Seeing things differently, literally

[The Cloud]

I had a really odd experience today. I'm not sure if the post belongs here, but this is where I feel it belongs most. I was standing by the lake today, just staring at the water. My glasses were sliding down my nose, so I readjusted them and pushed them up my nose. All of the sudden, it was as if my glasses became TV screens to the world that I was watching. With a TV, you can see entire scenes at the same time, as opposed to focusing on a specific object.

So my vision became all-encompassing, covering things in the periphery just as acutely as the things in the center. It was as if all the sudden I was seeing everything all at the same time. Instead of just looking at one wave or ripple in the water, I was seeing all of it at the same time. I had a strong sense of how it was all connected, of how all the waves were just parts of other waves. I wasn't just seeing it like you see things when you focus on them, I was seeing it in its entirety, seeing how every wave led naturally to every other wave. There were a bunch of seagulls fighting over something one of them had, and I saw all of them dancing in the air together, rather than just individual seagulls.

It was one of the strangest things that has ever happened to me, but the more I tried to hold on to it the more it slipped away until it was gone. I suspect that it will happen again as long as I don't try to force it, but I would be interested to know if anybody else has had any similar experiences.

[Jarrod]

A method I've used for activating attention/consciousness is to look at something and then very quickly look away and quickly back to looking at it.

While the focus is on one object, the exercise seems to open up all the senses to a certain degree. Something to try anyway.

[PianoManGidley]

I think after watching too much TV, I started seeing the real world in a somewhat similar fashion whenever looking through a car window.

Usually this would happen on the bus to/from school, and I would start to feel myself slipping into this idea that what I was staring at through the window wasn't really real, so my mind started to try to make it more real in a way different than how we traditionally do...and it almost led me to feel as if I was trying to perceive the 4th spatial dimension, which was really trippy.