the east of us, with the cyclonic rotation plainly visible in the upper part of the cloud. A tornado was sighted a few miles to the south.

That makes me wonder if there wasn't something of a warning in the dream encounter I had with the twister. Seems at least like an odd coincidence that these two things happened so close together.