OU blog

Personal Blogs

Stylised image of a figure dancing

Lost in a Tunnel

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Martin Cadwell, Friday 7 August 2026 at 10:05

Tunnel Vision

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

Cadwell NOT Caldwell

 

Lost in a Tunnel

[4 minute read ] 

opinion mental health

I feel as though I shall be thwarted in some way today. Dreams have that effect on me. I got lost in a tunnel on the way to a place I know didn't have a tunnel between where I started in the dream and where the place is. The tunnel should have only been under a road bridge, but it went on and on and seemed to be curved. After a time I noticed it was blocked by an abandoned excavator (JCB digger) but I could see daylight beyond it. I thought the pursuing vehicle would not see it and would smash into it. I had no desire to warn the driver. Then, the end of the tunnel vanished and it continued on and curved almost back on itself before I came out into twilight, completely lost. I saw, in the distance, a large group of people moving towards me and that worried me. I walked away in the opposite direction, frequently looking over my shoulder, and found a smaller group of three men ahead, whom I approached to ask for directions. 

       'Hey, don't talk to them!' came a cry from behind me. Another group of five were running. 'They are not allowed to talk!'

        'It's alright, he's only asking for directions.' called one of the group of three. I know he should not have spoken at all.

I never got the directions; I suppose puzzlement woke me up too much. That dream, or unresolved dream, has kind of sapped my confidence that I shall achieve all I want to today. It could be disappointment from not completing an important task (not getting to my destination in the dream) or the sense of foreboding that lies crouched in the undergrowth of my peripheral consciousness. 

When I was seventeen and working in Bavaria (Bayern) in South Germany, I had a semi-violent argument with a black man. He was staying in the same Gästhaus as me (Pub with rooms). I was quite argy-bargy and physically confrontational, but we did not come to actual blows. He was a lot older than me and probably didn't want to beat a child up. That night, in the early hours, I woke with a heavy black weight pressing down on me and holding me still. There was no-one there and I immediately conjured up the idea that the black man was putting a Voodoo spell on me. Of course, we are paralysed in our sleep, or should be, in order that we don't live out our dreams and thrash wildly about when we fight monsters, and it was the middle of the night and my light were off, so it was dark. I have since then awoken paralysed and it is always from a nightmare with evil spirits attacking me. I doubt that the instances are connected by association at those times, but you never know. These days, however, it is so easy for me to dispel my rationale in place of fantastic stereotyping quite simply because I can apply memories of other instances of woken sleep paralysis being a consequence of waking from nightmares of evil intent, but only because I am awake and scraping my mind for similarities. Plainly, I have an active imagination and seek solutions outside of reason. Here's something: I heard that black magic only works if the afflicted person believes in it. My teenage stereotyping of black people likely allowed me to believe that all black people know and practice Voodoo because they all live in Haiti. After all, I was naïve and I had never seen any before. I probably didn't read enough Ladybird books, except for the one that had a mid to late 1950s illustration of a black Kenyan on a red tractor!

Tenuously, I might link the nasty neighbour who stole my food-waste caddie to my bad dream last night. He, I am fairly sure I know who it is, is the sort of person to experiment with the occult to help him navigate through what probably seems to him to be a very confusing experience of other people in the world. Yes, I know; I give with one hand and take with the other. I have to be true to myself though, I am emotionally upset from my dream last night; well, more disrupted or discombobulated I suppose, and I am giving deliberately free-rein to my imagination to iron out any wrinkles that mar clear thinking.

I very much believe in the spirit world (and aliens) and it would be dishonourable if I denied myself that declarative statement. While I can use convergent thinking such as would be used in writing a good essay or report, I much prefer to look at the flowers and the hedges on any journey, metaphorically speaking, and in real life. That said, I won't stop to look at Chartres Cathedral on the way to Madrid, even with ample time to spare. 

I can't help it. Today, I feel, will be one of gossamer veils of fantasy that shroud reason. Subjects such as Mathematics and Chemistry will have to make way for fairy-tales and sitting round bonfires today. I am supposed to go into the city today, but there is too much reality there for it to be fun. I think I understand now why I don't really like the city and all the people there. I have to use convergent thinking and I am wholly focused on achieving my shopping goals, which Is why I think everyone is in my way. Not realising that the other people are using both convergent and divergent thinking, as they happily graze in the shops and boulevards, I get irritated. Ha! Lesson learned. I need to chill quite a bit.

Chartre Cathedral; focus on a destination; fun; diligence; get the job done nothing else matters; imagination; ruthless. All these thrown in a cauldron and cooked together taste like I am socially isolating myself with convergent thinking that completely displaces any divergent thinking (the fun stuff). Hmmm. Maybe being in a circuitous tunnel that exits at where people do not explain anything has given me an insight that I can use, after all.

I will make myself go into the city today, and I will chew my cud while I graze, like the bovines around me. Maybe, if I use magic I will be able to see them as human. Yeah, I know, I am cold, harsh and uncharitable today.

Tunnel vision.

Permalink Add your comment
Share post
Stylised image of a figure dancing

Mass calls to be honest

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Martin Cadwell, Sunday 11 January 2026 at 08:52

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

silhouette of a female face in profile  

Mass calls to be honest

I am only a guinea-pig in my own laboratory

[ 9 minute read ]

It is not particularly surprising to me that whatever is the first thing my mind settles on, when I wake, dominates my thoughts for a while, until something else comes along to fascinate me.

Duck hatchlings will fix upon the first thing they see and call it mum. Of course, the 'thing' needs to move, have eyes and not look like itself. I don't think it needs to be alive though; 'imprinting' (Developmental Psychology and Ethology).

Is it the fixation on a subject while we are still waking that writes the Table of Contents for our day? Tomorrow, after I have washed and made a cup of tea and before I do anything else, perhaps I shall write a few words on flowers to see if I do more in my garden later in the evening - I have outside lights.

We all know that I don't need to let my thoughts dwell on my garden to recognise I have a desire to spend more time shaping it to my desire. But if I spend maybe the first twenty minutes from waking with a cup of tea and writing about farms and forests and flowers, I am fairly sure I will imprint my garden in my mind. And like the little ducklings following their mum, the imprinting will act to release the energy and motivation in me to actually pick up a fork and dig.

When I was fourteen, one of my friends said to me, 'To think you can, creates the force that can.' It was completely out of the blue, and apropos to nothing. It is sports psychology and may come under the chapter heading 'Visualise your Win' or something, but today it would be called 'manifesting' and that book is next to the one on Pilates and Yoga, but sometimes misplaced on the shelf on spirituality. Things are always better if we think they are new. He also liked to sing, 'Love is like oxygen, you get too much, you get too high; not enough, and you're gonna die. Love makes you high.'

My daughter, when she was a teenager was grumpy first thing in the morning. I told her to stick her head out her bedroom window when she got up and breathe all the air out of her lungs, until there was none left and then breathe in fresh air. Hold it for a few seconds, and slowly breathe all of it out until there was none left.  I said 'Do this three times and then come downstairs.'

Another trick(?) I had, was to laugh as soon as I woke up, for a few seconds. No particular reason, just laugh. It was a technique I used to calm irritated and frustrated workers in the flower bulb factories in The Netherlands. 

       'Bend over. Put your hands on your belly. Now straighten up and have a good rolling belly laugh. Bounce up and down a little like Father Christmas, but make sure you laugh.' The person felt better; the frustration gone, and the onlookers all smiled. I even became more attractive to some of the other workers.

Hume, the philosopher, believed that if we see someone laughing we are happy and if we see someone crying, it makes us sad. I am convinced that when there is a crisis a stable person makes the people caught up in the crisis feel more stable. I think Anne Heche in the film she made with Harrison Ford, 'Six Days Seven Nights' (1998) summed this up admirably when she said to him, something like, 'Don't fall apart because you are all that is holding me together.' It is a long time since I have seen it, so it is only a suggestion of what she said. I think the 'meat' of the sentiment is there though.

       'To think you can, creates the force that can.'

I had a conversation with someone a few days ago that puzzled me. He, the other guy, said that there is more mass in a human than in all of the space in space. I have no idea. He said he is interested in astronomy so I let it go because even if he is wrong I have nothing to counter anything he says, so it would be a monologue lecture. Either I listen or stop him pushing that idea, because either way I won't just accept what he says. 

The interesting thing is, he was trying to link the mass of a person with their force of authenticity or 'genuineness'. 

       'Children don't lie; they just say what they mean,' he postulated as though it is how much someone weighs that determines how their integrity is perceived by others; well, to him anyway.

I countered with 'Small children don't have blocks of information to sum together to make a coherent statement to outline their mental position', but in a much more conversational format with lots of sentences. Blah, blah, blah...heuristics!' But I was hooked on what he was saying.

I am open to all sorts of communication, telepathy, symbolism, words (spoken and written), tones and pitches in speech, images, and spiritual notions. I felt that this man might have something worth investigating, so I pursued it later in my head. Already I had been having discussions of mass-less fantasy creatures in fantasy stories so I was shaped for fitting through the narrow gates that led me to physics and gravity and magnets; attraction and repulsion.

A long time ago, I used to drink to oblivion when my PTSD got too much for me. I would drink for a few days just seeking unconsciousness. Eventually, I was temporarily 'healed' (?) and I stopped drinking. I always had money left and had food and stuff; it was just a alcohol-driven mental holiday. When you have spent a few days drunk, and only drunk, suddenly stopping drinking is dangerous. You have developed a physiological addiction and 'cold turkey' withdrawal is coming, and it is coming hard.

I could operate well after a day or so after the initial shaking and no sleep for three days and nights. One day though about a week after coming off the alcohol, I was in the local library writing some JavaScript code for my website and I thought I could hear an American radio show advertisement playing over and over again. Clearly, a bit of psychosis or auditory hallucination. The electric fans in the library were on because it was a warm Summer. I left the library and the American radio advert faded. 'Phew! that was nasty!' The library was in a cul-de-sac with no cars. When I got to a road with cars going along it, I noticed that the American radio advert came back in my head, got louder as they approached and faded as they passed away. Quickly, I sought an area away from roads, and sure enough where there were no induction motors or generators there were no American radio adverts in my head. I stored that episode in my memory. It has never happened again. However, in my tent in the woods and away from the roads I could hear the telephone wires nearby throbbing but not as a pulse, more as though they were sending Morse code. I thought at the time that the worlds power lines would make a good antenna for sending messages to alien ships in space or distress calls or something. I don't drink like that any more. With a creative mind though, the 'trips' were entertaining. I think it is more to do with sleep deprivation than the poisonous metabolised alcohol enzyme, acetaldehyde, which is then further metabolised into less harmful substances. You know, no dreaming means you 'trip' while you are awake. My jury is out on that because I am only a guinea-pig in my own laboratory.

Having recently been involved in discussions on fantasy creatures and mass; and having the experience of seemingly hearing electrical devices that give off either superfluous harmonics or electro-magetic fields; and understanding how gravity works to attract bodies of mass together; and learning that there is a type of fox that has to dive through snow to get to voles or small creatures which has a greater success rate when it aligns itself North Westerly; and learning that, that fox has a special protein in its eyes to be able to 'see' the Earth's magnetic field to align itself appropriately; when this man spoke of authenticity coming from the mass of someone, naturally I was intrigued.

Unfortunately, the man's shop manager came out to intimidate me because he was told by a young shop assistant that I was harassing the man with a weird idea. It wasn't me who started that conversation and I was only saying, 'Go on, I am intrigued' and 'I could argue that.' Do I give off something that makes people wary of me. I have been told that I also can be intimidating.

So, I gave the man my card and said 'Contact me because I want to continue this discussion.' He hasn't. Such a loss!

I am both fey and silly enough to believe that the shop manager is influenced by a malevolent spirit and has spiritually removed the man's tongue or his memory of talking to me, as he whipped my card from his hand. He might work for an intelligence agency. If I don't see the man again, it might be because they took him to work at GCHQ. Oooh! I hope so!

Permalink Add your comment
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 648512