draemer's Story

draemer’s story
December 2012

I don’t claim to be an extraordinarily powerful metahuman.  Though I do have seven years of training, there are those who have more, and many of my years were wasted in search of the proper information before guides and sites like these were available.  I hope to save you from that fate.  There are certain techniques that make using our abilities easier; there are paths that your training could take that will yield results faster.  I don’t claim to be an extraordinarily powerful metahuman, but I’ve learned some interesting secrets.  My lifestyle demanded that I develop practical applications to basic abilities; as a result I have become practiced in “rare” skills that aren’t often talked about on the sites.  There are abundant resources online for metahumans, but for the reasons I listed above, I believe that I have something unique to bring to the table, and I believe that a reader of any level of experience will find this guide educational.
I grew up in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania.  This is important to note, since it was here that I learned my abilities.  My earliest memories of metahuman abilities took place about 12 years ago.  My dad and I were “scouting”, essentially learning the habits of the local deer so that he could later hunt them.  He told me, as we were hiding in the thickets, that there is more to camouflage than being hidden from sight.  He told me that I had to camouflage my mind, and imagine my body melting into the landscape like I was invisible.  He told me of telepathic camouflage.  I don’t know exactly if my father was a metahuman, or if he would actually have called it telepathic camouflage.  But I’m positive that he knew of the skill.  Many naturalists, I would later learn, know of telepathic camouflage.  It seems to be a rarely spoken of secret that most anyone who spends enough time hiding in the woods learns of on their own or from others.  There are hints of it in almost every survival handbook I’ve read.

I was only six years old at the time, and undoubtedly didn’t realize the implications of what my dad had told me.  But when I grew older, I would learn more and more about this ability.  I used it most often in games of man hunt my brothers and I would play, and generally to draw attention away from myself.  It was clear to me that telepathic camouflage worked, but I had no idea how.  I would later come to believe that it stems from telepathy, as the name implies, but to this day I still do not know exactly how this ability works.

Mental Camouflage:  What I do know is how confidence is important.  I used to have complex procedures that I would go through in order to camouflage myself; these would often include visualization and spoken commands.  But I would later learn that procedure doesn’t matter.  All that matters is confidence in your own camouflage—confidence that you are invisible.  The procedures were simply a way to boost my confidence.  And, conveniently, the more I see my abilities working, the more my confidence improves, and thus the more my abilities improve.
In summation, telepathic camouflage essentially boils down to maintaining the proper mindset when you’re hiding.  The most common mistake is thinking: “Please don’t see me, please don’t see me!”.  This almost invariably leads to the hunter finding you.  Hoping that you will remain unseen is not the same thing as believing that you will remain unseen.  In fact, hoping implies doubt, and doubt is the opposite of the mindset you’re going for here.  A better mindset would be thinking: “He will not see me, because I’m using my camouflage, and my camouflage makes me invisible.”.  The only thing missing from this equation is an action to have confidence in.  This is where visualization comes in.  Again, it does not matter exactly what you visualize, so long as you have confidence in it.  I usually visualize my body melting into the landscape and the landscape into my body, because I achieved very effective camouflage once when using that visualization, and so I am confident that that visualization works.  But you may use whatever you wish.  Meditation can be used to focus confident thoughts and weed out negative ones.

The best way to practice this, I’ve found, is by using it in your everyday life.  With invisibility comes a certain mindset—it’s rather difficult to describe, since it’s something that must be felt to be understood.  With this mindset, you become unnoticed.  Jays no longer call when you walk into the woods.   People don’t pay you any notice.  You will begin to notice this more and more when using this mindset.  I find manhunt and similar games helpful in training.  You should start using your telepathic camouflage as an augmentation to visual camouflage.  Hide behind partial cover, like a patch of thin bushes, places where the hunter would have to look very hard in order to see you.  With the camouflage-mindset, the hunter would glance at the bushes and inexplicably fail to see you behind them.  Every successful use of you camouflage will give you more confidence, and you will therefor grow stronger.

As your confidence and concentration improves, move on to hiding in more open areas, where visual camouflage is scarcer.  It is theoretically possible to simply stand in an open field and remain completely unseen, but I doubt that anyone is that skilled or ever can be.  Your mental camouflage will be stronger when it is used in harmony with visual camouflage.  Not just as a backup to visual camouflage, but in harmony with it—using the visual camouflage to make your mental camouflage more effective.  Complex landscapes can be reduced to simple, repetitive shapes. A forest can be reduced to a series of vertical shapes, and you can imagine the awkward shape of your body blending in with these, instead of having to camouflage yourself to every tree from every angle.  Hide on the edges of shadows, then use that varied, uncertain light to your advantage in your camouflage.  Slowly, you will grow more and more confident in your abilities.  The ultimate test comes when your hunter looks directly at you—even looks into your eyes—and then continues as if he never saw you.

By now you will begin to understand the strange mindset—almost spirituality—that out of this out of this.  When you’re using camouflage, the line between your body and the rest of the world blurs.  You become one with your surroundings.  I’ve actually begun to use mental camouflage at at least a weak level whenever I go hiking in the woods, because I simply feel more at one with nature.  Instead of just being a visitor, an outsider in the woods, I am part of them.  This paved the way to an interesting revelation.  The more I was “at one” with my surroundings, the more I became aware of a sort of sixth sense that came with it.  Instead of seeing or hearing things, I could feel them.  It seems irrational, and is difficult to explain with language which relies so much on sensory and physical as opposed to “transphysical”.  When I was mentally camouflaging myself to a tree, I was filled with a feeling that I simply knew belonged to the word “tree”, and the sight of a tree.  The same can be said for any other object of landscape.  I discovered this independently, but many others have noticed similar things.  They call these feelings “energy” or “auras” (for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to them as “Impressions”), but truthfully I don’t know what to believe.  Camouflage, I thought, was just a matter of visualization.  I wasn’t actually becoming part of the tree, just imagining that I was…but that visualization allowed to me access some fundamental level of reality—an aura, energy-field, impression, or whatever we shall call it.  These impressions would later form the foundation to my other abilities.

Precog:  By this point, I had been using what is called precognition, or simply “precog” for quite some time.  This too developed as a consequence of my lifestyle.  I did things as a kid that would have made my parents cringe.  And yet I have never been seriously hurt.  I began to notice a guiding sense that would alert me whenever I was doing something where I would become hurt.  This same sense I adapted to predicting things, and locating people and things.  It had developed very slowly, however, and was of little use to me.  This all changed when I learned about feeling impressions. I noticed an increase in the accuracy and frequency of my precog (at this point, I had almost no control of this ability). Meanwhile, I made a common practice of meditating on impressions.  It soon became clear that my feeling impressions were what was affecting my precog.  I began to notice underlying impressions in all of my visions—some visions, in fact, were entirely in the form of impressions.  When it got to the point that I could feel impressions almost passively, or at least with less than five seconds of meditation, my visions became very clear and frequent.  On the few instances that I’ve used precog voluntarily and consciously (instead of being bombarded by spontaneous visions), I consciously felt impressions and translated them into information that I could understand.  I’ve come to believe that precognition and other forms of extra-sensory-perception are secondary phenomenon: the result of the brain’s ability to perceive impressions.  I had been doing it all along, and it was only when I realized it that I could focus my training in that direction.  Part of my training went into simply meditating on impressions, and the rest went into my abilities themselves.  This paved the way to a number of psionic abilities that I could use semi-consciously.  I say semi-consciously because, though I can initiate them by feeling for impressions, I cannot really control what I see.  My training focused on initiating more visions and making those visions clearer.  In that sense, I developed some control over my abilities, but not total control.  I can’t look directly into the future, but learn to open my mind and let the future flood in.  Total control, I believe, is almost impossible.

It should be noted that these abilities I’m about to detail are ordered in a progression.  It would be easiest for them to be learned in that progression.  It’s also important to become familiar with your subconscious mind.  As you will see, many of these techniques take advantage of the unconscious, and it’s innate ability to perceive impressions and the future.  Rather than extending my focus outwards when I’m feeling the impression of a landscape, I focus inwards…because that impression is already somewhere in my unconscious.  You will have to learn to do this, but first develop habits.  When you do this enough, it will become second nature.  You won’t need to concentrate anymore to feel impressions; your unconscious will do it innately.  That will make everything much easier.
You will also have to change your mindset.  It’s entirely possible that you already feel impressions, just don’t recognize it.  That’s how it was with me.  That’s why you have to take nothing for granted.  You should be able to sit in the woods and stare at the same tree for hours on end, but still find it fascinating and beautiful.  Taking nothing for granted is the path to true understanding, and for some reason makes feeling impressions much easier.  I discovered this last summer while backpacking in the mountains of California.  It was a dark night, and in the parched desert air the sky was the perfectly clear.  I was alone, looking up at the stars.  If you are like I was, you never looked at the stars before—I mean really LOOKED.  Most people don’t appreciate how beautiful and incredible they are.  I happened to on that night.  I realized that when I looked up at the night sky, I was looking into infinity.  That’s when I happened: ego-death.  I suddenly felt incredibly small…I suddenly appreciated how big the world was.  I suddenly appreciated how incredible the world was.  And I suddenly was able to perceive impressions with perfect clarity.  Where before, it would have taken me an hour of meditation to survey a few dozen square miles with my precog, I perceived the entire mountain-range instantly and at once.  It was strange; I perceived the impression of the billion-pound granite dome to my right, but at the same time perceived the impression of a tiny pebble at my feet.  They both were just as awe-inspiring to me in that state.  Furthermore, in the same way that the line between my body and the environment thins when I use camouflage, in this state it completely vanished.

Many people describe claim to have achieved ego death.  Victims of stroke often describe being unable to tell where their body ends and the world begins.  Users of psychedelic drugs report feelings “small”, and claim that they were able to perceive and appreciate infinity.  They report what I described: how they find it impossible to take anything for granted.  But, to my knowledge, I’m the only person in this time to achieve ego death without drugs or brain hemorrhaging, and I’m the only metahumans I’ve talked to who’s experienced this.  I’m convinced that it is the secret the perceiving impressions with complete accuracy.  My ego death lasted a total of ten seconds, and to this day it was the most powerful I have ever experienced.  Whenever I use my abilities, I simulate small ego deaths.  The more powerful and moving they are, the more effective I can use perceive impressions, and consequently the more powerful my abilities are.  Keep that in mind as you read the following tutorials.

Navigation: I open up my mind to the impression of the land…blending in in much the same way as when I use mental camouflage.  In doing so, I might feel any number of things.  Often I feel the landscape as a whole—this is not particularly useful, since although the fact that I can feel within this landscape a lake tells me that there is a lake in my vicinity, it does not tell me in what direction it is, or how far away it is, or even very much detail about it.  What’s better is if I feel something specific and separate from the landscape as a whole, that lake for example.  Now, rather than feeling a landscape with a lake somehow a part of it, I feel a lake in contrast to the rest of the landscape.  From this information I can discern where it is relative to other objects, how far it is, and where it is relative to me.

Tracking: The results of tracking are very similar to navigation, but the approach and technique are very different.  Where navigating is a way of getting the lay of the land, tracking is a way of being guided to certain places.  Essentially, it works like this: I chose a place or a thing that I want to go to, and then picture it in my head as an impression.  All the while, I’m thinking: “I want to go there!”.  I meditate thusly for a little while, then simply open my eyes and start walking.  I don’t walk in any particular direction; in other words, it is not my conscious mind telling me where to walk.  It is my unconscious mind (the part of my mind that is occupied with feeling the destination that I want to go to) that controls my movements instead.  When I’m going in the right direction, I feel a certain way, and when I’m going off course, a feel a different feeling.  It’s almost like how you feel when you look at two parallel lines, versus two lines that are slightly askew.  As I walk, I will oftentimes get that feeling that I’m off course, at which point I simply meditate again in the same manner, and start walking once again.  This is especially useful when I’m tracking a moving target that is constantly changing directions.

What’s especially useful about tracking is that I don’t have to “track” a specific thing or location.  Instead of tracking a particular fox that I knew of, I could just track a fox.  Instead of navigating to a specific land that I know of, I can input “a good campsite” as my destination.  This is especially useful because often times I don’t know very much about what I’m tracking, or where exactly it is.  I used this to find water in the desert (which was actually quite easy, since the impression of water stood out so well against the parched desert).  I didn’t know where water was, but I knew what water felt like (I actually meditated for a long time before my trip into the desert so that I could learn exactly what water felt like), and so I could find it with this technique.  Unlike navigation, tracking can be done fairly consciously for obvious reasons.

Psychometry: Until this point, I have only discussed extra-sensory-perception associated with the present: feeling the landscape, feeling where things are at the present moment.  It is much harder to do this with regard to the future, since the future is not physical.  Though it is harder, it is not by any means impossible, and can be accomplished.  Psychometry, classically, is the divination of information about an object by touching it.  I use the word tongue-in-cheek; in this case, Psychometry is the divination of the future as it relates to a particular object, which can be perceived by touching it in a metaphysical sense: that is, by feeling its impression.  In short, you search for the part of an object’s impression that concerns its possible futures.  I have no idea why this is possible, why there is information concerning the future of an object imprinted on the present form of that object.  It has fascinating implications in physics for the study of time, but that’s a different story.
This technique, unfortunately, is very difficult to describe.  You have to find the part of an object’s impression that details it’s possible futures, but there is almost no way of describing in language what that feels like.  You will simply know when you find it by chance in your meditations, and as you practice, finding it will become faster and easier.

Reflexes: ordinary reflexes only work so fast, and there are many activities where they simply aren’t fast enough.  These abilities allow the user to react to something before the eyes even see it.  It is therefore useful to become practiced in psychometry, since that will allow you to feel the near future and react accordingly.   I use this most often in fencing, which is a great sport to practice these superhuman reflexes.  The most obvious thing to do would be to simply open my mind to my opponent and feel what they are about to do, and then react.  There is, however, a much faster, more reliable way.  I call it programming, and in some ways, it’s very similar to the tracking technique above.  In the same way I “programmed” a destination into my subconscious when I was tracking, I can program a reaction to a certain event when I’m in need of faster reflexes.  And in the same way I simply let my conscious mind go, and was guided by my subconscious when I was tracking, I can now allow my subconscious programming to control my body.  The reason this is faster and more effective is twofold; first, because the subconscious is considerably more powerful and faster than the conscious.  With this method, you don’t have to think, you can simply do.  And second, there is evidence that the subconscious passively feels impressions.  So as long as the subconscious is controlling the body and not the conscious, you will constantly be feeling what your opponent is about to do.  Ironically, fencing is no longer a test of my skill with a sword, but a test of my concentration and how long I can stay in a trance.

As an example, here’s how I would program my subconscious before a fight.  I would imagine the feeling of my opponent’s sword about to strike a part of my body.  I would be sure to associate that feeling with an emotion, like fear.  I would then program my reaction: me blocking the attack, and I would associate a successful block with a positive emotion, like satisfaction.  It should be noted that I’m visualizing what I want to happen (my successfully blocking the attack), not what I don’t want to happen.  This is crucial.  Although I am programed to avoid the feeling of fear that comes with an imminent strike, I am overpowering that emotion by tenfold with my programming to seek the satisfaction of remaining unharmed.  I would repeat this process in every major area of my body, and with every sort of block.  Lastly, I would picture of feeling of my opponent being vulnerable, and input the reaction of me striking him.  When the match begins, it is only a matter of staying concentrated on these things and staying in my subconscious trance.  It is disturbing at first, since your body moves without you controlling it.  But I’ve gotten used to it.

Keep in mind that this skill has varied applications.  I use it in glade skiing to allow me to dodge trees.  I can program reactions to almost every dangerous situation imaginable.  I can program myself to feel the emotion of fear before something bad happens, and can effectively have a sort of passive quasi-precog.  I can use it to become more agile in sports like freerunning and skiing.  This is by far the most useful ability that I know of.

Programming continued: I’ve found that the human body is capable of much more than we give it credit for, and often our own beliefs in our capabilities hold us back from out potential.  Programming allows you to access this.  I will first reiterate how important it is to focus and program what you want to happen, instead of what you don’t want to happen—in this skill especially.

Imagine you are trying to accomplish a challenging physical challenge, one that requires both strength and agility—a particularly difficult rock-climbing move, for example.  You would consider the problem at hand, and then visualize yourself doing it.  Do not be concerned with the limits of your strength—in fact, don’t even take that into account—and avoid all feelings of doubt.  Simply imagine yourself doing it.  Consider the technically difficult areas that will require agility and program accordingly.  All the while you should be feeling your energy and strength building, “getting pumped” as athletes call it.   At this point, suddenly awaken from the trance, and just begin.  Imagine releasing all of that pent up energy you were feeling; imagine it powering you through the challenge.

There are obvious dangers associated with this.  In fact, it can be downright insane!  You are essentially disregarding the limits of your skills, blindly throwing yourself into danger!  I implore you to use sense with this.  Get to know your abilities in less risky situations so that you how much your physical strength improves during a trance.  Only then should you use this in the “real world”, and even then, with extreme caution or only when it’s absolutely necessary.  There’s another danger called “crashing” that I discovered the hard way.  Often in these sorts of trances, you don’t feel how tired and weak you actually are simply because of the can-do-mindset you are in.  You don’t notice that you are exhausting our strength until you are completely burned out.   This can happen at any time with almost no warning.  I was once doing what’s called “chinneying”, climbing branchless trees, and was 35 feet or so up a tree when I was hit by my first crash.  All of a sudden, I simply couldn’t hold on to the tree, and slid down thirty feet of abrasive trunk to the ground.  Again, be sensible.  Don’t do anything where your life depends on this.

Dreaming: more recently, dreams became a huge part of my abilities, and so I adopted the name “draemer”.  My first precognitive dream happened about three years ago.  In the dream, I was standing in a ruins that I sometimes visit…but everything was flooded.  A TV on the wall was tuned to the news, and was saying something about a disaster in Spain.  A few weeks later, the river I live near flooded, and a few days after that there was an earthquake in Spain.  Years later, I dreamt that I would receive a concussion, and that shortly after it would rain.  The number 44 came up as important in that dream.  Sure enough, I received a concussion, and shortly thereafter Hurricane Sandy struck the east coast, where I live.  Someone suggested that that number represented how many would be killed in the hurricane.  The death toll in New York: 44.  I’ve had a total of six precognitive dreams, but those two are the most impressive, and the only ones that I can actually validate with evidence.
44 dead.  I was elated that I predicted that number exactly, but at the same time terribly disturbed.  Theoretically, it could have been prevented.  I had this dream in September 2012, long before the Hurricane had even formed, and time enough for a more extensive evacuation of New York.  For a while, I’d been toying with the idea of creating a database of dreams.  This solidified the idea, and I helped set up the Alliance of Prophets.  Precogs send us their dreams, and we cross-reference them, searching for patterns and common symbols.  It’s my hope that, once we gain credibility, we can actually use our database to prevent disasters and save lives.

But back to dreaming.  Some people say that only realistic dreams can be precognitive.  I disagree.  I believe that even the most fantastical dream can be precognitive, and, most importantly, that ALL dreams can have precognitive elements.  In order to understand my reasoning, you must understand the nature of dreams.  When you sleep, your brain isn’t completely inactive; it’s constantly sending out weak nonsensical signals.  These signals don’t mean anything, but when the unconscious mind intercepts them, it assigns them meaning.  In the same way you might look at a Rorschach Blotch, a random blotch of ink, and see an actual object, your unconscious interprets those random signals.  The way it interprets those signals gives you the dream.  The reason Rorschach Blotch tests are effective in psychology is because the unconscious will interpret them differently depending on your mental state.  The same applied to dreams.  If you have repressed emotions of fear or anger, you will have nightmares.  Most importantly, your fear and anger will take on a physical form in the dream.  It might be represented as a monster.
Likewise, if your unconscious knows something about the future, that will come out in dreams in the same way repressed emotions do.  That’s why any and all dreams can have precognitive elements.  And like with repressed emotions, those predictions will take on physical form as symbols.

The hard part is knowing which symbols are precognitive, and which simply represent your emotions or other things.  This is difficult, but I do know of one method.  To do this, you will first have to learn how to lucid dream.  There are extensive tutorials on the internet about this, so I won’t go into details.  When you go lucid in a dream, you will be conscious of the fact that you are dreaming.  .  It’s important not to interfere with the dream, just to observe what’s happening.  This allows you to actively search for precognitive elements; if you go into the dream with the intent of looking at precog, precognitive elements will stand out from other parts of the dream.  I believe this is because unconsciously, you want to know the prophecy, and so your unconscious will guide you towards it and highlight the precognitive elements.  This is also the basis for a more advanced technique which hasn’t been adequately tested…
Remember how I said never to interfere with the dream, only to observe it?  This technique requires you to break that rule.  It backs on the idea that in dreams, ideas take of physical form.  With this technique, you create things in the dream in order to tease the prophecy out of your unconscious.  This requires hours of work to be thorough enough to actually work.  It’s hard to do in one night, so additionally you will have to learn to go back to the same place in the dream after you’ve woken up.  I’m in the process of creating a library for this purpose.  It’s a long hallway lined with bookshelves; in the back is the past, where the books tell my memories.  In the front is the future.  When it’s done, I’m hoping to be able to simply open a book from the future section and read what it says.

I’m continuing to perfect and experiment with these techniques.  Hopefully, by December of next year, I will have to release a second edition of my story, explaining what I got wrong, and what I improved on.  But for now, that concludes the practical tutorial of my abilities.  What I’ve yet to explain and what is too often omitted in discourse on the metahumans are the psychological effects of these abilities.  My being a metahumans has affected almost every aspect of my life.  Camouflage is more than just an ability—it is a mindset and a lifestyle.  To some extent, it cannot be turned off.  People fail to notice me even when I’m not using camouflage…which is both a blessing and curse, as you might imagine.  My weakness with precog is the fact that it’s hard to tell an authentic vision from what is simply my imagination.  About a year ago, I would have “visions” of myself dying, and would fear that what I had seen was precognitive.  This led to paranoia bordering on psychosis which I am just now getting over a year later.  It is an unavoidable consequence that every precog will have to deal with before they have enough authentic visions to distinguish them from their imagination.  I’ve already detailed the story of my “crash”.

Still, I regret nothing.  These abilities weren’t suddenly given to me.  I evolved around them over these past ten years.  It’s the only life I’ve ever known, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.  But newer metahumans who learned of their abilities later in life should know going into this that it will change you.  Whether you come out better or worse on the other end is hard to say.  They could very well drive someone insane.

But then there are the positive aspects.  You can do incredible things—but more than that, using camouflage and impressions make you feel intimately close with nature or other people.  Having a guiding sense like tracking or navigation gives me confidence.  Even when I’m not wandering the wilderness, these abilities guide me in my everyday life, leading me down the right path.  The weeks after my ego death were some of the happiest I can remember.  I had a deeper appreciation of life.  Even as a precog, constantly concerned with what the future holds, it forced me to live in the present.  It’s impossible to say exactly how my life would be if I never discovered these abilities, but I’m certain that I would be a far less content and happy person than I am today.  I wish you the same fate.