Interesting conversation with H.o.p. tonight. We were sitting at the puters after he’d practiced piano (he is now taking piano) and H.o.p. says after a while, “What can I do to keep from floating up?”
Hmmm. Okey-dokey. “You feel like you’re going out of your body sometimes?”
“Yes. Going up. I float up above it.”
I could tell he was worried. “If you don’t want to go up there or want to bring yourself back down, you ground yourself.” I smiled reassuringly and took his hand. “Like this. You take hold of something and really feel it and that can ground you. Like the blanket on the back of your chair. You could take hold of that and feel its weave.”
I could tell he was relieved I didn’t flip out and that was instead grinning at him and holding his hand.
“You’ve done this before?” I asked.
“Yes. I can look down and see you.”
OBE isn’t uncommon. What it is exactly, no one quite knows, though science thinks they may have pinpointed a site in the brain that has something to do with it. And considering he’s dyslexic and that dyslexics (at least some) have the ability to holistically see (or imagine) things from different angles, and H.o.p.’s dyslexic, there’s the dyslexia to consider.
I remember the time I was 13 or so years old, maybe younger, and had one of my more peculiar, emphatic waking OBEs. I became so confused by it that I turned my coke upside down (thinking I was righting it) and poured coke all over the place. May have been just a matter of the dyslexia. In the same dyslexic vein, I have been walking through a store, stopped to look at an item, and turned to face an entirely different world, flipped backwards from what it was, which makes everything look very different and then I have to try to figure out how to get out of there. Usually closing my eyes a couple of times and taking several steps will reorient things back to what they were. But it can still throw you.
So this may be the dyslexia or whatever science now thinks might cause it…or maybe he is looking down and seeing me. Hey, you jeer but I’ve had some odd experiences too and am not going to tell H.o.p.
“Does it worry you?” I asked.
He shook his head yes. “I’m afraid I’m going to fall.”
“You’re not going to fall. OK?”
“OK.”
And hoping to further reassure I told him a number of people felt this, sometimes awake, sometimes sleeping.
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