Things Almost Real

Did you ever see something that couldn't "technically" exist? I have. This article reminded me of it. Many years ago, in the back-country of the rocky mountains, I was camping with Brighteyes and some friends. It was a pretty remote location with beautiful vistas, a series of lakes that cascaded down into a valley fed by a waterfall that plummeted hundreds of feet from a ridge of the continental divide.

We camped there several days and one lazy afternoon I lounged against a warm rock just enjoying the awesome feeling of the elements when I felt a prickly sensation on the back of my neck. You've probably felt this when someone was staring at you ---and this is exactly what it felt like. All my camping buddies were way down at the camp and there were no other people around for miles and miles. When I turned around I saw the most unusual cat I've ever seen. I've seen mountain lions, bobcats, lynxes, cheetahs, tigers, lions and most every type of big cat in either the wild or zoos, but I'd never seen this one before. It was watching me with huge and eerily intelligent eyes. Its head was small, like a cheetah with very long legs, unlike a mountain lion and very distinct coloration. We both just watched each other for about a minute and then it turned and seemed to vanish. For some reason I didn't tell anyone about it, maybe at the time I didn't want to scare them, but I forget the exact reasons. Years later I was looking at a cryptozoology book with Mew and saw the exact cat. Supposedly a mythological creature. Very odd.

The article and the memory got me musing again today about this concept of Daimonic Reality. About how people have been seeing things in the margins since recorded history: fairies, ghosts, bigfoot, ufos. Are these chimerical because they are perhaps dreams of a larger organism, like the earth, that we sometimes experience and interpret in whatever ways are closest to our current understanding of the world? Future research project, perhaps.