I was sitting at my desk trying to picture a scene for a story when a shadow moved through my consciousness—that is to say, someone walked across my mental image.
At first, I wasn’t sure what I’d just seen. Trying to comprehend the feeling made my mind bend. At best, I could describe it as someone walking in front of a theater screen while a movie’s playing, except, in this case, the movie was the scene I was imagining. I ran through the sensation over and over again, but I couldn’t replicate it. I got the distinct sense that I was now just creating a mental image of a shadow walking by rather than actually experiencing a shadow walking by. Still, I was dead certain it had happened.
I couldn’t explain this to my friends. That evening, over a drink at our local bar with three of them, I tried to put it into words. “The only way to sum it up is that it felt like somebody walked in front of my mind-movie.”
“The hell’s a mind-movie?” asked one.
I looked around at the group, a little confused. “You know, the image in your mind?”
Another friend narrowed her eyes. “You see images in your mind?”
“You don’t?” I shot back, catching their gazes in turn.
My third friend stared at me like he thought I was nuts. “What are you talking about, man?”
Wary and a little concerned, I asked, “None of you see images in your head? Like when you picture a place you’ve been, or call to my mind somebody’s face?”
Their responses shook me.
“No. That sounds crazy.”
“Are you making that up?”
“I just know things.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Same. I just know what somebody’s face is like. I don’t actually see it. How can you see out of your eyes and in your head at the same time? You’d get vertigo.”
Profoundly disturbed that I was apparently the only one that saw images in my mind, I decided to let the matter drop, at least publicly. Privately, I realized I’d stumbled onto something very peculiar and isolating. Was I somehow unlike the people around me?
Of course, I searched online, and discovered that this was a thing people were actually debating. I found a massive Reddit thread full of people with mind-movies and people without mind-movies both surprised at the existence of the other type. At the very least, it turned out I wasn’t alone, but it still didn’t explain the shadow I’d seen.
There wasn’t much I could do about the experience, but it lingered with me for several months. Writing stories for my job involved creating highly detailed settings in my mind, and I remained on edge, wondering if something was lurking just outside each scene. The problem was, I could never look to the sides. It wasn’t like I could turn my metaphorical head in a space that didn’t really exist. I could imagine turning my head to look, but I wasn’t really doing it. The scene would shift, but only the way the picture in a theater shifts—it was still locked in place on the screen of my senses.
There was no shaking that apprehension. I could picture a vast idyllic green sea of rolling hills on a bright summer day, not a danger in sight, yet I would still feel that safe place was just an illusion, ready to waver and disappear. If another shadow ever walked across my mental image, I would have absolutely lost it and started screaming in public—but the expected terror never came. My tension simply kept rising, like a pot slowly boiling.
I awoke sweaty and adrenaline-filled in the middle of one rainy spring night, but the moment of shock from my dream had given me an incredible idea. In the dream, I’d tried to look into a mirror, and had seen only distorted revulsion and fear in that pure form only a nightmare can give. My heart hammered in my chest. On any other night, I would have gotten up to get a glass of water and calm myself down, but, this time, I remained half-asleep with intent.
Lying there in the dark listening to the rain, I imagined my bathroom in as much detail as I possibly could. I imagined myself getting that glass of water, purposely envisioning what I might have done, what I was supposed to do. I saw the tiles. I heard the drone of the overhead fan. I felt the bath mat under my bare feet. Most of all, I focused every sense I possessed on the mirror on the medicine cabinet door as I approached the sink.
Staring into that flat span, I saw its smudges. I saw its smooth and subtle shine. I saw myself, looking back at me—because unlike the dream, I was generating this. I was in control. My own reflection was exactly what I expected to see in a mirror, and, so, there it was.
But what if I…?
I reached forward in my imagined bathroom and pulled the swinging mirror door out, angling the reflection. If there was something lurking just outside the scene in my mind, it would be out there, off to the side of my mental picture—I couldn’t look to the side myself, but my nightmare-inspiration had made me think that maybe an imagined mirror could.
A second burst of adrenaline burned through me. I opened my eyes and sat up, grappling with what I’d just seen.
It hadn’t been a shadow.
But it had worked.
Life as I knew it was in question. I had a choice. I could forget this and go on with my days, purposely ignoring that I’d just caught a glimpse outside of my own mind-movie, or I could delve further and risk upending my entire understanding of reality. Worse, I might even catch the attention of whatever had first flitted across my imagined senses…
Honestly, I chickened out. I let it go, or thought I did. I ignored it for nearly two years. I wrote less, and differently, trying not to use my imagination too much. I tried to think like them, the ones that just know things.
But you know what? I just couldn’t do it. I missed the worlds I would make. I missed the feel of exotic sand under my feet, the scent of clean and open air in my lungs, and the chill of high mountain vistas I would never really visit. I couldn’t go to those places without feeling that creeping tension, so, ultimately, I had to know.
Winter was just turning into spring again for the second time since that night with the turned mirror. I drank a bit too much beer, sat in my room with the windows open to let in the chill air, and I returned to that imagined bathroom.
Clenching both my mental fists and my real ones, I braced myself, then swung the mirror out again.
It was the same reflection.
Not a shadow. Not a monster.
A rectangle of low light on shadow.
Beyond, there were trees. They were the same trees from before, lit very dimly in shadowed moonlight. Deeper darkness weaved in and out between smatterings of rain. I couldn’t hear the drops, but I could see them roll down the leaves and disappear into dark brown earth and roots.
The reflected image kept flickering between that inexplicable scene and the tiled wall of my imagined bathroom. It was me doing that, I knew, because my concentration was slipping between what I expected to see and what I was actually seeing. Slowly, I managed to clear my mind of expectations, letting the mirror simply be.
I watched light wind and drizzle on those trees for an indeterminate time, wondering only the most obvious of questions: why?
Why this? Why a rectangle surrounded by shadow? Why trees? Why rain?
It hadn’t been raining when I’d seen those trees two years before.
If the image could change… that meant something.
I let it go that night, but I began checking again regularly.
The next day, when I looked in the mirror in my mind, the trees were suffused with dappled daylight. I could see deeper into the woods, but only enough to watch the humid loam dry as the hours wore on.
I’d expected to find some horrific dark truth of existence that would terrify me beyond belief, but instead I’d stumbled upon an idyllic scene I found rather comforting. For another couple weeks, I gazed at those reflected trees often, relieved to find peace rather than fear.
But still… why?
Turning to my friends again, even though they thought differently than I did, I brought it up at the bar. I explained that I’d found trees off to the side of my mind-movie, thinking they’d again consider me nuts—but they surprised me.
One asked, “Is it the same time of day there as it is here?”
Another added, “Do you know what species of trees they are?”
“How big are they? You could guess their age,” another offered.
Right. They thought differently than me. More reality-focused, more grounded. I should have expected a very different viewpoint on it. Thinking on the daylight and night gloom I’d seen, I realized that the time had often been similar, but not exactly. “Actually… it gets dark there sooner than here.”
“So it’s east of here,” she guessed.
I laughed. “Wait—no, it’s not like an actual place. It’s a mental thing, you know.”
They all shrugged. They had no context.
But… I got out my phone and looked up species of trees. We collectively scrolled through images and articles until recognition surged through me. “That. That’s the closest tree that I’m seeing.”
“White oak. Yeah, east is your best bet.”
This line of thinking couldn’t possibly be right, could it? Thanking them for their help, I sat at home that weekend, watching those trees. When it started to rain there, I was seized by another inspiration.
I opened up an online weather map, and I watched all the rain clouds east of me across the United States. I kept screenshotting it every couple minutes, noting when I saw the rain drop off and the sun come out. I also noted the time I thought best fit sunset.
Then, feeling like a madman, I began flipping through all my screenshots of the weather, trying to cross reference the rain and the time. I couldn’t be seeing trees from an actual place, could I? How insane would that be?
But as I eliminated blocks of territory one by one, the potential location narrowed further and further. Eventually, I was left with a surprisingly specific spot. Apparently, I was seeing a small section of forest in upstate Pennsylvania, near Susquehannock State Forest.
I asked my friends if they wanted to go on a six hour road trip to another state, but they still thought the whole thing was a slow-burning prank. I knew going by myself was a bad idea, but I couldn’t explain this to anyone else, and I had to know. Ultimately, I set out alone, equipped with nothing but my car, my cellphone, and some fast food from a drive-through.
I started early. It was a Saturday morning in mid-spring, intermittently drizzly, and often overcast. The drive was long and boring, passed mainly by listening to the radio, at least until I began to near my vague destination. It was only then that the sheer size of the actual landscape became clear, and I realized I had no idea how I was going to find what I was looking for. It was already the afternoon, so I only had a few hours before sunset, and I certainly didn’t want to keep making the drive repeatedly.
I drove aimlessly around a few increasingly backwoods roads, feeling more and more cut off from the world, until I thought of a different tactic. Picturing the mirror with my eyes still open, I watched the overcast sky for gaps. I could see the trees in my mind, and the sky in reality. I watched the sunlight dip in and out in both, until I noticed a match. That gap in the clouds. That beam of sunlight. That way.
I followed the roads on the map on my phone, working my way in that direction. Every so often, I pulled over to reorient, using the same trick again. It was burning time, but it was working. Eventually, miles deep on roads that seem barely used, I found myself inside the same fading and burgeoning light from the sky. I was close; close enough that the mental trees and I were seeing the same shifting illumination.
Heart pounding, I sent a text with my exact location to my friends in case anything happened, and I finally stepped out of my car.
God, this was stupid.
The stupidest thing anyone had ever done, no doubt.
I had a choice again. I could leave. I could ignore it.
Or I could delve deeper, taking an enormous and stupid risk…
Ultimately, I already knew what trying to ignore it would bring.
Ultimately, I simply had to know.
The trees were right. The richness of the brown earth was right. Now, though, I could smell the freshness of natural air, and feel the chill of spring rain. I pulled my jacket tighter around me, then noticed that the ground was soft under my shoes. This was legitimately the middle of nowhere.
Uphill or downhill? Pennsylvania terrain was rugged as hell. I waited, watching a passing sunbeam in both ways. When it brushed across the trees in my mind, I knew I almost had it.
It was uphill, of course.
There was no path. I could hike up the slope on just my feet at first, but soon had to do an uncomfortable half-climb, pulling on ivy and branches to get up to each new undulation of earth and rock. The spring rain had been refreshing at first, but now began to bring about an icy grip on my limbs. My hands went numb, and I had to keep resting against tree trunks and warming them against my torso.
Nearly at the limit of exhaustion, I finally stumbled across the remnants of an old path. It was barely more than a thin divide between bushes now, but steps had once been carved into it, and I staggered along it with relief until I came around a boulder and found a massive old barn.
Covered in ivy, dead leaves, and general wear and tear, the barn must have been a century old at the very least. There was no way to get here by road, and the trail certainly hadn’t been used in decades, so I doubted anyone even knew this building existed. Yet, here I was, taking refuge against the broadest side to get out of the rain and wipe my soaked hair and forehead. The chill had set in so hard, I was actually getting a headache.
When I looked left, I saw it.
The white oak.
This was it. This was the place… and next to it, the barn door stood wide open, held in place against the wind by roots and ivy.
The rectangle of light. It was this door. The mirror in my mind… had been seeing out of this barn door!
Silently, so as not to break the quiet sanctity of this forgotten wilderness, I asked again, why?
Why was the mirror in my mind seeing out of an ancient barn door in upstate Pennsylvania? A sense of dread crept up through me as I started thinking about what the placement of this door in my mind implied about the contents of the barn.
It couldn’t be.
That would make no sense at all.
That wasn’t even possible.
But, of course, I had to know. Scared for reasons I couldn’t put into words, I crept toward that open door, senses keen for danger. I could only hear the wind in the leaves overhead and the gentle falling of light rain, but I was more alone than I’d ever been in my life. I scanned the sloped forest as I moved, but there was nothing but swaying branches.
I found sickening confirmation when I finally reached the open door and peered within.
Mostly, there was darkness.
Light played from out of sight to my left, projecting onto the wall.
On the wall of that barn, projected in vivid colors, was the side of a barn door next to darkness. Within that darkness was a projected cone of light. In that cone of light was the side of a barn door next to darkness that held a projected cone of light… it was an infinite tunnel of repeating images. The same image. My image: exactly what I was seeing in that moment. As I moved to to stave off the vertigo, so did the image, and the infinite repetition abruptly flickered away. I stared down at the ground; out of the corner of my eye, I sensed the projected image on the inner wall of the barn shift to showing the ground as well.
Proving it to myself, I mentally pictured the mirror again, tilting it toward the same trees I’d been seeing for so long. A few reflexive tears left my eyes, mixing with the chill rain on my face, as I reached a hand out past the edge of the door. I wanted to scream when I saw my own hand move into view in my mind, but I didn’t have the breath. Shock had taken it from me.
There was no doubt now: when I’d found a way to see off to the side of my mind, I’d been seeing out of this door… because, for some inexplicable reason, my mind-movie was literally playing on the wall within.
My mind-movie, my singular private conscious experience, was playing on the wall of a fucking abandoned barn in upstate Pennsylvania!
“Why?” I asked out loud, horrified and confused beyond my ability to handle.
Somewhere, a twig snapped.
I’d been a dire fool.
This had all begun with a shadow moving across my mind-movie. Now I knew how that was even possible to begin with—since my mind-movie was literally playing on a barn wall—but I’d never stopped to ask myself whether, two years later, that shadow might still be here.
The messed up thing was: I couldn’t leave. How could anyone? Quietly, filled with tension and the sense that I might have to murderously fight for my life at any moment, I crept to the nearby foliage and picked up a heavy fallen branch.
My eyes jumped between the trees again, this time on guard in a very different way. The gloom was taking on a subtle orange and purple cast as evening approached, but I could still see enough to know nothing could attack through the tangle without making a ton of noise.
If the shadow was still here, it wasn’t out there.
It would be inside.
Holding my stick at the ready like a club, I slowly moved toward the open door. A glance at the roots, rocks, and earth at the base showed me there was no way it could close behind me. Satisfied with that one small consolation, I stepped into the darkness within.
Ready to jump backwards if I sensed even the slightest danger, I let my eyes adjust.
Once I could truly see, it wasn’t actually that dark. The projection was bright, and I avoided looking at it, both to keep my eyes adjusted and to avoid the vertigo of infinite reflection. The light from that gigantic movie on the wall softly lit the rest of the barn, which seemed filled with rusted farm equipment. The contraption nearest me was clearly from a time before engines, confirming my suspicion about the sheer age of this place.
I was certainly curious, but I avoided looking at the projector of my mind-movie, for the star of brightness it gave off would have ruined my ability to see. Instead, I moved slowly along the wall, staring at each nook and cranny for as long as it took to make sure nothing was hiding there. Hyping myself up, I peered over a gate into a stall.
The skeleton of a horse lay within. A pang of sadness hit me, but there was nothing I could do for the long-ago animal. I spared it only a moment’s glance under the shifting light of my mind-movie; the illumination darkened because I was looking at a dark stall.
But that sight did give me an idea. Readying myself, I mentally pictured a blinding expanse of white light. The barn lit up brightly as the projection brightened to match. I could suddenly see everything in crystal clarity—and I instantly knew the barn held no hidden threat.
That was almost worse. I stared around, wild-eyed, but it was just an old barn.
Keeping that bright white in mind, I approached the center, finally able to look directly at the projector.
It was a mottled corpse sitting in a chair. It wore no clothes, but it still had leathery skin covering withered muscles. Rotted beyond recognition, but not nearly rotted enough to be over a century old, it sat with mouth agape as its empty eye sockets projected two shimmering cones of light. The sockets, and its mouth, were both far wider than they should be.
Confused and mortified, I stood staring at it for several minutes. I’d looked to the side with my imagined mirror, but I’d never thought to look backwards. I’d never even considered it. Now that I was finally recognizing the possibility, I realized I’d assumed that the only thing directly reflected in the mirror would be me; my mind self, or my dream self.
My self always seemed to be hidden behind emotions and distortions in dreams, and behind the light of the movie itself in my mind.
A ghastly thought occurred to me as I stood there: if I looked into this thing’s eyes, would I be able to see my real self? The me that actually experienced existence, the witness that rode around in my brain operating the animal that was my body?
Overcome with a soul-wrenching need to know, I slowly approached the corpse, worried intrinsically that it might leap up and attack me. It was almost worse that it never did. Getting close to its fetid open mouth and decaying face—and seeing my own face slide into view in my mind as I did—I slowly brought my eyes into the cones of light and gazed into the bright abysses within those empty gaping eye sockets.
“So what did you do?” my friend asked.
Sitting solemnly over my beer, I told them what I remembered. “Went nuts. Hit the corpse-thing with my branch, knocked it over, smashed its skull.”
Another asked, “What’d ya see?”
The weight of what I’d discovered, and what I’d done, was still too much for me to process. “I can’t picture it anymore. I know I saw myself, my true self, my soul, the thing we’re never ever supposed to see, but I can’t visualize it. I don’t have a way to convey what I saw. The mind-movie’s gone.”
They still had no context for what I’d had, or for what I’d lost. They probably thought I was just telling a story. They clapped me on the back happily. “Eh, you’re like us now!”
“Yeah,” I told them, staring into the distance.
One friend did believe me. Two tears were running down her cheeks. “But why?” she asked. “I have so many questions. Why was your mind-movie on a wall? Who walked in front of it? Why a lost old barn? Why a corpse? Why any of it?” She took a breath, regaining her composure for one final question. “Why did you smash it when you saw what we really are?”
I snapped out of my trance to lock my gaze with hers, hoping to impart my trauma to the creature behind her eyes, the one I knew she had, because we all did. Our true selves were unseen for a reason. Slowly, never breaking eye contact, I shook my head. “You already know what we really look like. That fear and revulsion you see in the mirror when you’re dreaming—it’s not a distortion. It’s the truth.”
Everyone balked, and we sat drinking our beers in silence, forever dimmed.
