The Eclipse

1

Dreams, intuition, mystery, subconscious, searching, the unknown

The Sun’s radiant light of clarity and warmth is eclipsed by the eerie silver wash of Moon as The Fool is lured away from the surface world and into the subterranean; dreams, intuitions, and hallucinations take precedence over rational thought and perception, and that which is perceived by the senses takes on a vaguely unreal quality. Moonstruck, The Fool finds himself in a world of shadows and blindly ventures further into the luminous darkness of terra incognita, past the point of no return, irrevocably bound to the path of The Seeker. The light at the end of the tunnel shimmers as a distant star, then squiggles and blurs like the pages of a book when you read yourself to sleep at night, and The Seeker treks deeper into the abyss, beyond the limitations of the senses, following the guide of something formless and invisible within, the only slither of certainty left: The only way out is through.

 Around here I started getting memory gaps. I’m not sure where I went or how much time passed, but my next memory is walking back to the party and seeing some kind of commotion spilling out onto the street. Vicky found me and asked me where I'd been. It seemed like an odd question to ask and I couldn't give her a good answer. She told me that William freaked out and no one knew what to do with him.

Outside the house, a group of drunk people were trying to control an extremely inebriated William. Apparently, he'd woken up in a stupor and stumbled around for a while, before attacking Vicky and our other friend, Edwin, when they tried to help him to the door. Presently, he seemed to have lost all motor function, and was stumbling around the street, while few of our friends walked along next to him and tried to catch up when he fell. He stopped halfway across the road and reached out and mimed arranging invisible objects at eye level. Once he finished his business with the invisible shelf, he started walking again, before tripping over his own feet. Our friend Owen caught him before he hit the ground; and, while Owen was holding him up, William reached down as if to grab his cock, then pissed his pants all over Owen. Owen shouted something and shoved him into a crumpled heap on the concrete. For some reason, this reminded me that we'd taken datura. I felt like I'd just stumbled upon the missing piece of the puzzle, the answer to all of our problems, and announced it to the group. A few people looked at me like I was crazy - which, I now realise, I was - and reminded me that they had just watched us struggling to munch down the flowers for like half an hour at the party. I was just like, 'Oh yeah, that's right.' It seemed like a fairly reasonable thing to forget.

A small group of us followed William as he stumbled down the road, trying to make sure he didn't fuck himself up too bad. A few times, no one managed to catch him when he tripped over, and he scorpioned face-first into the concrete without catching himself at all. The sound of his head colliding with the pavement was sickening. Somehow, my motor function was still intact; and, though I was very forgetful and occasionally delusional, I didn't seem to be hallucinating yet. It made sense to me that William was in a far more advanced state of inebriation than me because he went to sleep.

My memories of the walk are punctuated by long bouts of amnesia. From what I've been told, the group splintered off in several directions. One guided William to his parents' house, a few blocks from the datura tree. Another went back to the party. The third set off back to Vicky's. People have told me that I'd wander off and then reappear randomly. When asked where I'd been, I'd just shrug it off.

I ended up ghosting along behind the group heading back to Vicky's. I followed them along the waterfront walkway, which was lit up by small lights built into the ground, spaced about four or five metres apart, leaving a few metres of darkness in between. The datura had definitely taken over by then. I had no idea who I was following, where we were going, or where we were, but I knew that I just needed to follow these figures through the darkness. Every time we re-emerged into an illuminated area, the scene was slightly different; sometimes I felt like I was being led by a few homies talking casually, other times we were an enormous, cultish group drifting solemnly through the dark. But I’d usually recognise any of my friends if they addressed me directly. What I imagined to be on either side of the pathway was constantly changing - sometimes it was a path through the forest, sometimes the city, sometimes the waterfront. The most persistent hallucination was that of a flowing river superimposed over the concrete. It was like a translucent, two-dimensional image resting on top of the surface. The fact that I was walking on the surface of the water as if it was solid didn't seem weird to me. Most of the time, I felt like I was walking on concrete; but I sometimes felt the ghostly sensation of water flowing past my feet (even though the river appeared to have a greater depth than that) or heard the trickle of running water. At one point, I noticed a body floating in the river beneath me. It was somewhat decomposed, and by all appearances long deceased - except for the eyes, which stared up at me with a sense of longing. Though morbid, there was something peaceful about the vision. The way it floated weightlessly under dancing reflections. I felt like I was communicating with the corpse, until one of my friends snapped me out of it and I followed the black human river once more. Most of these illusions felt more like lapses in attention than actual hallucinations; and, whenever someone snapped me out of it, or I tried to focus on what was real, I had a fairly accurate perception of reality. However, thanks to my short memory, these moments of lucidity were very brief. By the sounds of it, I was less inebriated than William even at my worst. I'd mumble in response when one of them said something to me - usually something irrelevant - but I was still generally reacting to real rather than imagined occurrences; and while my gait was unsteady and my sense of direction diminished, I could be trusted to stay on my feet and at least roughly follow the path.

There was another very curious but difficult to describe phenomenon that occurred several times on that walk. The closest thing I can compare it to is experiencing the emotional impact of a musical score in a movie, but without hearing the music - think of a 'dun dun dun . . .' moment when the camera pans to an evil dog looking from side to side, letting you know he's a villain, or at the very least a bad dog. One example was coming across a boulder illuminated by one of the lights. There was no hallucination, just a powerful impact. Like 'There! A boulder!' Like a dolly zoom kind of effect. A sense of drama and significance.

For the most part, my mind was fairly blank during the walk, with a detached curiosity and slight sense of wonder. However, these stretches of relative serenity were punctuated by semi-regular moments of chest-splitting terror - the shock of realising something wasn't what I thought it was. These happened most often when I thought I was holding something - usually my skateboard - and realising it wasn't there; other times it was realising I wasn't where I thought I was; the worst were the times when I thought I was still walking, only to have a hand on my shoulder snap me back to reality and realising I'd been standing there staring at nothing. It sort of felt like when you miss a step, but magnified. I think I still have PTSD from those moments throughout my various datura experiences.

Besides these jump scares, I can only remember being disturbed by one other vision during the walk. When we reentered an illuminated area of the path after a stretch of darkness, my friends had all taken on a new and unsettling form. Their bodies were entirely horizontal from the knees up, extending along behind them while their faces stared up at the sky and their hands rested on their torsos, kind of like walking benches. This only lasted till the next patch of darkness, like a weird glitch, but the way they moved looked so deeply wrong and it took me a while to shake off the feeling.

While this was happening, William had some kind of seizure and was taken to hospital by Vicky and a few of her friends, where he was fed charcoal and fought off doctors until they managed to sedate him.

My next memory is sitting on the couch in the living room at Vicky's house. The sun was up, and some of our friends were still awake. I only have snapshot memories of my time on the couch. I was hallucinating vividly by then. Strangers stood motionlessly in the living room, staring out into nothingness. I kept seeing things move out of the corner of my eye, and would snap my glance to them as if to catch them in the act, like 'Ha! Gotcha!' before wondering what I just did. I remember thinking Vicky was sitting on the floor by my feet, staring at me, until I looked at her and realised it was her vacuum cleaner that had eyes painted on it. Among the voices of my friends, I also sometimes heard unfamiliar voices say things that didn’t make sense, but my memory was gone, and I’d instantly forget what I heard, only remembering that it was out of place. I heard people say my name a lot, but then I’d look around to see who had said it, no one was even looking at me. The illusions would stick around for a little while, then sort of dissolve seamlessly into the background, in a way that was more like realising that they weren’t there than actually watching them melt away; but my memory was too short to think too hard about the fact that I was hallucinating. One of the most disturbing hallucinations was a rotund, suited man sitting next to me on the couch, resting his elbow on his knee, frozen in place as he looked into the distance with a wistful and intrepid expression. I got a fright when I noticed him there, but my shock turned into a deeper and quieter fear when I looked directly at him. Though he remained as still as a statue, his visage shifted around as if I was looking at him from a constantly changing angle. I got a powerful impression that he was somehow doing it on purpose, revealing himself to me from different angles. Wondering how he was doing that was unsettling; wondering why he felt the need to was fucking harrowing.

Some of my friends put me to bed around midday, and I quickly fell into a state comparable to a form of sleep. Dreams manifested before me while still fully conscious. I felt like I could hold onto awareness of my body through my own will, but fall into an immersive dream state by letting go. After playing around in my head for a while, I decided I was ready to get up. I stood up from my mattress, took one step, and felt the horrible sensation of crushing some kind of small creature under my foot. I looked down and saw the squashed carcass of a rabbit and decided I wasn't ready to re-enter the world yet and went back to bed.

I spent most of that day dreaming in bed. This part of the trip was actually very enjoyable most of the time. Since I couldn’t remember ever being in any other kind of headspace, I took it for granted and just went with it. I felt like an explorer navigating uncharted territory, trying to identify the patterns and physics of this strange dimension. At some point, I had a conversation with William, who told me he'd be getting out of hospital on Sunday afternoon. I was relatively lucid during this dream, so I got up and went into the lounge to tell my friends the news. Someone asked if I'd been texting William; I started to explain that I'd talked to him in person, then realised that I was still completely delusional and went back to bed, where I spent a few more hours dreaming. The only thing I didn't like about this state was the semi-regular jump scares - usually sudden plummets or some kind of ambush - that would come out of nowhere and shock me awake, forcing me to confront the reality that the datura was still powerfully affecting me even though it had been close to a day since I took it. When I was in the dreamstate closest to waking consciousness, I would often be reading an imaginary book. These were fascinating, and were almost always about some form of arcane forgotten sorcery, witchcraft, or ancient philosophy. However, I could only remember about one sentence at a time, and, whenever I tried to go back and reread an earlier passage, the book would malfunction - the words would become jumbled and the letters unclear, culminating in one of those horrific jolts when I realised it wasn't actually there. But if I kept reading without questioning it, the words would slowly turn into imagery - like a clearer and more solid form of the mental pictures that one's mind conjures up while reading - and would eventually lead me into a deeper state of dream/hallucination.

Later that evening, I felt ready to rejoin the others in the lounge. Vicky and about five or so others were there. Some had been up all night, and others had slept and come over to hear about the fallout. The atmosphere was tense - Vicky was very shaken up about her night in hospital with William, as well as my lingering insanity. Though I thought I spent the day in a broken sleep, my friends said that they'd been coming in to check on me regularly, and would invariably find me lying on the mattress, eyes wide open and crazed, but completely unresponsive. My hallucinations were still present, but less intrusive - my vision was very blurred and out of focus anyway, and the hallucinations mostly consisted of misidentifying an object or person, or mistaking the negative space around or between something as being an object in itself, inducing another chest-splitting shock when I realised what I was really looking at. I found it very hard to talk, and usually forgot my train of thought when I did, so my friends just left me to myself, doing what they could to look after me. Tommy noticed that I was squinting my eyes and staring at the floor, wincing whenever I looked up. They speculated that the light might be fucking with my eyes, and turned off all but one light in the living area. This was actually very intuitive of them; I hadn't noticed any increase in light sensitivity, but immediately felt more comfortable in the dim light. Someone gave me a glass of water and I struggled to drink it. It was like my throat and mouth were too dry to swallow. This made me realise how dehydrated I was, so I made a determined effort to finish the glass, splashing tiny amounts of water into my mouth at a time. I got so immersed in this task that I was completely oblivious to my disturbed friends watching me spasmodically peck at my glass of water like a bird.

In the dark, my hallucinations were more persistent, but less jarring, and I enjoyed watching small scenes play out in the shadowy areas of the room, which I generally had the presence of mind to know were only hallucinations. It felt good to be less visible, too. Since everyone was trying to relax and wind down after the last few days of party and drama, the environment they created was mellow and ambient - we sat under blankets with incense burning and Jefferson Airplane playing quietly. Someone lit a joint and passed it around. I listened passively while my friends talked about whether or not to offer me some. They decided the most important thing was for me to get some sleep, and that some weed might help with that, and passed me the joint. After one puff, my mouth was instantly bone-dry again; the paper around the roach stuck to my bottom lip and almost unrolled as I pried it away. I knew I couldn't handle another hit until I drank some more water, so I held the joint out into the dark until someone plucked it from my hand. This turned out to be for the best.

Within moments, I was back to the state of total delirium I was in walking home the previous night; but, this time, the calm detachment was replaced with raw anxiety, and the visions were more grotesque than surreal. All of the furniture and appliances attained a kind of pained almost-sentience, fleshy genetic abominations made of incomplete faces and limbs, gurgling and throbbing weakly as if they were fighting to escape the forms they'd been trapped in.