Hidden Fabric Messages
November 27th, 2008 Posted 10:57 pm
This morning I was in the bathroom taking a shower and my eyes were nonchalantly drawn towards the bathmat laying on the floor. You know what it’s like when you’re situated in an inactive environment – there’s nothing specific to look at, so you just end up staring at something and daydreaming. Anyway, after about 20 seconds of semi-conscious fixation at the bathmat, my now slightly-out-of-focus eyes picked up on a pattern made by the folds and creases within the bathmat, and quite bizarrely, I could clearly make out the word “FIG.” I then blinked my eyes a few times, and it was gone.
This experience brought me back to when I was in my early/mid teens. I would wake up in the morning and the first thing I would see would be a wisp of sunlight sneaking through the gap where the two halves of my curtains met. Continuing my routine of awakening, I would rub my eyes a few times, prop my head up on my pillow, and lay and stare at the curtains for a while before actually rising from bed. On many occasions, I would make out patterns and words within the fabric of the curtains, in a similar way to the “FIG” I saw this morning.
I can’t specifically remember very many of the patterns and words I saw because this all happened so long ago, but I did see them regularly and they were almost always different; often I would never see them again after their initial appearance. Some were small, insignificant words, whereas others were longer, up to 7 or 8 letters in length.
There was one, however, that does stick forefront in my mind, which was incidentally one of the few that I saw on a recurring basis. On the top right-hand side of my curtain, I would see the word “LOST” and underneath it, a small pattern of a sad face, not unlike the 
emoticon that we are all familar with. This was the only one of the patterns that I ever felt any emotion toward… mostly I would disregard the words as some kind of eccentricity in the stitching of the fabric, or a figment of my imagination… but with “LOST,” I actually felt as though somebody was trying to talk to me… desperately trying to get a message across and bring my attention to something, whatever that may be. It’s hard to explain, but I got a clear impression on the many occasions I saw this word that there was definitely something more to these hidden fabric messages than met the eye.
This is not something I’ve ever thought much of in the past, until this morning when my “FIG” experience rekindled these old memories. I’m currently pondering the significance of FIG and LOST… the first thing that comes to mind is that the fig is a collective term for the “ficus” genus of plant species. Ficus sounds very similar to the word Focus… so… “lost focus” maybe? That has some relevance in my life right now. I’m sure I’m looking into this all a little too deeply, but I’m fascinated by such hidden, cryptic meanings!
It would be quite interesting as well to hear if anyone else has had any similar encounters when it comes to hidden messages within the stitching of fabric / timber grain / carpet / other such random textures.
Until next time, take care, and stay focused!
Dan
Tags: curtains, fabric, focus, hidden meaning, lost, message
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Blog, Reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
