What I'm going to tell you might not fit with "natural experience." That's because I was on the sauce when it happened. My girlfriend Carol had moved out--all because of a dog--and I was hitting the bottle pretty heavy. The night before, I put on a doozy. I was so hungover I thought I might be dead. The only cure for a hangover that severe is a little bit of the dog that bit you. So I collected my shaking self and made a bee-line for Jeanne's Carryout on the corner of Fifth Avenue. I took the back alleys and made my purchase. Back home in my apartment I cracked the bottle top and took a chug. As the booze slowly started to make me feel better I thought about Carol.

 

How she went from an army brat to flowerchild protesting the war in Viet Nam at Kent State University while her father, a lieutenant in the Air Force flew bombing missions over Cambodia. That's what Carol was protesting--Nixon widen the war by authorizing bombing flights over Cambodia. When the shit the fan, May 4th, when the Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on the students, Carol left town and returned to her hometown of Columbus. She spent the intervening years, before she met me, in a headless hedonistic pursuit--she became a biker chick. Her biker boyfriend was in the workhouse for assaulting three women on High Street, one fine Spring Friday night. He was in a blackout and remembered none of it. So Carol shacked up with me telling her boyfriend I was gay--yeah, right.

 

Carol liked the booze and I liked drugs. She introduced me to John Barleycorn and I introduced her to the needle.

She was gone now and I was spending my empty days drinking. I finished the fifth of Mad Dog. APD I called it. Alcohol Per Dollar. Best deal in town. I still wasn't feeling good. My symptoms had lessened but I didn't feel drunk. I layed out on my bed and that's when it hit me. It was like big ocean waves running through my body--very poweful. It felt like they were going to rip me apart. I began to get scared. I thought to myself, ""what is this? Am I dying? am I having a stroke?"" It was something I had never experienced before. I told myself to remember this phenomena, that I really felt it and it was nothing like anything I had ever experienced. I didn't want down the road to attribute it to my imagination.

 

I lived in a century-old house on Sixth Avenue. My apartment was upper left as you faced the building. I liked the windows. They were big and I kept them open. I liked the fresh air coming in and sounds and smells of summer. One time, a bat flew in the window. I was all for getting my racquetball racquet and practicing my backhand but Carol wouldn't let me. The bat was hanging down from the shower curtain. So I got a juice pitcher and captured the creature with my racquet as a
lid. I let the bat go.

 

I found I could fight against the waves and, like, push them back, or slow them down, so they wouldn't ll tear me up. That made my fear go away--knowing I was in control of this experience and not the other way around. So I let the waves come, kind of like opening your fingers on the top of a jug of water held upside-down.

 

I felt like these waves were tearing me from my body. They were sucking me out through the windows. It was like I was in a vacuum that had suddenly opened and the windows were my portals to the unknown. I remember the curtains blowing violently about, perhaps a storm was coming. Then again the image of blowing curtains might be just my imagination. Anyway I was sucked out of my body and sucked through the window going into space at a startling speed. I was flying and how. I enjoyed the sensation. I liked it. It was neat. I flew millions of miles it seemed. I was in outer space flying around. There were planets and stars all about me. I found I could slow down my travelling and swoop about a planet and interact with the inhabitants. I visited many a strange world where unknown languages were spoken and unknown customs practiced. But I was flying. I didn't have long to spend at each place, though at a few I landed on the ground and interacted with the inahabitants, attempting to learn what they were about. Unfortunately, I didn't think to get a calling card from the places I visited, or learn there names, or anything.

 

It was a couple of hours I would say I spent visiting these extra-terrestials. Then I felt my flying power waning, like somebody was pulling the plug. And soon I was in my own body. It felt like I was awakening from a dream. But it was no dream.

What was it? Do I really beleive I skipped the light fantastic with alien beings? Hell, no. A hallucination was what it was. But now in my readings and studies I realize there's a lot more to consciousness than meets the eye. Strange quantum effects are possible say the physicists. I gotta believe them so I'm keeping an open mind.