From around 1888, in the waning days of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, there appeared among Deakin's ‘Clues’ and other journals occasional narratives, parables, and similar ‘fictive’ writings, generally untitled and seldom exceeding 500 words, which share as common subject matter what in modern parlance are referred to as ‘out of body’ experiences. Visions of judgment, ontological displacements and similar experiences that assault twentieth-century consensus reality crowd the pages of this narrative genre which, though small in volume, is relevant to any consideration of Deakin's private spirituality, especially when viewed against the backdrop of his concurrent gospels. The thirty or so experience narratives that survive relate variations of an heightened experience in which a protagonist is either transported to an alien though beatific region of the Kosmos (Deakin's term), or else a sudden disjunction in the pattern of the world shows him things as they really are, and he is in the process impelled from his body, with the identity of self or selves thrown into some doubt.

The liminal zone where ‘the two worlds meet’, the traffic between divine and secular, between the mundane self and its highest expression in the Ideal, was a constant source of fascination to Deakin; it reappears throughout his writing in different forms.