Your
True Tales
September 2005 – Page
33
Crosswalk
to Another Dimension
by Tim D.
My most powerful experience is a really strange one, and if it hadn't happened to two friends at the same time, I might even doubt it myself, now. The three of us were walking through London, from Camden Town down toward Mornington Crescent. We stopped to wait at a pedestrian crossing for the lights to change -- the unusual plain green silhouette of a man walking for go, and plain red silhouette of a man standing for don't go, in case yours are different.
As usual, when waiting for the lights to change, we all watched them impatiently. Eventually they changed, and we started crossing, keeping an eye on them to make sure we had time to make it across comfortably -- some of those crossings in London are a bit rough.
About half way across the road, there was -- quite literally -- a ripple in reality, a brief flash of disturbance. I looked up, and the lights had changed again... but not back to red. Suddenly, the plain green guy was wearing flares and glasses, had long, flowing hair cascading out behind him, and was surrounded by stars. Astonished, we stopped and exchanged glances. One of the others said "Did you...?"; we both replied "Yes" before he could finish the sentence.
Not wanting to get killed, we finished crossing the road, and then waited, looking nervously at the lights, for them to go red again. Sure enough, the red guy had changed too. He was now carrying a briefcase, smoking a pipe (with wisps of smoke rising), wearing a little homburg hat, and he had big brogues on his feet.
We stared at the lights for a while, but eventually continued on, feeling very confused.
I mentioned this to a friend a couple of days later. She told me that she'd seen an article in the press talking about how the council had changed the plates over on the signs, to mourn the death of a singer who had been famous in the sixties and who had lived in that street. She promised to bring me the article to have a look at, the next time we met (which was once a fortnight, at a regular social gathering).
The council changing the plates makes sense; they most certainly didn't change them in less than the blink of an eye, though.
I went back a few days later to look at them more closely. The construction was standard -- they were just normal plates of black-dyed glass, based on the original template of the walk/go men, but with extra details etched out on top of them to provide the outfits. The plates were bolted in, and took up the entire casing; there was no mechanism by which they could have slid down in front of the other plates, or anything similar.
To be absolutely sure, I hung around looking at them from a cafe across the road for about an hour, but they stayed changed.
A week after that, I went back again for another look, to get a sketch. The lights were back to being perfectly normal.
A couple of days later it was the meeting again. When I spoke to the girl who had known about the singer, she looked at me blankly -- neither she nor anyone else had any memory of me mentioning changing lights, singers or Camden before; no knowledge of any article; nothing at all about any commemorations.
It still feels to me like a brief swap into a closely-aligned parallel dimension.
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