I can confirm this. Back in 2010 I used to be capable of influencing wind and by extension weather through inducing chains of tiny pressure differences into the atmosphere that would create a domino effect that would make the wind do more or less what I wanted. It originally started by accident when I noticed one day while I was meditating, during a storm, thast the wind and lightning would intensify the harder I ran my energy. Higher energy equaled harder winds and closer lighting strikes. I had no idea why this was but after a number of trials to make sure it wasn't just a concidence I started seeing what else I could do.
I learned that I didn't have enough energy to influence the wind directly. Instead I had to induce tiny pressure changes into the existing flow to slowly but surely change its direction or intensity. getting the environment to do most of the work for me. After about 6 months of practice I got myself to the point where I was capable of creating sudden gusts of wind at will although I had only minimal control over the direction it would blow. It was more of a "wind turn on, wind turn off" type of ability. But I wanted a lot more control and a lot more concentration in one area to make the ability a lot more practical. I thought about the concept of compressed air in a bottle and thought about what it would take to get that same level of compression
without the bottle. From that I developed the concept of Dynamic Equilibrium, a means of manipulating tiny pressure differences in an area to create a sort of pendulum effect so that high concentrations of wind would naturally swirl in a space of whatever size and shape I wanted with me only providing maintenance. This increased my control over the wind further.
I was starting to transition to smaller, more concentrated effects. I wanted to learn how to fly and I knew, based on what I was already able to do, that it was completely possible with enough energy and practice. However, not only did I not have enough energy, I wasn't willing to touch levitation until I
knew I had solid, precise control over my energy. Because if something went wrong at 100+ meters, there is no parachute, there are no nets, I just die. So I started training things that focused as much energy as possible into the smallest space possible while moving as precicely as possible. Beams and bolts of wind, balls I could hold in my hand, large sheets of wind that could cover my body, etc. Stuff right out of an anime pretty much. To help mitigate my lack of energy I developed something I called The Weaver System to split my energy up into tiny threads that I would then wind back together to concentrate the power to be more efficient.
I used to randomly mess around with these techniques, not really taking them seriously, because so far nothing had ever really happened. But one day I was walking home from university and held out my hand at a house randomly, as if to shoot something at it. I theorized that at my current level each thread should have a density lighter than air and the resulting "cord" would have a density maybe of styrofoam so even if the technique worked it would be too weak to do anything. Well, when I started the technique I immediately found out I was wrong. Each thread had a density of a hardwood and the cord had something I hadn't even felt before. All I can describe it as is "stronger than steel". A ring of cloud condensed visibly around my hand as all the energy swirled and compressed together. I had never, ever seen something like that before in the real world. I always knew in the back of my mind it was possible to get plainly visible effects like that if you condensed enough energy in one place but I'd never thought that
I would ever be able to do it. I guess I didn't have very much faith in myself at the time or something.
I reflexively dissipated the technique, fearing pretty much everything about the situation. I realized that what I was doing was no longer a game or a cool trick with the wind but something that could easily do severe property damage or kill someone if I wasn't careful. It started a vicious cycle. I wanted to train, but I didn't feel I could train safely, so I needed that ability to go somewhere remote where no one could get hurt, but to get to somewhere remote I needed transportation, I had no ability to get a car so tha meant learning to fly, but learning to fly meant training, but I couldn't train safely where I was... etc, etc. I just stopped training at that point, too scared of hurting someone or damaging something. Many other things piled onto this fear. I was getting attacked by one thing or another on practically a daily basis at the time. Usually spirits with grudges or a god-complex who'd pull me into a projection randomly during the day but also sometimes hijacking dreams while I was asleep. Or sometimes totally random situations like
The Dead Space Dream that I posted awhile ago.
Sometimes they were leaving physical wounds which was a big part of why I was trying to train magic in the real world in the first place and why I took such a combative focus with it. I had spirits claiming a lot of stuff about how I'd had past lives and whatnot. Lots and lots of craziness that I'm honestly suprised I never committed suicide over. I was going to say that it was probably because I figured that would be worse but really was probably more that I wanted revenge on everyone who was doing it and refused to give in like that. I never dared show anyone any of what I could do or talk about what was going on. I knew the people around me would be...
unsupportive... to put it mildly.
Eventually after very nearly getting killed in late September 2010 from one spirit attack I'd just given up on trying to live what I saw as a double life. After healing up a bit I attempted to force a technique I'd been designing to merge my physical and spirit bodies together. It was practically a suicide attempt, I was in a mindset that I didn't care what happened to me as long as the merge worked. When it became clear my body didn't have enough energy to complete the technique I got incredibly angry and overclocked it to force as much energy as possible out of it. But my body couldn't handle the energy output I was forcing on it and it ended up overloading and destroying my entire chakra network and nearly killing me in the process. I lost the ability to recharge energy and my abilities slowly atrophied until completely dissapearing around the end of 2011. I fell into depression. Curiously my spirit body was far less affected by this and I retained most of my astral projection capabilities for awhile. I developed the ability to poltergeist in late 201-early 2011 and tht became the backbone of my plan to regain my magic. Although the depression made it very hard to work on things too much.
My girlfriend convinced me not to give up on magic and when she moved in with me in late 2013 I decided I'd start up again. We stopped having shared dreams almost entirely and I determined it was because we no longer had the same emotional pull towards each other that we had when we were still living in different countries. I took knowledge I'd gathered about the links between astral projection and dreams and used it to develop the ability to induce shared dreams via projection. I healed the physical damage to my chakra network by around July 2015 and now I'm still trying to get over the emotional/mental damage. My mind had locked down from everything that happened, preventing me from performing any external effects to this day. Likely because of the
many varied reasons that went into the fears around magic the fear festered and deepened until it became an irrational fear of performing magic itself that I lovingly named "Abracaphobia." It makes it completely impossible to even
try real world magic and greatly hampers my ability to astral project, poltergeist, or induce shared dreams reliably.
All of my progress so far has been from slowly getting over this fear, not any real training. If I were over it right now I'm all but certain I'd be capable of doing on the spot demonstrations for people and then teaching what I know to others. Although I did recently post
Magic Training in A Nutshell as well. I originally came to Skeptiko in the hopes that somehow it would help me and so far it has. I figured sharing my stories and experiences, like this one, regardless of how crazy they might seem, might help me desensetize myself a bit. And there is way,
way more to this story than I'm able to tell at the moment. The links and stories everyone is posting in this thread especially have allowed me to reformulate my approach to getting over all of this and it seem like it might actually be working a bit.
I'm not sure why I'm writing all this down, it wasn't my intent for
this to be my reply, but it happened anyways.