This event happened  in 1993, just before Sandra first founded HappyPuppy.com, the once noteworthy games website (we later sold it). Although it is exceedingly easy to come up with rationalizations of this experience (an exceedingly rare congruence of atmospheric elements such as ambient moisture, angle of sunlight, and lensing or refracting effects caused by tree branches and leaves interfering with the light surely must be responsible for this freakish - but without any question utterly - nonmystical event), frankly, none of them measure up to the profoundness of it for me.

Sandi and I stood, walked, in floating blobs of color. I watched rainbow blobs and streams of light pour through my splayed fingers like water, or perhaps sand. I have never seen a similar effect, not even amidst the fanciest light show. It was like nothing I have ever seen.

Now it didn't feel like anything, this was purely light here. No touch sensation at all, no 'weird' feelings or anything...but it was light that acted not like light at all. Oh, I will claim to staunchly believe in the rationalized explanation in public, but in private, well... I don't have an explanation, and I just can't truly embrace such rationalization. For one thing, that damn rainbow really did get larger as we approached, as though it were a physical object, with a physical contour, and a definite, and finite, size to it. Everything I know about what a rainbow actually is, says that is impossible, that can never, ever, ever happen. But it did, and we drove right into one leg of it.

Inside that leg, it looked just as I have drawn it...blobs of color, streamers of color. When I held out my hand, the color seemed to pour or ooze through. And another thing- when I first got out (I got out before Sandra), everything, including my hand, had a kind of subtle triple image to it. Really small, not much separation between the duplicate images, but a clear multiple image effect. Like taking a camera and shooting several shots of the same thing, on the same piece of film, the angle slightly different, and each with a different color filter. Or like separating the RGB colors on an old CRT screen, so they are out of sync with each other slightly.  I don't think Sandi saw that, it faded rapidly. The whole thing was slowly fading even as we stepped out of the car.

The experience lasted about 15 minutes, before it had faded to almost nothing, and wasn't profound enough to be worth standing around gawking anymore.

If anything inspired my technology of 'Chatoyance' in Pastel Defender Heliotrope, it was this experience.