Visions of Multimodes

"It's a skull...with eggs hatching on top...with the mommy and daddy dinosaurs looking on!!!"

After coupling the laser into the single mode fiber, I decided to put the multimode in. This probably means the laser was going in at a strange angle or wasn't entering the entire fiber, therefore the output pattern wasn't as speckley as usual. Jon, Yiyi, Ani and I were looking at the crazy pattern and thought it was moving and alive. Being scientific about it, we all held our breaths to elminate the possibility that our hot air was affecting the fiber. Lack of oxygen does strange things to one's mind. The motion of the dark and light outer regions of the output pattern continued to move. Then Matt walked in and joined in our group halucination. Giving up on describing the pattern's movement, Jon started seeing things in the random blotches - tons of cats, pigs and faces, and many really crazy things. We had to see the image as soon as it was announced or it would morph away due to the unexplained flucuations. After evaluating a scene to its full capacity we'd "change the channel" by moving the fiber and changing the way the light traveled through it and interferred with itself. The old woman with one tooth was on every channel for a time and made us scream! The whole time I was writing all the things we were seeing down in complete darkness. My slight dyslexia ended up in my recording things like "Miss Biggy." Ani taught us about some psychological phenomenon that made us see a green trail when we used a red laser pointer on top of the red speckle. So after an hour of all this, we left the darkness to see what we'd written, and instantly we started laughing hysterically. With tears streaming down Jon's and my face, and Ani about to pass out, I drew the amazing eggs-hatching-on-skull-while-parent-dinosaurs-look-on picture on the whiteboard...

Exciting stuff we saw:

Horse fetus
Skull in Buddhist temple
Ferengi
Old scary lady with one tooth
Twi'lek (Star Wars alien with prehensile head tail)
Mufasa
"If you pressed your face into plastic!"
Mario mushroom
Elephant resting its head on fire bushes with man waving on its back
Anemone
Spider, tarantula and skull
Lion teaching/pointing
Texas
Hippo
Dinosaur eggs hatching on skull with parents looking on in background
Bush
Dromedary
Phantom of the Opera mask
Diamond in display case
Cat in brambles
Awesome lion nose with the shading
Chessboard spiraling into center
Ape eating its foot
Druid hailing Hitler or playing guitar
Scary woman giving west coast/middle finger/peace sign

Other stuff we saw:

Alligator/crocodile
Four legged creature with long neck
Grinch
PacMan
E
Zoro
Tiger/bear cub
Squirrel
Man with black lipstick & bandana
Lobster
Happy pitbull
Stork
C
Scorpian
Dolphin family
Crab
VW Beatle
Old guy with one eye sticking way out
Vertebrae with top of dead dinosaur with hands thrown up
Six Flags commercial dancing man
Mario ghost
Bat
Panda lying down
Barn owl
Snorkel person
Bunny/cyote/wolf
Ape
Crane
Tennis ball
9
80 year old Miss Piggy
Frog
Cow
Chipmunck
Pigs like crazy
Fox
Fat guy
Baby's face
Cats in mass quantities
Miss Piggy
Big nosed freaky man
Lamb/llama
Fish
Gopher
Raccoony gopher
Elephant
Toucan
Hood guy smiling/patch over one eye sticking out

Most visions were convcieved by Jon!! The other contributers were Yiyi, Matt, Ani and I.

July 12, 2004