THE VAST DARK OF MY DREAMING or: "Lemme Outta da Box!"
Since time immemorial—or at least as long as I can remember in the vast dark of my dreaming—man has sought for moments in life to leave an individuated ego-skin in order to reconnect with a fundamental mystery, to directly experience the ‘world beyond’, the ‘realm of forms’, ‘a separate reality’ or the ‘harmony of the spheres’; not—I would suppose—out of boredom, listless ennui or the desire for ‘entertainment’, but paradoxically through a quite stubborn inclination toward survival in the physical world. To find a means of subsistence, to heal one’s self or family, man has had occasion to resort to ekstasis(1) (“to be or stand outside oneself”) or, we could say, to ‘step outside of the box’. Thus the wisdom of an oft cited sentiment: ‘You can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking you used when you got into them.’(2)
In ‘The Cosmic Serpent’, Jeremy Narby relates his experiences with a native Peruvian community when in the 1980’s he was working towards preserving their Amazonian forests. When he asked them how they came to cultivate such knowledge of an outstanding pharmacopeia, the people routinely replied that knowledge of a plant’s medicinal properties was told them directly by the plants themselves—in visions they communicate with the essences of different lifeforms, including the plants, and in this way they obtain the information regarding the plant’s particular character and uses: “Nature speaks to people in visions and dreams.”(3)

nomami of the Amazon Basin
Apart from an acute need of plant medicines for some particular physical ailment, man does well on occasion to take advantage of the possibilities at hand to ‘heal the soul’ by seeing things from another perspective or stepping outside of the box as it were. While maintaining too myopic an obsession with the quotidian corporeal context, one can become blind to wonders and opportunities actually available in a living world.
Various religions have inherited—or have at least had to reconcile—man’s need to ‘go beyond’. As someone who was brought up in a religion that practices baptism by immersion (4), I find it interesting to consider how this ‘technique’ of immersion could have been used in very ancient times as a practical—if hazardous—means of inducing altered states of awareness, bringing about something like what is now termed the “Near-Death Experience.”
By many accounts it would seem a fruitful procedure, this ‘being reborn’, and for the intrepid seeker who would willfully submit to these practices—dangers be damned—we can see how an attitude of reverence would be prescriptive; and how a certain faith in one’s chosen practitioner could be a helpful aid if one lacked the benefit of that age old agent-of-change ‘nothing left to lose’.
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In what may be at least a mildly amusing diversion I’ll relate here two anecdotes—what I would qualify as my own Near Death Experiences—neither of which occurred when at age eight I was initiated into the previously mentioned and wholly innocuous coming of age ceremony practiced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The first of these came to pass when I was five years old: I’m told that I jumped out from behind a bush to surprise my older brother as he was joy riding his motorbike on the path through our spacious backyard. The impact involved a meeting of some part of the motorcycle with my forehead—just below the hairline, slightly left of center—and sent me flying some five yards through the air. Though I can’t recall what exactly I may have had in mind, I strongly doubt that it had anything to do with suicide or the attainment of a mystical experience. What I do remember is flying in the air over the entire two acres of our family plot and watching my mother from an autoscopic(5) perspective as she washed my forehead clean of blood under the bathtub faucet.
The second event I had undergone as a disaffected youth, age 17, living in the first of a series of extra-familial bohemian households. Having free access to a shady fringe-underground, being relatively heedless and tending to experiment, I had the misfortune at some point to have been passed some ‘bad acid’ (6) which my slight physiognomy had a difficult time assimilating.

Mormon baptism circa 1850s
After my grasp on time and physical sensations had ‘dripped’ off of me (as though by a steadily mounting melting process) my body apparently acquired some super-human strength, operated in puppet fashion through ‘strings’ from a world of half-conceivable dreamlike scenes. Physical time had entirely fractured and was perceived kaleidoscopically, each moment in its own eternity. I was occupied in a timeless world of archetypes in which a prominent theme was one of ‘breaking out’. Back in the ‘real world’ several windows had indeed also been ‘broken though’—the penetrating object being in this case my head—and so there was a bit of a bloody mess on the floor as well. Apparently It took five people to hold down what I would certainly classify as a rather scrawny body. An ambulance was called: A police car arrived. They carried me away in the back seat. The left rear car door window did not escape intact.
At last I ‘came to’ in hospital. Sometime during the phase of physical re-entry toward the end of the perplexing and mmm… disconcerting itinerary I found myself ‘around’ my body in the care room bed while the sheet was raised over my face in a death scene cliché—there was nothing more they could do.

Gustave Doré’s depiction of Dante’s “Paradiso”
I’ve read somewhere about the phenomenon of ‘the adulation of nurses by the wounded’ and it seems to bear some resemblance to my case here: upon a final ‘awakening’ to linear reality I saw her face—and it was as though having spent days watching a cherished film star in her most renown role, of a sudden, I was confronted by her there above me, still in character though radiant in actual life. Astonished, I had a difficult time believing that the terrific nightmare I’d come out of had some relation to the daytime reality with which I had now to live. I sensed first that familiar relief upon awakening from a horrible nightmare only to be robbed at once of a large portion of this relief—finding myself on the wrong side of a layered dream.
Though I’m not sure that I would concur with the popular adage ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’—and I don’t know to what extent these events may have changed the grand scheme of my life—one thing is evident: I was lucky. In one instance lucky to have survived the skull fracture without some kind of permanent brain damage (or do you question my normalcy?!) and the other for getting off with neither permanent injury nor permanent record.(7)
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