One of the articles in the series inspired by Stella Gibbons's My American covers Amy's Lee's nightmare experience in the form of a horrible recurring dream in which she is invisible to the crowds of Hurrying People who stream past and ignore her no matter how hard she tries to attract their attention. She also has a few daytime experiences that trigger memories of her dream.
Amy Lee is not alone in sometimes feeling like a ghost in a world full of real people.
A nightmare from Neverwhere
This is an extract from Neil Gaiman's wonderful urban fantasy story Neverwhere:
“As a child, Richard had had nightmares in which he simply wasn’t there, in which, no matter how much noise he made, no matter what he did, nobody ever noticed him at all. He began to feel like that now, as people pushed in front of him...”
This is uncannily similar to what Amy Lee experiences in My American.
Examples from real life
It is not just fictional people who sometimes feel invisible.
The former friend who is featured in the story about the sultanas and the fox cub told me that she often had a sense of standing apart and invisible while crowds of people streamed past. Another friend who was involved in some of the other synchronicities in that article had similar experiences.
I haven't had any nightmares about Hurrying People myself, but I have experienced this phenomenon on a few occasions while out walking. This comes from one of my articles about energy vampires:
“People in the streets seemed to stream past in crowds: I felt that I was standing to one side and watching them from another dimension.”
I didn't want to scream at them to get them to notice me though!
Reversing the phenomenon
There is a reverse aspect to feeling invisible. When the streaming crowds involve sinister, dangerous and disconnected people, it is an advantage to be on a different dimension: the last thing we want is to be noticed by them!
On a few occasions when it all went into reverse, it seemed to me that the people streaming past were the ghosts and I was the real person.
One example involves a group in single file that was led by a strange man who was shouting religious slogans, Roman Catholic I think, with the followers repeating them. They seemed oblivious of the crowds of ordinary people around them; they seemed to be caught up in and stuck together by a fog-like current of energy that swept them along.
This reminds me of a scene in some fantasy story I read many years ago and have only vague a memory of. I can't recall either the author or the title, but I do remember that desperate people were streaming through the streets like zombies on the march: they were searching for their stolen souls.
What does it all mean?
What unseen influences are at work in these cases? Is the experience of feeling invisible in a crowd most likely to involve people with strong imaginations, ungrounded people and those who live in two worlds?
This is a topic that is worth researching.
