“Today, as I was showering, I was reflecting upon why it is that I often experience unexpected cognitive sensing when I am doing dishes, or touching water. Of course, water is an excellent (yet incomplete) metaphor for consciousness in a variety of ways.

But it was then I began to remember my relationship to and senses of the elements when I was small. How I -played- in and with them, as if they were, indeed, somehow extensions of myself. How, when in water, everything changed suddenly into a kind of strangely self-animating amalgam of reality and a dream. So too, in different ways, whenever I was ‘playing’ in and with any of these ‘elements’.

And as I began to recall to mind all these scenes, of playing in and with water, fire, air, mineral, nature, wood… I began to understand how deeply these experiences of elemental play during my development underlay the future experiences, in adulthood, of transentience and other expressions of nonordinary awareness.”

— an anonymous informant