Strange Vision at the Black Swan

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Bases at the Black Swan conference in Devizes Wiltshire, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/colin-and-ben-bases-chats-2.html. The Black Swan is a pub and hotel first established in 1737 and its interior is very quaint and rustic. The conference took place in an upstairs function room and it was a very successful event. During the one of the speeches I became drowsy. This is not because the speakers are boring; far from it, they were all very interesting. Drowsiness is just something that always affects me when I'm at a conference, no matter how well I've been sleeping. I went into a similar half-asleep state to the one I was in when I had my experience on a train in 2008, see background link below. This time I had another strange experience that was very different. In a very vivid vision I suddenly found myself standing at the back of the room by the fireplace. Even though the fire had not been lit for the conference it now was and I could feel its hot glow against my back. It was also much brighter and sunlight shone in through the windows; the day of the conference was chilly and overcast. Miles and all the Bases equipment had disappeared and I could see that the other end of the room where the speakers had been standing was now empty. The rows of seats had also gone and the entire audience. Instead a long dining table filled the room. It was covered by a white tablecloth and there were half-eaten plates of food along with glasses of drink on it. People sat around the table looking like they'd just had a meal. They were well-dressed; the men were in suits and the women in elegant gowns. Some people were smoking and I could smell tobacco smoke along with the scent of the fire behind me. The people all looked happy and were talking animatedly. I couldn't hear what they were saying but they sounded very cheerful. They did not react to my presence and appeared not to be able to perceive me at all.

                                                           

This experience lasted approximately one to three seconds then I woke up and found myself in my seat at the front of the room watching Michael Shrimpton giving his lecture. I'm not sure how to explain this experience. I can't rule out the possibility that it was just a brief dream. It was highly lucid though. It was as real as real life is, and I could see every detail of my vision. I remember that one of the women had blonde hair and a glittering headband on with some piece of red jewellery attached. The Black Swan has a reputation for being haunted, see: http://hauntedwiltshire.blogspot.co.uk/2009/04/black-swan-hotel-devizes.html. Had I experienced a real paranormal event? I asked at the bar and the landlady told me that the function room used to be a local law court. It has been used for banquets since the 19th century. However, there was nothing supernatural about what I saw; it just looked like a normal group of people having a party, maybe a wedding reception or something similar, in the same room that we were having the Bases event. Had I instead had a vision of a past event in that room? This is sometimes called the "stone tape" phenomenon; in that a location can record events that happen there, through some unknown mechanism, and replay them in the minds of people later on. I began thinking about the details I had managed to recall, to work out when such an event might have taken place. The men's hair was all short and neatly combed, and the women's hair was long and some of them wore it in loose curls. This, along with the fact that they were smoking, leads me to think the view of the room I saw was not a recent one. I've looked at pictures online of dinner party scenes through the ages and based on that think what I saw fits best with the time period of roughly 1900 to 1920, a century or so ago. Had my altered state of consciousness, together with The Black Swan's possible flexibility when it comes to the spacetime continuum, allowed me a brief glimpse of something that happened in that room decades in the past?

See here for more information: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/real-ghost-train.html.