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Deprivation Chamber
Once back in my room, I stripped down into something more comfortable and sat down in the beanbag in my closet. The sign on the door said "PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB, experiment in progress". Boy was it ever. Since this was the first time I'd ever done high dose sensory deprivation, I wasn't sure what to expect. I sunk into the dark and slowly began to melt. I felt positively cathedral; ecstatic and holy, yet serene. Opal lattices and geometries were unfolding before me, but they were the type of vision you get like the imprint you get after looking at the sun. Nothing definative, but very present. As I drifted from thought to thought, wave to wave, I began to experience something I had not since my very first intense acid experience, in which I overdosed (not pharmacologically, but judgementally inappropriate for the situation). The feeling I speak of is that inbetween raggedy edge, where ego desolves and hyperspace is as present as normal space. At this point, it is no longer clear whether you are alive or dead. I distinctly remember feeling disassociated, as if floating between lives. At this point I had an interesting dialogue with myself. Since I wasn't sure if I was alive or dead, I began trying to consider the implications of both. After what seemed like an age of deliberation, I realized it didn't matter either which way. *GRIN* a startling conclusion, no?
At this point, I had made contact with the hyperdimension. I could sense the presence of some sort of other, but it was vague. As I floated through this experience, all of a sudden from the periphery of my vision these wild, wiggly, translucent hyperbeings would pop into view, stick out their tongue, and put their hands in their ears like kids and make these strange sounds and laughter. As soon as I saw them, I was snapped out of my melting sensation and focused all of my attention on them. But no sooner had my synapses popped with recognition and attention, then they would dissapear out of my periphery. "Wow, holy shit." I'd say to myself, and relax back into the pleasant disassociation of existance/nonexistance. Then, *POP*! Another hyperbeing would jump into my attention and make itself known to me. The whole thing was quite amusing, and I got the distinct impression (communication) that they were making contact with me, just saying hello, confirming their existance, and having a little fun with me. Nothing serious, aside from the fact that I was in communication with a non-human, non-corporeal entity!
Then something mindbendingly strange happened. I had forgotten to unhook my phone, and the phone rang. It tugged at my from the sidelines, begging for attention, but I knew it was just a phone and my answering machine would pick it up. Then my message began playing, and it is this psychedelic Terence McKenna track that, to a jazzy beat, says "But the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it what you wish..." Hearing this gave me a good deal of amusement, but then the wierdness began. From the answering machine, this strange siren like pulsing began to blare, and an automated voice began repeating, "Please hang up and dial again. If you need assistance, please dial the operator. This is a recording. If you need assistance, please hang up and dial the operator." Now this last bit about needing assistance, combined with my somewhat ambiguous state of existence, and the siren sound, flipped me out. Did I need assistance? Was I in some kind of hospital? What the hell was going on?! So I burst out of the closest, peaking, into my empty, moonlit dorm room. What a shock! Since I had cleaned everything out of my closet, the room looked like a disaster zone. Everything was exploded everywhere, and I freaked. It took me a good 10 minutes (I think) to reintegrate into reality. Talk about a crash landing! The mess was so expansive, and the parallel between the mess of my room and the mess of human existance so strong, I was completely paralyzed with amazement. I had no idea where to start cleaning up, just as I had no idea how to start "normalizing" my experience with all this new visual input. So after a while, I cleaned everything up. The night progressed in a fairly remarkable fashion, but those other stories will have to wait till next time. The point of this tranmission was to convey the fact that yet another Homo Sapiens has pierced the veil of hyperreality. If anyone ever asks, I know where I stand on the issue; with one foot firmly in the fractal cauldron of creation!





