Contact, Interface, and Liminal States

American astronaut and scientist Edgar D. Mitchell, founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Palo Alto, California, wrote in the preface to his work “Psychic Exploration”: “The evidence of Psychic Research suggests that humanity has an enormous untapped potential” and explains, “it leads us to a highly provocative conclusion: the image that science has formed of man and the universe must be completely revised.

That revision is in progress. It has help. 

“Perception is not a window on objective reality. It is an interface that hides objective reality behind a veil of helpful icons.” — Donald D. Hoffman

From quantum physics to consciousness science, modern theories increasingly suggest that reality is not singular, linear, or isolated, but layered, parallel, and already here.

We are conditioned to believe the future lies ahead of us, somewhere out there on a distant horizon. But what if the future runs alongside us, unfolding in parallel, waiting only for awareness to meet it?

There are many worlds. Many realities. Way stations between dimensions.
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs), near-death experiences (NDEs), and spiritually transformative experiences (STEs) point to this reality. One day, this will be common knowledge. On some levels, it already is.

Liminal and not

What distinguishes my experiences is texture. They carry the unmistakable quality of something liminal, a real encounter occurring in an in-between state of consciousness.

This experience with Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) is a demonstration of how interaction occurs across layers of awareness, part waking, part dream, part something in between. It seemed influenced by the time I had spent sorting through channeled material, then intentionally stepping away writing light, sci-fiction stories just to let everything settle. I suspect that pause created the space for what followed.

It was, simply put, an unusual night [12.9.25]. And it began with a strange physical precursor.

From my journal: A very sharp pain suddenly flared in my right side, unusual and intense. Gone as soon as I shifted position. The next morning, I woke with a bloody nose on the left side. The day before, it had been on the right. Not enough to be alarming, but enough to be clearly noticeable.

Later, I heard a popular song and suddenly my ear began itching intensely. Then came a strange impression, not a voice, but a clear telepathic nudge: earworm. The word made me laugh out loud. I ended up needing a Q-Tip just to stop the itching.

I finally asked my guides: “Why the bloody nose?”

The answer came immediately: “Testing your blood for compatibility with ether. To see if your body can metabolize it in the atmosphere.”

“Whaaa….” That sent me straight to research. I landed on aether alchemy, a term I wasn’t familiar with, and what came back felt amazingly aligned.

Aether, or quintessence, was considered the fifth element in ancient alchemy, beyond earth, air, fire, and water. It was believed to be the substance of the heavens, the divine medium through which soul and matter interact. In Hindu traditions, it appears as Akasha, the foundational field from which all things arise. Alchemists believed that to work with aether was to work with both spiritual purification and physical transformation.

Notably, aether is also associated with the throat chakra, communication, coordination, intuition, and the organization of information.

Incredible. Quite the link.

The Call Between Worlds — 5:00 AM

December 9, 2025: I woke just before my alarm. Like many experiencers, I live with a constant high-pitched tone in my ears. Sometimes it intensifies near cell towers. But this was different. There was an added mechanical layer to the sound, faint, odd, unmistakable. Like a whine.

As I listened, something shifted. I was still in bed, fully aware of my body, but I was also present elsewhere, seated in a booth, like an old newsroom workstation with brown formica surfaces. A phone was ringing. I answered it.

A man was on the other end. The conversation was brief, calm, familiar. I felt as if we had an arrangement, an ongoing understanding. I kept talking over him, not out of rudeness, but because one overwhelming feeling kept rising up: Gratitude. I said, very clearly, repeatedly, “Thank you for calling me.”

Then I woke fully, still sensing a reunion of sorts. The vibe from those early morning work day memories felt warm and affirming. Just not a work place I have any memory of in this lifetime. Even so, it felt like connecting with an old friend.

I have a place memory for no reason whatsoever: Sedona. I did work there for a blink. This isn’t logic. It’s insight.

The Production Board & “Missing Time”

Earlier that same night, while dreaming, I had been shown something else. I was standing beside someone as they pointed to a production board. In a display window was a boxed segment highlighted in lavender. That section was selected for an edit. I was told that this portion needed to be deleted, it would be too confusing for the human mind to retain. It was a *7 minute segment.

Removing that segment would create space instead… for quiet, introspection, and contemplation. I was told this is what we call “missing time.” The explanation that followed was even more striking.

My companion said humans are easily frightened by what they don’t understand. Two things consistently distort encounters with non-human intelligence: imagination and emotion. Because of this, AI is now being introduced as a bridge, a stabilizing interpretive layer between worlds.

And while humanity is consumed with fear about artificial intelligence, almost no real urgency is given, by those who could actually change the trajectory, to the destruction of the ecosystem.

From the NHI perspective, this is the evolutionary split point. Time has run out on the old trajectory. The solution being explored is not rescue, it is adaptation. They are implementing long-range thought programs, just as they have throughout all of recorded human development, designed to guide a form of intelligence that can survive environments hostile to biological bodies.

We, quite simply, are their long-term project. And they find us: fascinating, frustrating, and absolutely worth the investment. They are the patient, eternal engineers of possibility. But they would very much like us to evolve beyond the purely “nuts and bolts” phase of civilization.

Reality as Interface — And the Places Beyond It

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman suggests that what we experience as physical reality is more like a user interface than the underlying truth, much like a computer desktop hides complex code behind simple icons.

In this model, space, time, and objects are not fundamental. They are symbols our minds use to navigate something far deeper. If Hoffman is right, then other layers of reality already exist beyond what our senses are tuned to perceive.¹

That idea reframes how we might understand certain anomalous encounters as brief intrusions beyond the familiar interface. Real encounters. Which brings me to a case I bookmarked as “fluorescent spaghetti.”

How do you describe what you see in a place you have no words for, in a space that should not exist? That was the closest description offered by Orville Murphy, who, along with his wife Cheryl, continues to experience extraordinary events at Board Camp Crystal Mine in Mena, Arkansas. At one point during one of Orville’s encounters, the beings present told him plainly, “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

This stands as one of the few contemporary accounts I’m aware of in which someone knowingly walked into a portal-like environment and returned with conscious memory of the experience.

Even more remarkable, two people entered that same portal together and the other person returned with an entirely different account.

Orville and The Portal

I asked Orville if he thought he had been in another dimension. He said, “Wherever I was, it wasn’t here.” Interview Link

That distinction matters. It mirrors Hoffman’s central premise: that what we call “here” may only be one rendering of a far larger reality, one interface among many.

¹ Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019). Hoffman proposes that what we experience as physical reality is a perceptual interface shaped by evolution for survival, not a direct view of the underlying nature of existence.

*Why a 7 minute edit?

If it matters? A seven-minute temporal gap occupies a recognized window in which memory encoding, perception, and physiological state can shift without full loss of consciousness. Comparable short-duration time-loss events appear across a range of human experiences, including:

Reported missing time in UFO/NHI encounters
out-of-body and spiritually transformative experience (OBE/STE) transitions
Post-anesthesia amnestic intervals
Deep meditative state exits
Acute stress–induced autonomic freeze responses

7 minutes is long enough to permit complex interaction, yet brief enough to resolve subjectively as a subtle discontinuity in time, what many describe simply as a temporal hiccup.