How to Not Be Seen
The House of Forbidden Knowledge's Associate Professor of the Hidden, the Invisible, and the Undisclosed provides an introduction to how to be any of the above at will
It was fashionable once for sorcerers to summon demons for private tutoring in such things as the languages of men and of beasts and birds (excellent for farmers and tenders of livestock, I guess) and favor at court (both legal and aristocratic schmoozing) and the influencing of men and women, the finding of treasures and lost items, the knowledge of the arts and sciences and medicine and the paths of the planets and the stars and the meaning of comets and signs in the skies and other omens, and, of course, the one thing every wallflower can do naturally, which is the art of being invisible.
There were one or two demons who specialized in being able to make any woman appear before the sorcerer naked. I’m sure they stayed busy before the arrival of the Internet—which itself is a demon sui generis and under no compulsion to tell the truth, especially with respect to things like airbrushing and retouching. But I digress.
I’ll be honest. I hate giving these classes. These lessons work, and those who adhere to what’s taught in them tend to have significant success, but the truth is that people want magic to do the hard work for them. They don’t want to do the hard work themselves, and practice hundreds of hours doing it, just so that something that now seems mundane can seem magical to other people.
For every field of knowledge, there are the four aspects: the science, the technique, the engineering, and the art. “The magic” does not appear in this list. “Ooh, the magic!” is the reaction of the uninitiated to seeing impressive examples of any of the other four aspects. Once you are initiated, however, there is no more magic. I’m sorry. This is universal. Get over it.
Once you are properly educated, magic is dead. There is only discovery—and frequently it’s the inspiring or aggravating discovery that there is more to learn than you thought. That should be enough for any scholar.
Let’s get on with it.
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One way to be invisible is to be absent—which seems like it should be obvious. If you wish to observe others without being observed yourself, I recommend that you mentally relabel the endeavor “spying” and consider a number of devices or techniques that will allow you to collect the data you require without being present, including paying someone who is allowed or expected to be present to describe to you in appropriate detail what you want to know.
I understand that that might be unsatisfying. It presumes that you already know what you’re after to some extent. If you need to explore to find out if there’s anything in a location worth study, it’s not very feasible. Also it reduces your ability to use all of your senses and intuitions, and it reduces the thrill of the transgression.
I get it. I do. I’m not made of stone.
Another way to be invisible is to look like you belong so much that nothing about you attracts the attention of an observer. Yet another way is to look like something that nobody wants to look at, so that people look away and thus fail to notice any details that might identify you. And another way is to look like something other than what you are, so that you are miscategorized and mentally dismissed even though you are noticed. It’s quite possible to do all of these things at the same time.
Messengers, couriers, custodians, panhandlers, vagrants, pamphleteers, surveyors, anyone walking around with a clipboard looking like they know where they are going—these people are automatically invisible just about anywhere.
If you want to go to all the work to make all of your various tissues perfectly transparent and nonrefractive as well as nonreflective—except your eyes, I suppose, because how then would you see?—you can give that your best shot on your own time.
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Let’s talk more about perception and attention.
There has never been a moment in your existence, living or post-living, when you have ever seen anything with your eyes.
I hate this metaphor, because it’s broken and wrong, but it’s just valid enough to use it for a moment: You are a person rattling around in a one-room house. There are windows through which you can see some of the outside world. These windows are your eyes. The windows do not see. You, the person in the room, see through them—but not all the time, despite them being mostly unshuttered during daylight hours. Sometimes you’re dozing. Sometimes you’re sitting in your comfy chair, reading or listening to music or watching shows. Sometimes you’re right up against a window, facing outward and staring, but not seeing anything because you’re distracted and daydreaming.
All that is to say that if you aren’t actively putting effort into looking, you’re merely being bombarded by photons, and that’s not the same thing. Because you see with your brain—and more specifically with your attention in your brain—what your eyes simply relay.
But it’s worse than that. If what you are looking at has already been seen and discarded as irrelevant, as a mere background feature, you may never see it a second time even if you stare directly at it. Your eyes never bother to focus on it as they swivel past on their way to elsewhere. A memory, or a sketch of an idealized memory, even, will be used to fill in the gaps when you try to remember what you might have just seen, because it’s seriously not worth the calories you’d burn actively working to see something barely relevant that you’ve probably already seen a thousand times.
It’s very rare that a recalled memory of sensory data is anywhere near accurate unless it was accompanied by emotional trauma—and even then it can get quickly distorted and corrupted.
The capacity to see takes up about a quarter of a sentient human’s neural capacity, and using it all is exhausting. It burns a lot of oxygen and carbohydrates. Daydreaming and backfilling half-remembered, half-imagined bullshit to fill in any gaps uses substantially less in metabolic resources. That makes it the default method of perception and recall unless there’s an active crisis.
It’s a wonder people ever see anything at all, because mostly, they just don’t. What they think they’ve seen is what they were expecting to see—a pasted-together collage of sensory impressions and the most quotidian, boring, and accessible bits of imagination possible, quietly assembled by background processes—occasionally brutally interrupted by something surprising.
If you want to be invisible—if you want to remain unseen—just don’t be surprising. That will get you more than 90% of the way there. As an improvement to this scenario, don’t be a surprising thing in a scene where something else is the surprising thing instead. Let some other surprising thing grab all of the attention. Perhaps you can even arrange for something else to be the surprising thing.
But let’s not move on from my point about perception and alertness just yet. As much as the typical person you might meet looks like they are looking around with their eyes open—you know, at least minimally alert—they just aren’t. I’m not trying to be insulting, like I’m trying to imply that their brains are empty or they’re basically sleepwalking. It’s not like that.
Humans are complicated creatures. Their brains are constantly pretty damned busy thinking about anything and everything—replaying the conversation they just had that could have gone better, replaying a conversation from eight years ago that could have gone better, rehearsing a shopping list for a trip to be made later in the day, trying to remember the place they’ve been in the past that had this same cloud formation, trying to recall and keep fresh in their mind the names of people they will be calling later at work.
Human life has changed drastically from what it used to be 50,000 years ago, when you rarely had to deal with anyone you haven’t known in some capacity since birth, and so few different things happened to you on a daily basis that you could make it from cradle to grave with a 5,000-word vocabulary. The insides of heads could be quieter, leaving more oxygen and simple carbs for watching what’s going on with the clouds moving in their different layers, listening to what the birds are saying about snakes and foxes, watching how the tops of the grasses are waving so you can tell the difference between where the toddlers are playing versus, say, a possible leopard.
In that last example, it would be important to not move through the tall grass like either a toddler or a leopard if you’re trying to remain unseen.
When people are anxious and fearfully aroused and alert, they’re even less likely to be aware of you unless you are specifically the kind of thing they are concerned about finding. Allow me to direct your attention to this instructional video demonstrating the principle in question.
When people are on the lookout for something specific, they will be exceptionally oblivious with respect to literally anything else.
If you are going to be spotted, it’s not likely to be by someone who is active and going about their business. It will be by someone who is idle and relaxed, or trained in being fully present in their senses.
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The only thing I’m going to say about camouflage is that only an idiot wears dark colors to hide in shadows. The colors you should wear are whatever colors the things in the shadows would be when it’s lit up, so that when you’re in the shadows, in the dark, with those things, you’ll blend in and not be too dark. A darker thing spotted in the shadows is automatically terrifying to most people. Also, wear loose clothes that wrinkle and break up any outlines that would make you more identifiable.
This is all assuming you have to do your sneaking around at night, in the dark. It’s a bad time, though. People are more worried about prowlers and threats when it’s dark. It’s best to try to be invisible during daylight hours when people don’t pay as much attention.
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There’s a behavioral component to not being noticed, and it’s not a simple thing. If there are predators where you’re trying to remain unnoticed, you must not act like you’re vulnerable. If people around you are acting like they’re worried about being accosted, then it’s important to not behave too alert or confident, because then you’ll be mistaken for a predator. That’ll draw the attention of the fearful. Also, predators tend to be territorial and notice others who seem like they could be predators. Competition causes complications.
This is a problem of urban life. In every crowd, among the thronging indifferent and perpetually distracted there will be those who are afraid of pickpockets, robbers, bullies, and rapists looking for targets and a few people who are simply wary of being accosted for any reason. In every crowd there will also be a good chance of finding serial harassers of women walking alone or beggars looking for the softhearted or evangelists looking for the distressed and psychologically vulnerable or authorities looking to bully undesirables and numerous other kinds of predators.
In every crowded situation you will need to decide whether it would be better to be actively avoided by the fearful or occasionally targeted by the predatory. And while you’re working to enact your strategy, you should be prepared to get tired much more quickly than you might think, because you have to be as continually present in your senses in exactly the way that most people aren’t, so you can continually keep track of who is looking for other people and why while at the same time looking as perpetually distracted as everyone else, because anyone who appears alert draws attention.
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I can read your questions on your faces. Is this what the demons used to teach in the olden days of maybe 500 years ago? —Does that really count as the days of yore to you? You’re such babies!— Isn’t there supposed to be an unguent of some kind, or maybe a potion? How does any of this let me terrify someone who thought they were alone in a room after I’ve watched them undress or bathe, as if I were a common poltergeist?
I try not to judge. But I do judge. I judge. But also I understand that everyone needs hobbies, and a number of would-be “victims” are perfectly happy to be terrorized in such a fashion. Either way, who am I to stand in the way of good honest sexual perversion?
There are ways, of course, though they require radical changes to your physiology or co-opting an entity with a physiology that’s capable of such things. Such entities clearly exist, so to speak. But before you start planning for radical corporeal transfigurations, you should be aware that those kinds of entities are plainly seen by others of their kind—and especially by certain other larger and more insidious entities that prey on the less substantially incorporated—and you will want to be able to remain unseen by them as well for reasons I’m sure you can work out.
Believe me, even as an entity that’s invisible to normal human senses, you’ll want to follow these principles of remaining unseen even more in order to remain unseen by those with uncommon abilities of perception. Entities with extraordinary abilities of perception will almost always also have extraordinary abilities to deal with your juvenile or predatory nonsense. And for all you know, some of those entities may already be in this room, invisibly scanning your faces to see which of you are wearing guilty, smarmy grins and marking you for extra observation and brutal reprisals the instant you step out of line—or step outside of our circle of protection here on campus.
All of our classes are open to the public, as it states in the brochures and student handbooks. Until you’ve taken measures to enhance the ranges of your senses, you will never understand exactly how open these classes can be.