Here's Luck by Lennie Lower

Sitting on the bed, I clasped my hands and stared at the clock on the little table near me. I don't know how long I sat there. I was not thinking. I was just looking at the clock. Not that there was anything particularly remarkable about it. I did not regard it so much as a clock, as something to look at. I am not a man who goes about seeing sermons in stones or lectures in bricks, or the descent of man in a piece of bone. I can see material for a debate in a heap of road-metal but I am not the type that can gaze on a Seville orange and weep for the glory that was Spain. Had I been like that I would have gazed past that clock to its old home-town in Switzerland. I would have visioned the Swiss clock-makers perched on the Alps and yodelling happily over their work. I would have seen the Swiss maidens condensing the milk and throwing the nuts into the chocolates. The cows browsing in the streets. The cheeses by the lake. The lakes clogged with tourists.

But I was just looking at the clock. It was as if my mind had said, "Now you look at that clock till I come back;" and had then departed leaving me a mere body, a shell whose whole outlook in life was clock. Utterly blank-minded. Governmentally employed, so to speak. It is hard to describe my state of mind--or my lack of any state of mind; but it is necessary to describe it. I believe that when one is in this state one gets messages from Beyond. The line is clear, there are no statics, and one has premonitions, vague prophetic feelings loom on one; the great Darkness is lit for a while by a feeble blue flame before one is hurried back to earth and the darkness again.