[Hnus]

I saw exactly the same infinite arms thing with zero prior interest in religion. It took me to place “I was once before and should know well” other entities protested because why bother when he needs to go back soon. Then I came back to my room and had no idea what to do with that experience.

[adriand]

These stories never fail to astonish me. Why the same deity? It’s so interesting.

The fact the mind is able to create these powerful visions and patterns and other realities is really incredible. We have this machinery for perceiving the world and moving though it, but that machinery is capable of so many other insane and beautiful and terrifying things - capabilities which are inaccessible except in rare instances.

It’s really quite remarkable. Underneath our prosaic experience of consciousness is something that can generate infinite fractals, awe-inspiring visions of otherworldly creatures, dream landscapes of colour and shape. Why? Where does it all come from? Is this what life would be like all the time without us filtering the information coming into our senses?

[card_zero]

The night hag comes to mind, a cross-cultural supernatural creature with a mundane physiological origin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_hag

So, some common sensory interference might suggest many-limbed things, maybe. Like how LSD makes things wobble and crawl about.

[DisruptiveDave]

May I suggest "Man And His Symbols" by Car Jung? It was his final writing and, I believe, his only one that focused on the common(ish) reader as the audience. The basis of the book (and generally his studies and beliefs) is that the subconscious is as meaningful as the conscious, it just communicates in ways that are harder to access in modern society, and therefore it's been pushed away and ignored.