Leomie's Field Journal

A long and psychedelic first-person account of a traveler's journey through Numina and all the mind-warping things she experienced along the way.
== TL;DR ==
Leomie has been spending time in a place called Numina and has been documenting her experiences in a journal. Numina appears to be a strange and enigmatic place where time seems to behave differently than it does in the outside world. Leomie notes that she has been feeling a "pulsating pulling tone" that seems to be drawing her to Numina, and that once she is there, it is difficult to remember how long she has been there.
In her observations, Leomie notes that the lifeforms in Numina seem to exist in a way that is different from the ecosystems found elsewhere. The plants do not seem to bloom or die in the way one might expect, and many of the animals do not appear to participate in a food chain. Instead, the lifeforms in Numina seem to function more like organelles in a world-sized cell, rather than individual beings inhabiting a landscape.
Leomie also notes that she has been hearing voices and sounds in Numina, which she suspects may be related to a "memory storm" that she experienced, described as a phenomenon where memories rain down like voices, creating a confusing and disorienting experience. Despite the strange and sometimes disconcerting aspects of Numina, Leomie continues to return to the place, drawn by the mysterious and intriguing qualities of the place.
Leomie also describes encountering a number of unusual objects and phenomena. For example, she describes seeing a "noodle headed quadroped" that appears to be in a contemplative state, and notes that it is difficult to tell whether the animal is moving at all. Leomie also describes finding a small flower that is emitting a song, and notes that when she takes the flower outside of Numina, it seems to lose its mass and take on the appearance of a hologram or air bubble.
Leomie also notes that she has found images in her journal that she does not remember drawing or adding, and describes the experience as feeling like a memory of a memory. She also describes feeling a sense of "exponential déjà vu" or "jamais vu," as though she is experiencing the feeling of a feeling or the memory of a memory.
Despite the unusual and sometimes disorienting experiences in Numina, Leomie continues to return to the place and document her observations. She expresses a sense of curiosity and fascination with the enigmatic qualities of the place, and is intrigued by the potential insights that studying Numina may provide.
== Transcript ==
=== Page 1: ===
Sketches and images.
=== Page 2: ===
I’ve been back in Convergence a week and coming to Numina every day.  I haven’t been able to get this place out of my head.  The days leading up to my return were accompanied by a buzzing in my brain, a kind of shape and feeling that I couldn’t fully understand, but kept brushing up against.  A pulsating pulling tone trying to bring me here.  Now it’s been a day or maybe two or three.  A couple of weeks?  Hard to remember.  I’ll be using this journal to document my observations, experiences, and thoughts in this enigmatic place.  I don’t think “place” is even the right word.  I spent much of my time away reading as much as I could from other researchers and enthusiasts.  I’ll be including relevant information, visuals, and excerpts from a number of sources.
=== Page 3: ===
I had a slow start today.  So tired all morning, but the moment I crossed into Numina I felt like I had just woken up.  It’s good to be back in the field.  I’m reminded of my old slime conservation days.  Years ago, but feels like yesterday Literally.  In Numina, it’s hard to tell how far in the past something was or is.  Anyway, I came across this noodle headed quadroped today.  It caught me off guard because I was deep in thought and as I looked at the curious creature it struck me as being in a similar contemplative state.  Observing these animals move is nearly impossible.  Is this a moment frozen in time?  Time frosted over an instance?  Perhaps they are moving imperceptibly slowly or in a manner that my sight simply can’t comprehend.  I wonder what they are thinking about.  Sometimes many of them point in a single direction seeming to have had their attention drawn by something unseen.
=== Page 4: ===
Today I had a tune stuck in my head for hours.  Full embarrassing disclosure – it was an Infatuation Station song.  At a certain point I swear I could actually feel the melody in tangible sound waves.  I thought I was losing it.  I searched for the source of the sound and discovered the song being emitted from this little flower like a tiny organic boom box.  Bloom box?  I absentmindedly carried this small flower our of Numina and as I did it seem to lose the majority of its mass!  Though its’ size and shape stayed the same, it took on the substantiality and appearance of a hologram, or even an air bubble shaped like its former self.  It was as though I was holding some kind of three dimensional cross section of the delicate but dense object I’d been holding before.  I stuck the hand holding the flower back through the doorway and it instantly looked and felt whole again.  It didn’t seem harmed by either transformation.  It’s sitting on my desk now looking like a flower shaped pocket of space in the air.
=== Page 5: ===
I turned expecting to find it blank only to find these images I don’t remember drawing or adding them.  It’s the strangest feeling, its like a memory, its like a memory that I had forgotten and then found in the latter part of it’s the strangest feeling.  Exponential déjà vu?  No, jamais vu.
The feeling of a feeling.  The memory of a memory.  I know that times moves differently here, but that still does not explain the odd ways that the life here changes – or doesn’t change.
Numina does not seem to be an ecosystem.  The “plants” don’t bloom or dies the way one could expect elsewhere, and most the “animals” don’t seem to participate in a food chain of any kind.  Two of them have some fruits, but I don’t see those fruits anywhere but in their possession.  It seems to me that the lifeforms here serve a more integrated function as thought they are organelles in a world-sized cell rather than individuals inhabiting a landscape.
=== Page 6: ===
Noisy day in Numina.  I’m hearing a sort of mish mash of voices and sounds.  I suspect it may be a scatter of memories from last night’s memory storm but its hard to make out.  It sounds as though voices are raining down.  Perhaps this is a relative of a memory storm.  A distant cousin? 
I could sit and listen to Numina for hours!  I feel like its easier to grasp the oddness here through sounds than through sight.  I definitely hear creatures that I cannot see and see creatures that I cannot hear.  A simple bird sound will delaminate into a hundred layers.  A polyphony of a thousand birds!  The creaking of the walkways will slow down and speed up and reverse the sounds of their invisible shiftings are as scrambled and refracted as I feel!  And sometimes all of the sounds fall into a sort of negentrophic rhythm, an emergent musicality that is as clear and inexplicable as a crystal lattice forming from a mineral solution.
I’m going to do some audio field recordings and see if I can make more sense of things upon listening back.
I recognized a few of the voices.  I even thought I might have heard my own.
=== Page 7: ===
Sometimes it feels like the Cosmohedron is Numina's center of gravity, like it holds some sort huge centrifugal force in suspension, warping Numina around itself.
It appears so alien to this place, and yet so enmeshed. A touch to certain inner "organelles" will send electrical impulses into nearby "plants."
Is it animal? Is it like a mitochondria or nucleus?
Is it conscious? Separate?
Is it one lifeform in itself, or many? Is it listening?
Can the Cosmohedron in Numina be thought of as a formula?
Is it this structure within a structure a blueprint of how life is arranged in this other world?
If I were to levitate and zoom out into the galaxy I feel that would see this is but one tiny link of an infinitely expanding chain twisting & spiraling in perfectly calculated disorder. Like a ___
=== Page 8: ===
Sketches and images.
=== Page 9: ===
Close up example of growing world inside clear dome.   
Sketches and images.
=== Page 10: ===
An example of a portion of the wall inside the Comohedron:
  - anemone fringes to shum
  - patches of small growing worlds encases in clear domes
  - reticulation in between
  - blops to press
[There is a small piece of paper with sketches of creatures that appears to be taped over a portion of this page.]
=== Page 11: ===
Sketch of the Slow Moving Woman.  Below sketch says:
What is she looking at?
Part of a page that appears to be ripped from another book with a handwritten note that says:
This is an excerpt from that book.
The referenced excerpt taped on this page reads:
The Slow Moving Woman
Once there was a feeling. Like a gust of wind, or a chill up your spine. The feeling was fleeting, almost as if it never happened at all, but all of us, everyone, felt it. And we went on as if we never felt the feeling, Living the same lives we had before it came to us. And many of us never shared that we had a similar feeling. We thought the feeling was solitary. And then one day an old woman born of a tree told us the story of an even older woman.
The feeling, the gust, the chill was not a feeling at all. It was a woman. Her name no one knew. Her essence we all felt. The old woman born of a tree told of a woman who mourned. What she mourned, no one knew. But she mourned the way they mourned on the old grey rock. They mourned as a vocation, dedicating their lives to whom they grieved. 
This woman, older than the woman born of a tree, had a mourning vocation that many didn't understand. But they respected it. The Slow Moving Woman did just that. She moved at such a pace that she could not be registered. The feeling, the gust of wind, the chill up our spines, was her passing through. Slower than the eye can see. Choosing to mourn by subverting time itself.
=== Page 12: ===
This woman
Who is she?
She appeared just recently in Numina, but the thing is, I recognize her.  After the convergence there was a confounding phenomena.  A collective memory about this slow moving woman.  It seemed like everyone in convergence inherited this mythologic knowledge.
I read about her years ago in a book about the myths from the converged worlds.  I never thought I’d actually see her.
My theory is that this woman moves so slowly she is imperceptible to the naked eye, but in Numina she can be seen.  I think this has to do with the way time operates here.  An unlocked perspective from which to view abstract anatomy exploring the dislocation of times bones access to a new orientation.  A previously hidden plane where time and space aren’t quite interchangeable, but still flow seamlessly.
I’ve come across accounts of people seeing her in dreams in Ossuary, Immensity, & Eemia.  Has she been in these worlds all along?  She doesn’t make attempts to communicate is it by choice or function?  I don’t know.
=== Page 13: ===
Dozed off again today. I guess I'm feeling more and more comfortable here. I keep dreaming about the day of the fire, my act of protest, the incident. I dozed off again and again. This time was a birds eye view and I watched the scene from above, but the timeline played out of order as if the sequence of events became self aware and more foggy on the details. One moment the QDOT truck is ablaze and then like watching a glitch on film, I haven't even at the warehouse then I see the security guard attempting to extinguish the flames. I can hear the heat and feel the sharp shape of the burn. I'm sorry. It feels strange to cry in a dream. When I awoke I found something truly bizarre. It appears to be a duplicate of my field journal.
The weirdest part is that the first 10 pages are blank and page 11 is well, this entry.
The pages look the same, but they feel a little different like I'm touching them again with new hands or the pages are trying to convince me they've met my touch before.
=== Page 14: ===
Watching living beings move around in Numina is hypnotic. They create timeworms of themselves showing where they've been and where they're going. I believe this has to do with the kaleidoscopic nature of time in Numina, not sure if it's a fault or a function but it can be hard maintaining a linear thought here.
We share space but we may not be sharing a "timeline." It's like I'm somehow seeing their timeline from the side, and getting a clip of the film strip of this branch of their life.
Do I look like a timeworm to them? Why do only some look this way?
Maybe Numina experiences something more like 360°of time smoothing out in every direction. All times at once.
Maybe I can't share Numina's experience being I've accustomed to linear time myself! Some timelines I share I can see, just barely recognize with some sense or intuition.
=== Page 15: ===
Some of the entities of Numina don’t fall into any known categories of life.  There are at least three types of emissive orb that take up space in very different ways.
Two orbs are very similar in appearance, but one floats mid air while the other appears to float in a void only visible through small openings in the living surface of Numina.  The third type of orb is very different from the first two, but much more uniform within its own kind.  This type is nested within the fields of Numina’s walls and are highly reactive upon approach.  I get the feeling these orbs are only partially here, like they are the tip of an iceberg of a much larger entity…somewhere else.
Could these be some kind of seed portal?  The beginning of a connection between Numina and another world?  Could it be some kind of…interdimensional bookmark?  A tiny punch from a moon or a star?
A teether between here and there, incomplete yet stable.  It makes me wonder about the rest of life here.  Are any of these beings only portions of greater beings somewhere??  Ugh, that doesn’t make any sense.  It feels right but can explain how it feels.
Update: The mid air variant has some kind of…mollusc orchid creature up near the sky holes.  If viewed through the body of the orchid some of the orbs come alive, rotating in space like a planet and teeming with additional textures.
=== Page 16: ===
I’m seeing these two a lot.  Gentle partner.  More interested in their fruit than in me.  I often find them like this.  Inverses of each other.  It’s hard to tell if they have an outward method of communication.  They may be linked in a deeper way.  A shared consciousness.  I’m starting to think everything in Numina is like this.  I feel more connected every moment I spend here.
The connection I felt to this space from the beginning is becoming more concrete as times passes elsewhere.  The belonging intuited all along becomes more evident and pronounced as my competing timelines reckon with each other.  At first I found it difficult to acclimate, but now it is flipped and is harder to spend time in Immensity.  I really only leave for food and supplies.
=== Page 17: ===
How long have I been here?  Here I find it harder and harder to tell.  I get lost in my mind, slip into a memory, flood into dream.  What feels like a day in Numina could be an hour in Immensity or it could be a week.  Time is not the only thing that works differently in Numina.  Space and the way matter fits into is unlike anything I’ve observed anywhere else.
This became clear to me when I realized that the plant life here can be tricky to draw.  Angles switch and perspectives change with no warning. 
Am I the observer or the subject???  What are the properties at work here?  When did I start writing this entry?  It feels like days or weeks or like I haven’t started.
Sometimes I merely wander away from a spot and back again and things are just different.
Everything is familiar and arguably the same, but its as though I’m looking at it from a slightly different angle than I’ve ever seen before.  It makes me wonder if the structure of my eyes cant take in the full view!
[There is a small piece of paper with sketches of creatures that appears to be taped over a portion of this page.]
=== Page 18: ===
I feel like I need to draw subtly cubist portraits of things in order to capture even a single point of view.  Sometimes I’ll simply sit and wonder about the shape of my thoughts while in Numina.  I see them fold in on themselves like impossible origami as mercurial and poly dimensional as the objects here…Am I one of these objects changed by the sheer existence of this inexplicable. 
I feel at home here, like I’m part of this place.
But as I lose my grasp, I once had on the familiar worlds outside of Numina, inside my perspective is becoming increasingly clear.  My ability to observe is honing and sharpening.
This place is affecting me in ways I don’t quite understand.  Changing the way I think.  Bringing old memories to the forefront of my mind.  Sometimes I remember things that haven’t happened yet, but it feels natural.  The way I used to feel has become a foreign idea.
=== Page 19: ===
While looking through [my] old biology textbook, I came across a diagram of plasmodesmatas – structures in the cell walls of plants that connect neighboring cells.  I immediately thought of all the portals in Numina that seem to open up to inaccessible warped reflections of Numina itself.  If those are parallel universes as various theorists propose, with so many semi-open connections between them, could each be a single cell in a high dimensional plant?!?
I have already been thinking of the “ecosystem” as a cell.  So cool!!!
If Numina in its 6th dimensional entirety is one single plant than each universe represents a single macro cell in the larger plant.  So it is indeed looking to grow by splitting off the 5th dimensional parallels of itself through the dimension-tree butterfly effect reality – splitting caused by the exercising of free will by linear being such as ourselves, much like a plant grows with mitosis.  It also still makes sense that the Cosmohedron could be a 5th dimensional micro by which it has a symbiotic relationship to the cells of Numina.  Same way a mitochondria does with our cells.
So it makes sense that creatures are more like organelles in an ecosystem.
=== Page 20: ===
Drawings of colorful trees.
=== Page 21: ===
I’m struggling to understand this, but there I am.  I’m watching myself write in this journal ________ this me?  My handwriting?  An alternative version of myself at a different time?!  This must have something to do with the duplicate journal I found with the latter pages filled out.  I’m tempted to talk to myself, but I’ll let myself be, must have something to do.  I look calm, peaceful even.  I wonder what I’m thinking about.  But I must know.  Know that I’m thinking about because it’s me.  It’s me right?  My thoughts are taking on different shapes in my mind.
Bright new colors high lighting previously unacknowledged awareness.
An enigmatic flow like a newly rediscovered river long known but thought to be a legend.
=== Page 22: ===
It stays the same here.  Is it constant?  The weather here.  I’ve never noticed the weather.  Ma it’s not.  Is it weather?   It’s the atmosphere.  It doesn’t change.  It’s pleasant.  Have I never noticed before??  I don’t think I thought about it until now.  Even as I write these words.  What was it?  The weather.  That’s not what it is. 
Wait what?
Where was I?  That’s right.
Here I am.
We acclimate to things like weather.  Have I acclimated to Numina?  My body feels like it’s matched the temperature here.  I can’t feel the difference between my appendages and the atmosphere.  Where one stops and the other begins is no longer distinguishable.  Have I been folded in?  I welcome the fold.  It’s like being tucked in for a cosmic nap or a dream being put to bed and having a waking experience.
=== Page 23: ===
It seems I’ve reached the last page of this journal but as I squeeze these final words in, all I can say for sure is that I’ve hardly scratched the surface of understanding this world. It's ironic to run out of space in a place full of endless experiences and infinite folds.
This much I know, my time here has just begun.
[End of Journal]
Category:Documents (CS)
Category:Lore