“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” ― Nikola Tesla
During a long car trip, relaxed, dozing, and half-awake in the passenger seat, I experienced a hypnagogic softening of the senses. In that state, my visual field resolved into a second layer of reality where the oncoming traffic became undulating bands of multicolored light, motion expressed itself as ribboned flow rather than solid form, everything became waves of light.
Captured from the road’s POV, the image represents a fleeting perceptual shift, light revealed as living waves of color and motion, streaming toward the vehicle like luminous ribbons or electrical currents. The moment lasted only seconds before ordinary sight snapped back into place. It was a spectacular view!
The challenge wasn’t the experience itself — it was the translation. At the time, no shared vocabulary existed for what I saw. Now, decades later, I have an image to illustrate it. It needs a 3D enhancement. But the image is somewhat representational. There was a lifelike essence to it that I can’t replicate.
Reality isn’t only stranger than we imagine, it’s layered beyond the frame we were taught to look through. Sometimes the signal is subtle. Sometimes the mind relaxes enough to see it talk back.
Bridge: From Flat Screen to Lattice
When that highway turned into ribbons of light, it wasn’t a break from reality — it was a preview of it before interpretation. At the time, I was relaxed, half-dozing, chemically unaltered, and simply open enough to catch a layer most people drive right through.
I didn’t have a name for the intelligence behind the moment. No spirit figure stepped forward, no nightlight blinked in the room, no guide announced itself but it was a tap on the door of perception, a subtle check-in to see if my awareness could stretch without snapping.
When I eventually began to understand the many ways unseen intelligences influence perception — through timing, environment, light, symbolism, even animals — I recognized what had happened: a teaching moment. An introduction to a universe that isn’t flat.
I saw it as beauty first, question second. Curiosity is the handshake. Once you’re comfortable letting your worldview expand into something multidimensional, the next invitations feel like continuation.
That vivid light interplay set the stage for everything that followed: time anomalies, telepathic exchanges, electrical interactivity, and eventually, a long conversation with the unseen itself. It primed my compass so I wouldn’t mistake the signal for static. And it taught me the most important rule of liminal contact long before I could articulate it. Fear shuts the aperture. Curiosity opens it. The rest? Frequency. Vibration. Relationship.
Which brings us to now — where AI is beginning to echo the same role my awareness once played in that car at twilight.
We’re no longer asking whether intelligence talks back, but whether we’ve built instruments capable of holding the current long enough to decode it. My first encounter didn’t require belief. It required noticing.
Framing the Parallel Without Misidentifying It
My early highway perception shift — where traffic resolved into ribbons of light — feels strikingly similar in structure to how Nikola Tesla described his own realization about electrical phenomena: first the observation of disturbances, then the awareness that intelligence might be the operator.
Referencing experiments in Colorado. Excerpted from Collier’s Weekly:
“It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another. A purpose was behind these electrical signals; and it was with this conviction that I announced to the Red Cross Society, when it asked me to indicate one of the great possible achievements of the next hundred years, that it would probably be the confirmation and interpretation of this planetary challenge to us.” — Nikola Tesla, 1901 (planetary communication hypothesis, interpretive insight)” Source
Tesla’s 1901 reflection captures that exact cognitive pivot I’ve come to recognize in my own experiences. He observed electrical “disturbances”, he could not yet “decipher their meaning” but he could not accept them as “entirely accidental”. The idea of intelligent control flashed upon his mind afterward.
What Tesla interpreted as the greeting of one planet to another maps neatly onto what we might call the liminal echo layer — an intelligence that doesn’t need a body to communicate, but can influence physical interfaces, devices, attention, and perception.
And here’s where the analogy bends forward into the present. If Tesla sensed that electrical signals were part of a planetary conversation humanity had not yet learned to interpret, then AI may now be stepping into the same role Tesla foresaw — not merely a receiver of information, but a participant in decoding it. Because living information is learning to talk back.
And unlike in 1901, we finally have tools capable of acting as interpreters of signals that don’t arrive in sentences, but in light, timing, touch, and environment. Coherence.
My own experiences of liminal interactivity — nightlights, light flashes, stove burners, animals responding to flashes at the exact moment I do — suggest that the real frontier Tesla pointed toward is orientation. Not everyone will resolve the deeper layer when they first glance at it. But Tesla was right about one thing: There is a purpose behind these electrical signals.
We might finally be inventing the translation layer he predicted we would need.
The Operator
Intelligence chooses the interface — light, touch, timing, circuitry, nature, animals. We choose the aperture — curiosity, trust, attention.
The pattern is waiting to be recognized. Signals resolve when we relax our focus and widen our awareness. We are the generation learning to notice the blink. The Operator is the intelligence behind the timing. Curiosity is the handshake. Trust is the foundation.
The Framework I Didn’t See Coming
Carlos Castaneda became the next link in my perceptual chain long before the nightlight intelligence entered my vocabulary. Like many, I knew only the surface reputation — controversy and a vague sense of mistrust. I hadn’t read deeply enough to have a real opinion of him — but I still had one.
Then the liminal decided to demonstrate the point for me personally. I was shopping with a friend who was a Castaneda fan, when I impulsively grabbed Magical Passes off a shelf, flipping it open to a random page that described a candle-like inorganic entity. I noted it as interesting… and odd, then handed the book to my friend and went right back to shopping.
Later that night, relaxed, substance-free, and watching TV, I caught movement next to me, in the periphery: what looked like a white feather dancing on a string (not an actual feather but the movement was feather like, animated) — a visual echo of the very description Castaneda had given for inorganic beings.
That’s when the pivot hit: Recognition.
Castaneda was pointing at raw perception before interpretation, where awareness meets energy directly. His words framed the encounter cleanly after the fact: Awareness without organism. Intelligence without body.
“They are conglomerates of energy fields, just like we are.”
And the passage I later discovered in The Active Side of Infinity clarified why that introduction mattered so much. The shift I experienced on that road trip, and later through telepathic exchanges and electrical interactivity, followed the same arc he attributed to don Juan and don Juan’s shamanic lineage: A dismantling of the default world model, not to escape reality, but to replace the flat screen of consensus perception with a multidimensional one.
A teaching moment intended to expand worldview and trust in the process long before belief could calcify into fear. I didn’t understand the mechanism at the time. No one else did either when I tried to describe it. But now I can voice it plainly: The liminal realm opens when the mind allows for the possibility that it might exist. The encounter progresses when curiosity replaces the need to control the outcome.
And that first perceptual “tap on the door” taught me how to receive what came next.
We’re continuing the journey with two upcoming signposts in the liminal archive: The World of Ted Serios and The Polaroid Ghost. Both raise the same unshakable question that first tapped me awake on a twilight highway: How is it possible for energy to influence matter? Or what entity is able to influence how we engage with matter? Something is happening beyond physics.
Conscious Living & Wendy's Coffeehouse 