I would have responded sooner, but recent days have been busy. Once before I posted the story of my apparent "time slip" experience, but I've been unable to find that thread to copy it. So here's a brief summary:
Amongst their futile attempts to get me interested in pyhsical activity, my parents got a family membership to a "swimming club." This is a place where members could use the pool. Next to the pool was a single building, where one found a consession stand offering bad fast food, as well as showers, bathrooms, and changing rooms. The place had a dim, musty hallway through which dripping members walked over faded, dingy astroturf to the facilities where, in theory they could emerge feeling clean and refreshed. Once long ago, this building had been someone's nice house in the country, but its patrician origins were well disguised.
I was about eight or nine years old at the time when I was with my father in the men's changing room and I noticed a small hole in the wall. Through it I stared in amazement for a couple of minutes at most beatiful room. It was an elegant dining room with fine mahogony furniture (my favourite type) and shieldback chairs with needlepoint tapestry seats having a floral pattern on a blue background. Fine china was proudly displayed in a the china cabinet and the sun shone brilliantly in through the french doors. A blue/green theme was carried in the china, in a beautiful oriental rug, as well as in the walls which were painted with that wonderful blue/green colour that has not been quite properly made since lead paint was banned. The room was immaculate and I described it as the kind of place where nice older ladies would sit and have tea, though nobody was in the room at that moment. The hole was low on the wall and my father tried to bend down but his adult size and bad back made it difficult. He said he couldn't get close enough to see anything through the hole.
I thought it must be a back office or club owner's private space, though it seemed strange to have such elegance co-existing under a roof with its veritable anthesis. I decided that I wanted to see that room and go in there with my father. We expected it would be behind a locked door, but that perhaps if we asked nicely and mentioned our interest in fine furniture a manager would give us a little tour. This was not to be.
We walked farther down the dingy hallway where we had never ventured before. It went past the entrance to the women's bathroom and a closet. Where it turned the corner would be the other side of the wall through which I peered. There was no locked door there. There was no door at all. A back room there was a pool storage room that has some cheap broken outdoor furniture, and a few lost styrofoam pool toys. The room had linoleum flor which was generously adorned with dried-on mud. The walls were painted yellow with level of care that suggested only that this shade of paint had been on sale at a reduced price when someone went looking for it.
I was in disbelief and protested that we must have gone too far around and this was not the other side of the same wall. Then my father pointed to the hole. It was the same shape and at the same height. I got down on my knees and looked through it seeing the men's changing room on the other side. It was the same small opening through which, mere moments ago, a wonderous sight appeared. For further confirmation that my eyes or mind had decieved me, I went back to the dressing room and looked back through the same hole to see only the muddy storage room with the lost toys and broken furniture.
I have no explanation for this. It is the one and only halucination which I've ever had. Being neither a madman, nor a user of drugs, I have always been confident that seeing is believing, but just once it wasn't.
...Rod