Surrounding Dimensions As "Onion" Layers
One might say that illumination is a very "human" effect, therefore: an "apparational" manifestation magically transforming a limited spectrum of deeper frequency functions which ordain the "speed of light." It should be no big surprise, then, that only a limited range of phenomena becomes visible. Indeed there must be a lot more going on around us—encompassing speculations about dark (maya) "matter"--controlled perhaps by variable speeds of potentially light-producing frequencies.
Another one of our recent Net notices, from Australian scientists, suggests that the surrounding "dark matter" constitutes a parallel universe identical or similar to their recently discovered "mirror matter." This epitomizes my intuition that our view out into the Cosmos is indeed obstructed, refracted and/or obscured by "smoke and mirrors."

Doors of Perception
As the
galaxies abide in measured precision
aglide around the horn . . .
* * *
Note (December 3l '03): In 1974 Dr. Robert Gibbons wrote an intuitive thought-piece welcomed by his friend Gene Roddenberry—the producer of "Star Trek"--as theoretical support for the "warp drive" previously imagined by series writers as allowing the spaceship Enterprise to travel faster than light. The paper theorized existence of super-space—beyond a swarm of sub-spaces that comprise interpenetrating dimensions of physical reality—including our own familiar "universe."
Dr. Gibbons is now a director at the Museum of the Unexplained in Reeds Spring, Missouri. He was receptive recently—over coffee at the Sunrise Cafe next door—to my own deepening suspicions about these (distracting) dimensions that seemingly surround us. Evidently each of these has its own characteristic composition of (ordinarily invisible) pulse-frequencies; which are magically metamorphosed into a critical "speed" of potential light. These velocities shift from one dimension to another—invisibly to us and thus "darkly"--except in our own "universe."

I have heard in occult parlance, incidentally, that the usually invisible dimensions immediately surrounding our earthly enclave are the "ethereal" and the "astral;" and that dreams take actual shape as real events and places as "imprinted" on the first if not both of them. Conceivably the Mexican-Indian Nagual, mentioned previously, encompasses both interpenetrating dimensions—starting closely within and around our enclave—to comprise surrounding "onion" layers in which ordinarily linear time and space are jumbled up.
Anyway the Gibbons paper proposed (again, in 1974) that the physical fabric of super-space gets "tied into knots" to produce the derivative dimensions; and is "warped" thereby into infinitely variable configurations. (Robert chuckled to me a wish that he had thought of the term "worm holes" presently proposed by astrophysicists.)
Thus the Enterprise might be released from our dimension—into the heart of super-space—if enough energy were expended "under closely controlled conditions;" conceivably by the "mutual annihilation of matter and anti-matter." The warping of super-space, thereby manipulated, might permit entry by the Enterprise therein for travel beyond the "velocity of light" within any one derivative dimension (such as our own "universe").

Little
Northwest-Passage Ship
(In San Francisco about 30 years ago but now gone)