Chapter 1 

There were reasons for everything. It made for a joke of sorts, sometimes a tragic one but, in the end, would be laughter. In the beginning I didn’t care one way or the other. I wanted to test things out but I found it difficult. I didn’t know the parameters of anything, of what my body was capable of in that new state of being. I remember my childhood filled with Superman and Mighty Mouse. How I wanted to fly! One full summer I fantasized having a whole airport under the little court I lived on and I could miniaturize myself and get into my jet and fly off. But I knew the parameters of flight. This thing, now, was not flight. It was the suspension in a black bowl of howling nothing with something, maybe the brain itself, zipping and zapping as if I were watching a huge dark screen and each frame instantly provided another backdrop. No, flying was not the apt description. It was all connected together I figured that out. Flying in dream and fact, flying at the lip of sleep when you rushed out into space and met with horror and delight, flying in the small planes my father took us up in, the big jets, even the pretends we had as kids waving our arms, stretching them out and running around some neighbors lawn or building a wooden space capsule and going off to Mars. We weren’t meant to stand pat and now I was in this mysterious state that was neither flying nor standing pat.

It wasn’t as if one could say, “ah, I will go to Alpha Centauri now,” and speed off like a bullet to shoot through its atmosphere and liven the self up with the sophisticated chemistry it contained, zapping through gas to the core and knowing the life there. And, believe me, there was life on every entity I had contact with if I looked hard enough. It was a sublime art that required a kind of metanoia moment that yes life manifested differently and was conscious in all kinds of states. I had heard of theories I guess they were theories along these lines but to actually experience the fact of it is indescribable. It’s humbling and ennobling at the same time and a necessary step to getting it as they used to say.

David Eide
January 24, 2014