Thanks ww and Dr. Bill. Wow. That last url on high altitude sprites is something. And now (whilst hoping not to get my dear milum all worked up on this thread) I am wondering if indeed I have seen some of these things from the air? It seems that the lightning was in pale colors on that fateful plane ride long ago, though I just chalked it up to the effects of illumination from within the thick clouds.
And my daughter and I may have seen sprites instead of lightning out the plane window.
These seem to me to be to be possible cases where perception and one's concept of reality may influence one another. I had no idea about these other forms of atmospheric phenomena, and so I didn't have those categories in my mind in which to file my new observations. So it seems I just squeezed my memory of what I saw/experienced into a tired old existing thread, the category of 'regular lightning' in my mind, rather than pursue/create something entirely new. And surely, my mind does this hundreds of times each day as new experiences, which are not life threatening, get filed into the wrong bin in an automatic quest to establish some order. Now I'm wondering what I really saw on those two days. In the future, perhaps I'll be not necessarily more observant, but rather more vigilant in describing exactly what I saw, rather than categorizing it too quickly.
Next time I'm in the library I'll head to the lightning section. (And I am embarrassed to admit that I couldn't even spell lightning correctly before this thread. Uhhgg!)
I am actually quite frightened of lightning when it's close by. I'm rather sure I'm going to get struck by it at some point. My old dog and I were once trapped on the wrong side of one of the Sawtooth's in Idaho when a huge summer storm blew through. We raced it up one side of the mountain and down the other, much of the time above the treeline, so we were basically out in the open, hugging close to the shale, with lightning cracking all around, and no one but mountain sheep (moving away far more agilely than either of us!) anywhere near.
Good old dog. He could have left me and gotten out of danger, but he anxiously stayed by my side as I frantically stumbled along.
I had forgotten all about that one. Luckily, we got safely back to camp before the real deluge began, but I'm not sure I'll forget the sound of the bolts hitting the rocky mountainside....
