Let’s explore a condition that most of us have in common, which unfortunately is also commonly disregarded by everyone. So, I will begin telling you the first time I encounter this condition face to face and how everyone around me had a difficult time understanding what I was experiencing.

 

It was a beautiful early spring that year and even though it was still very cool outside, most people had begun to plant their gardens. My mother would always make the best chicken soups during the winter, but during the spring those classical recipes would slowly change into the best chicken and vegetable stews.

 

Oh did I ever look forward to the baby carrots, spinach, peas and baby potatoes to add to those wonderful spices in the all satisfying chicken stews. I could never understand why my mom would always wait until the last weeks of winter and the early weeks of spring to add all the vegetables to our diets, since those were the last of the harvest of the fall that had been in the freezer all winter long.

 

However, my mother believed that we needed this during the transitions months to boost our immune systems and I can tell you that it really worked, since in my life I have never had the flu or any allergies.

 

It may be unusual to hear this for most people who get the common cold every fall and every spring and to hear me say that I never got those common illnesses. Perhaps I did get them but my body always fought them in a very different way and this was at times more painful.

 

What would happen to me when all my friends would get the flu or the common cold, was that my glands would immediately swell up and then I would get a fever.

 

During that beautiful spring I had a very unusual reaction to the transition of seasons. I first got extremely dizzy and my mom kept me in bed thinking that perhaps my immune system had a complete overload. By the third day in bed the fever got so high that my mother had to give me cold baths with ice packs to lower the temperature and my head felt so heavy that I thought that my mom had tied me to the bed.

 

It was then that I had the most unusual experience. At first I began to see various objects around me, of all shapes, sizes, colors, shades, textures, temperatures and even flavors. I would reach for them and they even produced sounds that would appear in different intensities and tonalities.

 

My mother told me that it was probably the cause of the high fever making me delirious, but I try to explain to everyone that it wasn't so. In fact I had often felt this before but never so clearly.

 

I spent several days at home recovering and I missed a couple of weeks of school, so I spent hours reading, drawing, painting, cooking and playing the piano. What was so interesting was that even though my fever had completely disappeared, my senses had remained all scrambled.

 

I started noticing that everything was emitting signals that were just inexplicable to me. First of all, I tried to explain it to my older sister as she was helping me practice my piano lessons. My first observation was that the notes in the piano were causing me to remember clearly those shapes floating in the air again and even though they were not longer visual I could certainly feel them around me.

 

When I tried to describe what I was feeling, my sister simply reached for the thermometer felt my forehead and then yelled... “Mom, I think Osie is getting sick again!"

 

Surely enough I had a couple of degrees of temperature but this time I had realized that the music had triggered it. I also earned a huge portion of my favorite chicken stew and a day to rest at home but I remained without being able to relate to anyone around me.

 

I thought nothing of it and eventually after months had passed by nobody wanted to hear the details of my wonderful experience, so I kept it to myself.

 

One night unable to sleep, I got up and walked to the terrace of our house. I brought my diary and my guitar with me and began to strum it along as I was thinking of words that would fit each note. That night I wrote my poem "I will always love you" which I dedicated to my maternal mother.

 

What happened that night was that as I strummed the guitar visualizing the words that I slowly wrote down, I was also noticing that my head was feeling heavy and I could feel my blood burning within me. So I laid down on the cool terrace, closed my eyes and I re-lived the experience with the shapes all over again.

 

This time it was so intense since I could easily study everything in detail. I always kept this condition to myself since I could easily control it and in fact I got to enjoy it.

 

Most of the time it would actually help me remain inspired and sense everything with the upmost intensity.

 

Years went by and I shared this with very few people around me who would try to understand me as I would explain this phenomenon. It would generally happen to me during very overwhelming events.

 

However, it was not until my second year university when I heard a talk about Spatial Sequence Synesthesia which is the ability that some people have to associate numbers with specific positions in space. I sat there in awe though I totally understood what they were talking about.

 

Finally someone that could fully understand what I was visualizing and feeling. My experience was slightly different to that of the speaker, but in general we shared that same ability. Yes, the numbers had also a different value to me, since I would associate them with weight, color and shape.

 

This was the same idea with everything else around me that could be measured with intensity values... And guess what? Everything has intensity values in life!

 

The speaker called 20 people up on stage to take part on a sensory experiment, and guess what? He was able to prove that we all have this ability but the problem is that most people don't understand how to use it.

 

He also explained how people of sensitive nature like artists are generally the ones who first discover the art of using such wonderful natural phenomenon to their advantage.

 

I could write an entire book describing in detail what I sense on a normal day. However, I would just leave it as an inspiring introduction that I hope serves as awareness to those who read this article.

 

I invite everyone to exercise this ability though it will make you much more aware of the smallest details in life. I strongly believe that we all have this wonderful ability to use our senses in unity and it would be great if everyone could fully benefit from this wonderful experience.