I remember three such occasions. All of them happened in a period of my life when I was intensively involved in psychedelic experimentation (but I was not under the influence when these happened).
The basic mechanism/story was the same in all three cases: it started with the alarming feeling of an emergence of the possibility that the border between the "I" and the "not-I" (the world) can dissolve and the two may become one, making "me" realize that "I" am dreaming this world with all its external manifestations; that the human beings "I" know and meet and all the situations "I" am participating in are in truth all part of a universal mandala which is an exteriorization of the dreamer's mind.
The first time this happened I was travelling on a train, and just as the emergence began, a quite dangerous-looking gypsy family got on the train. It is necessary to know the background to appreciate this: gypsies here in Hungary are handled in a quite racist way, they are looked down upon, essentially they are the stick in the white population's eye. On the other hand, they are very heart-oriented folks: they are much closer to the spiritual side of life than "straight" people. Their kind of spirituality however is mostly not of a conscious kind, they are more like automatons driven by God. They just follow their impulses, like honest human animals, and this makes them quite frightening in the eyes of the straight population (me included), because this may easily involve aggressive or otherwise quite challenging behavior and direct, living contact which the rest of the population had shielded itself from through the establishment of law and order.
Now this gypsy family was felt to be just a manifestation of my shadow side, the stick in my eye, I saw that there is "me" in one part of the train, and there is the shadow over there and my task is to somehow reconcile this psychological split in myself to become united. To give this feeling external support, one of the family members, a 25-looking guy was drunk and was covered with dark spiritual ink somewhat similar to that displayed in this other topic on the Nexus. The inner voice told me that this guy is a dark angel, and the gypsies (somewhat similarly with the jews and gays) were sent to Earth by God to be the sticks in the "I"'s eyes, thereby driving us towards the situation which I was approaching at that moment - the unification of the dark and light side of the dreamer's mind.
This mind process behave in the same way as it did on trips, namely there was a build-up quality, a series of relevations, which approached a sort of peak. Now here is the wild thing: when I got there to the peak, and got into the inner chamber where the making of this decision became a real possibility, a 14-yearish girl from the gypsy family stood up and slowly walked down to me with a mischevious smile on her face. She sat down in front of me and started to talk with me about trivial things like "could you tell me what's the time" and stuff. This was the point when I began trembling. I don't know if you know this kind of situation, but for me these have such an intensity which is incomprehensible for the rational mind. The possibility of this spiritual stuff being true - when it is not just on the level of words and ideas but approaches me in a real, earth-bound situation, while I can directly experience the internal process of which it is an outer manifestation - is so shocking, that I still am not really prepared to take this, after all these years of preparation. And that's what happened then, also. I gave back the chance, turned back from the door because I could not handle the fear. And with that, the girl stood up and went back to her escorts.
The second similar situation happened on a tram, this was also with a gypsy guy, who also appeared at the peak of an internal emergence process. He sat down in front of me - he could have sat anywhere because there were only the two of us on the entire tram. He asked for my mobile phone, saying that he wants to call somebody. From the internal experience of the situation, I deduced that his asking for my mobile phone is a test of my ability to let go, so I gave it to him. He called someone and talked with him for a minute, during which I was going through the inner struggle of "forgiving" him for being a dark angel and paying the price for the crimes the straight people committed against the unconditional love of God (this is very deep stuff, and deeply binds into the Christian archetype of Jesus dying for our sins). When the guy finished talking, he gave back my phone, looked at me and asked: "Do you believe in God?" - to which I answered: "Yes." "And which one?" to which I said: "Why, are there several ones?" to which he smiled and after a short pause said: "You are one of those who can clear up other people's sins, aren't you?" But he said this more like a thank you, with a sense of amazement, not in a matter-of-fact tone. Then he stood up and left the tram.
The third one happened on the same day as the first one (the meeting with the gypsy family). After getting into a total emotional turmoil on what just happened to me, I got off the train and went down to the underground. In the metro, I just stood and suddenly I noticed a beggar-looking homeless person standing at the other door. He was sort of unconscious, staring in front of himself in a drunken haze. What happened next was that I felt a pulsating ball of energy growing in my stomach and then I (or rather something that was working through me) pushed over this ball of light into the body of that homeless person. As I was witnessing this happening I again became totally wacko and left the metro trembling from what would happen next. Fortunately (or not?) God felt this would be enough. And I never had such incidents ever since.
I hear this can happen to people during sleep dep
