A fragrant night in May... of what year?

What follows is the "perfect" time slip story - the kind of event that got me (and, I am sure, yourself) interested in this mysterious phenomenon in the first place.

It is the story of the extraordinary walk - down a brick road, no less ;) - taken by Laura Jean Daniels, from Dearborn, Michigan, USA.
She told it to a well-known columnist on the "paranormal", Joyce Hagelthorn (1918 - 2001). The article was originally published by the Dearborn Press newspaper, on May 10, 1973.

"While I was walking home from work late one night, I had a very strange experience.

I was walking along, looking up at the moon and enjoying the evening, when suddenly I looked down, and everything familiar just vanished! Everything – the houses, the automobiles, the lampposts, the garbage bins, and the fences, even the streets – was gone! Even the sidewalk was gone, and somehow I was walking down a brick path. There were no houses on either side of me, just trees and bushes, but several hundred feet before me I could see a thatched-roof cottage. The moon was still high up in the sky, but now there was a scent of roses and honeysuckle in the air. 

Obviously, I was a little frightened, but I kept walking toward the cottage. When I got closer, I noticed a young couple sitting in the garden. They were wearing very old-fashioned clothes, and they were naturally in love; I could see the look of love on the woman’s face.

Instead of while I was standing there, watching them, a small dog ran through the gate toward me, barking wildly. The man in the garden looked up and called to the dog to stop barking. I realized that he couldn’t see me, and yet I could smell the flowers and feel the gate beneath my hand – and the dog had obviously sensed that I was there.

While I was trying to make up my mind what to do, I turned to look back the way I had just come, and there was my street again! Even then, I could still feel the garden gate under my hand. But when I turned for another look at the cottage, it was gone, and I was standing in the middle of my own block, just a few doors from my own home. The cottage, the lovers, and the small dog were all gone."

I do wish she had told the exact date - by the mention of honeysuckle and roses I am assuming it was in early May - and other relevant circumstantial data (check this post if you've forgotten what they are ;).

Would it have made any difference?

I don't know. It might.

Would it have done any harm to include them?
(No need to answer that one.)

It would certainly be helpful to have available as many physical data as possible.
Personally I think it's highly unlikely that physical circumstances do not play any role at all in such temporal/spatial displacements. And even if they don't, having a vast array of such data might at least help us eliminate apparently irrelevant parameters.

And I wonder... did Ms Daniels ever have another experience of the kind?

You can find a (much shorter) version of this story on p. 40 of Leonard G. Cramp's curious book The A.T. Factor Advanced Time - Piece For A Jigsaw Part 3 (under the heading "Time and a little dog".)

And by the way, you might be interested in reading Joyce Hagelthorn's book I'Ve Never Told Anyone, But..., in which she compiled interesting contents from her column. I haven't read it yet; but according to the promotional leaflet (from 1987): "Stories told to Hagelthorn are from hard-nosed scientists, skeptics, and magicians about some personal psychic experience they had as a child or adult. Stories of the strange and supernatural blend with current psychic research and ARE EXPLAINED!" ;)

***

NOTE:
The original picture of the rose, by Jillian Jeffrey, was taken from here.


If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

A poet's garden that never was

When the winter has outlasted its welcome but for a single day - like today - I send my imagination out to graze on greener pastures, to lush gardens, real or metaphorical, that once fed the imagination of others.
 

But time slips being what they are - unreliable by their very nature, and still considered as a potentially reliable "symptom" of a disintegrating mind - there are still relatively few accounts of this nature about "celebrities" to be found on the internet (or elsewhere, for that matter).

And if it weren't for a hint found by chance on Alfred Ballabene's defunct and sorely missed (but at least partially archived) website, I might have never found the following, very interesting short account.
 

»Something marvelous happened to me today:
I had a dream while walking.«

Thus wrote Franz Grillparzer, a well-loved Austrian poet, one summer's day long ago. According to his diary, it was »mid-July – mid-August« of 1852, and he was enjoying a stay in the Bad Tatzmannsdorf spa, where he had gone to regain his health.

»I had got up early, drank the [thermal spring] waters, took a bath, had another glass of water and went for a walk.
All of the sudden I found myself in a part of the park that I had not visited before. It was so lovely, the tree groves were so charming that I could not stop wondering how could have I missed such a sight before. Alas, there were no benches there inviting me to sit down. Having been given the task [sic - those old Austrian spa nurses were to be feared!] to drink another glass of water, I proceeded to do so, with the firm intention of revisiting the spot immediately after having had my glass of water.
I did so [using] a short allée lined with small trees through which I had often walked before, but the garden was nowhere to be found – because it never existed.«

Now, this is somewhat hasty a conclusion, if taken literally (and he did say, literally: it never existed).

But we know better than to take poets' words literally... Besides, the conclusion of this passage sheds some light (however treacherous) on his state of mind and mental processes:


»It is [the fact] that this dream – for I must consider it a dream – happened to me while walking that is marvellous. I am no stranger to dreams or spontaneous visions of sights, especially in the evenings, when I am tired from reading; but during walking, and with such reality-belying force, it never happened to me before."

You see, he is not really interested in establishing the former reality (or the lack thereof) of that garden: he has already assimilated the possibility of what had happened; and he is is too busy marvelling at it all. (And who could blame him?)

The passage above was loosely and hastily – and unpoetically – translated for this occasion from the German original (printed in the Walbaum-fraktur type, to boot). You can find it on pp. 136-137 of the reprint (2003) of his diaries and letters, Briefe und Tagebücher, originally published in 1905.

There is not much on the internet that could serve as a good illustration of how the spa gardens in Bad Tatzmannsdorf must have looked in Grillparzer's day. (I suppose you could always go there and hope for a direct vision...)

The best I could find was this photo:

(As you can see, there are benches there, so it's safe to assume he didn't see this part of the park, at least not as it is today.)

It was taken from the Hungarian version of Wikipedia.

(Surprised? Ha, I can tell you're not a Mitteleuropa native! True to the history of this area, Bad Tatzmannsdorf - Tarcsafürdő in Hungarian - changed national flags more than once during its existence; it once belonged to Hungary; and before that, to Austria-Hungary; and before that to the Austrian Empire; and before that... Well, you get the point. And if not, get thee a good historie booke. :-))

And here is an appropriately stern image of the man himself, cast in bronze – and, even more appropriately, placed in a park or garden:

This was, after all, the man who said (among many other things):

»Friendship and love bestow flowers on us.«

And who saw gardens in all their glory where none existed.

***

P.S. I'll probably be editing this entry in the next few days. Right now, I am having a waking dream - sans garden - of my own, all due to the painfully prosaic fact that I haven't slept in some 30 hours or so...

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.