I meditated for the first time today, in a Buddhist temple in South Korea. Being non-spiritual, I didn't expect much - actually, I expected it to be boring. However, I got an unexpected treat, a show for free, courtesy of mild hallucinations. I googled a bit to see if this is a common thing, but the results were wildly spiritual-enlightened-mumbo-jumbo, which couldn't have been the case here. Being a very fanciful and vivid dreamer, I'd think it was something more down that alley.
We did two sessions, a 20 minute one and a 30 minute one. The first one was richer for me, as I could just concentrate on the floor patterns, without any distractions. In that session, the floor patterns first started weaving to the sound of the rain before turning into shapes. The first shape was a demonic-kind of face, that was in turn eaten by a huge flame. After some more dancing patterns, I got one more scene of a mouse nibbling on a wooden horse, that in turn morphed into a mouse winding up a human-like shape (a nutcracker soldier kind of thing). That's when our session ended. My eyes were a bit misaligned after that, as all the people had two mouths and four eyes, which was amazing as well.
After a breakfast and a break, we did a second session. This time, I wanted to concentrate on the rain drops outside the meditation room. First thing that I noticed is that it's a lot harder to form patterns in an environment that is already dancing, but worse still was having a constantly moving person in my sight. When I managed to zone that out, I first saw regular pattern flows, forming infinity symbols and triskels. Eventually came the first scene: two guys doing some martial-arts fighting with long sticks. When they were done, the puddles and raindrops in them became intensively 3D and were gaining more and more height. Then the signal turned to noise for a long while, before turning into an epic ship fight, with sails, cannons and explosions. While concentrated on the scene, a gust of wind moved the trees in the background, which made it look like the mountain was about to get up and walk away. It also resembled a waking dragon a little bit, so I moved my eyes to concentrate on that, which broke the flow. After that it became uncomfortable sitting on the floor, so that was essentially the end of my trip.
It was an interesting experience - being fully rested and awake, yet dreaming with the eyes open and not even remotely feeling like falling asleep. I'll have to try to recreate the experience back home.
Dachaz
darko.zelic
+31639107668
@Dachaz