true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
I said nothing to anyone, but I formed the resolve to not spend that sleepless night as I had spent the others: wandering the fields like the foxspirit
or meditating at the chorro. Rather I would sit here where the lake emptied and the Igara-Parana resumed its languid course. Here at the
boat landing, seventy feet down a steep mud bank from the river house, I would sit through the night and watch.
And so, all night long, I sat reviewing the things that had passed, seeming to divide my consciousness and send it both backward through my
family tree and forward into the future. I seemed to see all the years still ahead; I saw some technique emerging from this contact, our careers
pursued across space and time, and finally vindication as the world realized the truth of the transdimensional nature of the Stropharia visions
and the true nearness of the worlds that they had thrown open. For it had become my belief that the contact with an intelligent and utterly alien
species was beginning
for humanity. It seemed that out of the long night of cosmic time the novelty of novelties, the moment of contact between minds on utterly
different planes, was beginning.
We were among the first to achieve contact with this Other species. It was the real thing. We had come to the equatorial jungle to explore the
dimensions glimpsed in tryptamine ecstasy, and there, in the darkness of the heart of the Amazon, we had been found and touched by this
bizarre and ancient life form that was now awakening to the global potential of a symbiotic relationship with technical humanity. All night
long strange vistas and insights poured through me. I saw gigantic machineries and worlds of vegetable and mechanical forms on scales
inconceivably vast. Time, agatized and glittering, seemed to pour by me like living super-fluids inhabiting dream regions of terrible pressure
and super cold. And I saw the plan, the mighty plan. At last. It was an ecstasy, an ecstasis that lasted hours and placed the seal of completion
on all of my previous life. At the end I felt reborn, but as what I knew not.
In the gray of a false dawn, the wave of internal imagery faded away. I rose from where I had been sitting for hours and stretched. The sky
was clear, but it was still very early and stars were still shining dimly in the west. In the southeast, the direction toward which my attention
had been focused, the sky was clear except for a line of fog or ground mist lying parallel to the horizon only a few feet above the tree tops on
the other side of the river, perhaps a half mile away. As I stretched and stood up on the flat stone where I had been sitting, I noticed that the
line of fog seemed to have grown darker, and now seemed to be churning or rolling in place. I watched very carefully as the rolling line of
darkening mist split into two parts and each of these smaller clouds also divided apart. It took only a minute or so for these changes to be
executed, and I was now looking at four lens-shaped clouds of the same size lying in a row and slightly above the horizon, only a half mile or
so away. A wave of excitement swept through me followed by a wave of definite fear. I was glued to the spot, unable to move, as in a dream.
As I watched, the clouds recoalesced in the same way that they had divided apart, taking another few minutes. The symmetry of this dividing
and rejoining, and the fact that the smaller clouds were all the same size, lent the performance an eerie air, as if nature
herself were suddenly the tool of some unseen organizing agency. As the clouds recoalesced, they seemed to grow even darker and more
opaque. As they all became one, the cloud seemed to swirl inward like a tornado or waterspout, and it flashed into my mind that perhaps it
was a waterspout—something I still have never seen. But even as the thought formed, I heard a high-pitched, ululating whine come drifting
over the jungle tree tops, obviously from the direction of the thing I was watching.
I turned and gave one glance at the river house seventy feet behind me and up the steep hill, gauging whether I had time to run and awaken
someone to get confirmation of what was happening. To arouse someone I would have had to go hand-over-hand up the slope and
consequently take my eyes off the thing I was watching. In the space of an instant, I decided that I could not cease observing. I tried a shout,
but no sound came from my fear-constricted throat.
The siren sound was rapidly gaining pitch, and in fact, everything seemed to be speeding up. The moving cloud was definitely growing larger
rapidly, moving straight toward the place where I was. I felt my legs turn to water and sat down, shaking terribly. For the first time, I truly
believed in all that had happened to us, and I knew that the flying concrescence was now about to take me. Its details seemed to solidify as it
approached. Then it passed directly overhead at an altitude of about two hundred feet, banked steeply upward, and was lost from sight over the
edge of the slope behind me. In the last moment before it was lost, I completely threw open my senses to it and saw it very clearly. It was a
saucer-shaped machine rotating slowly, with unobtrusive, soft, blue and orange lights. As it passed over me I could see symmetrical
indentations on the underside. It was making the whee, whee, whee sound of science fiction flying saucers.
My emotions were all in a jumble. At first I was terrified, but the moment I knew that whatever was in the sky was not going to take me, I felt
disappointment. I was amazed and I was trying to remember what I had seen as clearly as possible. Was it real in the naive sense in which that
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