Rivers of the Mind Episode 1: Blue Topaz

Episode 1: Blue Topaz

The blue topaz crystal represented eternity—it had a pure soul, everlasting and serene. I found it in a creek bed in a little town in the Texas hill country. It was the state's stone. I'd hitchhiked there from Alabama, where I was looking for blue quartz and agate. Lots of blues—the people I met often seemed like they were in need of solace, relief. Agates were for people in need of protection—another popular gem. I found the blue topaz crystal I held in my hands—I already said that—I'm sorry. I strung it onto a hemp cord and kept it in a box with the others. That was three days ago—it was the crystal I'd dug out of my things this morning when I needed comfort. The acid from the day before was still lingering, and I felt uneasy. I checked the clock. 34 hours, 9 minutes. It had been a beautiful trip, just beautiful—but I was ready for it to stop. The place someone goes with acid isn't a place they should stay.

I had taken a lot. More than I'd expected to take. For the first hour or so I stared up at the sky. I was next to a place where someone told me that the government had found a UFO, a big compound. I was hoping to see something—but I quickly forgot about it, and instead just laid in the grass, staring up at the stars. Time seemed to melt away, and I let my mind drift, slowly breaking ties with my body and collapsing into the heavens, until I was surrounded in color. Moments from the last few years drifted over me. The lingering doubt that where I was was not where I was supposed to be melted away—I forgot the feeling that, at my age, with my education, I should have been somewhere in North Dakota working on an oil field, living with a wife and kids and a house and a car—not homeless, wandering the country looking for crystals and making necklaces. I forgot about it.

When the acid peaked, it must have been close to midnight. But I was too far gone to return to my body and to look at the watch. I was somewhere else, somewhere indescribable—when I started to feel myself fall. A great, titanic gravity began pulling me in, and I felt myself, just imperceptibly, slide into what I could only explain as a crack in the universe. Thick, glowing blue energy pulsed around me—I was surrounded by a chattering whirl of panicked voices and sirens—I thought for a moment that I was in the hospital. But I decided to only relax and let it be, to not get bogged down in what might be happening. Whatever was, was—that was that. I waded for a moment in the energy. I wondered what I was watching—hell? Souls were being sucked down into some kind of indescribable deep, leaving their bodies, as I sat still, entirely unmoved. I felt an energy wash over me, taking me under like a great wave at high tide, and spilling over my body. It surrounded me with sounds of peace—if I were dead, I was comfortable with it—I was comfortable, and could accept whatever came my way. A feeling like cold water pouring from my brain and down my bones overcame my body.

The sensation still lingered there as I woke up. It was five in the morning. Everything around me was a solemn and grave blue—the trees and rocks breathed, swirls of fractal patterns edged at the periphery of my vision. I was still tripping, and hard. I looked up and I found the grass around me bent outwards—I wondered for a while if I had been abducted by aliens, but ended up laughing the thought off and founded my bags, hidden underneath a tree. I took out the topaz crystal and waited to come down, overwhelmed with awe at the power of what had happened the night before. I breathed in--”Thank you”, I whispered to the earth. I could almost feel it groan in reply.

That was this morning, and I was still there, underneath the tree, still seeing everything around me breath, still seeing fractals out the corners of my eye, my mind still racing like your mind does sometimes when you're at the peak of a trip. I'd taken enough that I hardly expected to feel totally normal the next day, but not enough that I should have been feeling these effects this far into the day. I had wondered, for the last hour or so, what to do. I needed to come back to reality. Sometime just before nightfall, the idea hit me—vitamin B. Niacin. My friend in Philadelphia used that to come down from a crazy acid trip a few years back. I'd passed a Walmart while walking into town—I'd walk there, buy some vitamins, and then, hopefully, I could come down.

Walking to Walmart felt like it took eons. Cars dragged by, followed by brilliant tracers. Some of them looked like army cars—probably heading to the compound. A few folks glanced at me with suspicion, but mostly paid me no mind—I could feel their thoughts—how sad—how disgusting—so sad to see Heroin destroying this town—coming at me in overwhelming waves. I could hear the gears inside of their engines in minute detail, the sound of teeth gnashing down against gum behind barely cracked windows. I could see colors around the people—most of them were red, some grey, some violet and blue—halos of light behind their heads, and souls quivering behind their eyelids. It was an hour of this until I got to the supermarket.

The flickering of the lights in the parking lot burnt my head, I knelt down against the ground and held my hands over my eyes, at which point I was treated to a vivid swirl of aggravating yellows and blues. I heard a voice mumble nearby, “I can't let my kids see this. I ought to call the police”, my eyes darted up at her. “Huh?”, I asked. A woman, putting her child into a carseat looked back over her shoulder. “I didn't say anything.” The colors behind her eyes said she wasn't lying—I stared into them for a moment and I could tell she was a protector—almost an angel. I could feel pain behind them too—her husband was gone away again, and she was afraid to be sleeping in the house alone. I wanted to give her an agate, for strength—but I knew she was afraid of me. “Disgusting”, I heard her mumble in her thoughts, “He's staring at me—so creepy.”

I turned away quickly, and raced away. I can't hear her thoughts, I told myself. I can't hear anyone's thoughts. Another family getting into their car all looked at me. “Did he just say something?” I looked back at them. Their lips weren't moving. A teenage boy inside of the car pictured himself in my shoes with horror. His little sister thought I looked like someone from her history book. Their mother was preoccupied with whatever she was planning on doing with the guacamole they'd bought at the store—the father was fantasizing about killing me, but still, in the back of his mind, also thinking about the guacamole. It wasn't what you'd think. I walked quicker, trying hard not to start speaking. I can't hear their thoughts, I reminded myself, quieter. An old lady exited the Walmart and started heading towards me. Her cart croaked and groaned. She seemed tired, exhausted, deeply sad—I couldn't ignore her, even if what I imagined were her thoughts were probably delusions. I had to keep reminding myself.

“Can I help you?”, I asked as she opened the back door of her tiny red sedan. My own voice sounded raspy and earthen. She looked at me with a faint smile, but a deep seated fear. She was afraid, and pictured me trying to mug her. I shut my eyes, trying to seal off my own delusions that I could somehow tell what she thought. “With the bags—I can help you load up your car.”, I offered. “I don't have any more money.”, she said, thinking that I was a beggar, maybe. “I don't need any—it's alright.” Without another word, I lifted up the two heavier bags and set them in the back of her car for her. “Thank you young man.”, she said. Internally, I could hear her breath a sigh of relief that I had not tried to hurt her. I nodded and hurried in to the Walmart.

Grabbing a cart and struggling to right my course as I entered the store, I looked up towards the ceiling to try and read the signs. None of the letters made sense to me—all of them seemed jumbled and bizarre. The manager had immediately spotted me. I looked threatening. He was expecting me to steal something. In his mind, he imagined fighting me off with an assault rifle, then engaging me in a knife fight. If he could teach me a lesson, maybe Jill from customer service would finally see he was—I needed to stop. I couldn't hear what they were thinking. The colors I was seeing were from the acid. So were the voices. So was everything.

Trembling, I wandered towards what loomed like the pharmacy, and saw a row of green bottles I presumed to be vitamins. None of the labels made any sense to me. I couldn't read. Irritated, I threw up my hands and pondered trying to find a customer service person. The thought unnerved me—what was I thinking? I couldn't have a normal conversation right now. I couldn't handle that—but now I was stuck in the city. So many of those people in the parking lot had thought about calling the police. If I got arrested, I didn't want to imagine what could happen. Not here in Texas.

I heard a woman's footsteps come by, and I could tell by her thoughts that she was an employee. My delusional guessing was right. “I can't read.”, I said, lying, “My doctor said I need Vitamin B.” Feeling very sorry for me, she headed into the aisle, scanning through the pill bottles with her index finger until she found what I was looking for. She handed it to me, grinning. She was the first genuinely kind person I'd met. Her name was Meagan. She wanted to be a doctor, since her grandmother had cancer. Before that, she wanted to be a psychologist. Her older brother worked at a fast food place on the other side of town, along with two other jobs. Last summer, she'd taken five grams of mushrooms and experienced ego death while sitting waistdeep in the--I grimaced to try and keep these delusions from coming to my head. “Niacin. Do you have any niacin?”, I asked. She nodded again, and found a bottle. “Thank you so much.”, I said. “Do you need anything else? Food, water, blankets?”, she asked. “No, I'm fine.” I started to walk away. She thought about having more of a conversation with me. “Where is he from?”, she thought. I wanted to put my delusion to rest. “I'm from California.”, I said. She froze. “I was going to ask.”, she said. “I think I can read minds.”, I admitted, “What kind of doctor do you want to be? A neurologist?” She was afraid now, but impressed. It was correct. “Let me give you something.”, I said.

I slung around my pack and took out a pencil case full of crystals on strings. The manager was alerted to my presence. I knew, since apparently I could read minds now that I'd taken acid. I fished one out, “This is a tourmaline”, I said. She looked at it, visibly uncomfortable. “It will give you bravery”, I muttered, “Concentration, balance and confidence.” The manager swung around the corner. “Is this guy bothering you, Meagan?” Meagan shook her head, “No, no, I was just helping him find some vitamins.” She also thought I was psychic now, and was staring at the crystal with awe. “What are those? Where did you get those?”, the manager demanded. I froze, wary of his every thought. “They're mine. I make these for people at...at...concerts and...stuff.” I started shaking. “Oh yeah? Look pretty nice, how much do those fetch for?”, he asked, skeptically. “I don't charge money. They're healing crystals.” Raising his eyebrows, the manager scoffed, starting to reach for the box.

The two of us locked eyes, and he froze. I felt my consciousness stretch until it met with his—the two of them brushed up against each other until the walls between them burst away, and I was inside of his consciousness, aware of every movement of his mind and every feeling inside of his body. He tried to jerk away—I held him still. I held him still. I couldn't believe what was happening—I started to panic, to bring my consciousness back into my body. Instead, it tore him away with me, ripping his psyche from its native mind. I could see it peel out of his skull, oozing like a thick red water, inside of which a small person, shaped exactly like him, was trapped. Only he and I were aware of what was transpiring. He came closer and closer until he was sucked into my forehead and I could see him—the two of us were locked in a higher plane of existence which I felt come detached from the other pieces of my being—a long tunnel inside of my mind, covered in mirrors and bright blue lights, where he saw me running away from him—all the while with the image of my physical face stared down at him from high above. He was being dragged along by a powerful force, screaming and pleading for mercy. He looked back and could see his physical body, its expression vacant and pale. Flailing, he tried to dig his fingers into the sides of the tunnel—Meanwhile, I was unable to think of what to do—I was terrified myself—I'd never had another persons consciousness inside of my head before—the sensations were bizarre. I felt the region of my brain where I held him trap light up on my physical body, but another part of my mind was aware of this psychic plane to which I had transported him, and stood in front of him now. He was both a part of me, and apart from me. Hoping to at least make his stay inside my head productive, I tried to speak to him. “Please don't take my crystals.”

“Let me out!”, he screamed, “Please! Please let me out.”

“I swear I didn't steal these--”, I said. I tried to make him cognizant of what I had been through to collect them, sharing my memories. The force which had been pulling him deeper into my mind began to dissipate, and, panting, he collapsed to the ground. I watched him, for a little bit, wondering if he understood—wondering as well if, outside of my still-tripping mind, I was being attacked. This couldn't have been real—I tried to come to him gently, to help him up. He swung his arms up and tried to punch me—it hurt at first, until I realized that it was my mind—it was my decision if his punches could hurt me. He continued hurling his fists at my face and my chest, but I was unmoved.

I'd taken acid only four or five times before, and I'd learned much about consciousness, the nature of pain and suffering and death, the nature of love and hope and peace, the harmony at work in the world. I knew, if nothing else, that as angry as this man was, there was compassion that I needed to feel for him, since deep down, I understood that I could have been in his same place—walked in his same shoes—had circumstances been only slightly different. The anger and hate that the man carried in his heart radiated and lashed out at those around him, pelting them with negative energy, but also withering away his own soul. The two of us were conscious of each other as one. “Stop.”, he whispered, “Stop doing that.”

“Please don't take my crystals.”

He punched me another time and began to run, frantically. I chased after him. “Wait!”, I shouted. He only ran faster. I began to gain speed on him, grabbing onto his leg just as he tried to leap out of my eyes. Shockingly, I was now adrift between our two bodies—the field of unity which I percieved between us stretched as we flew closer and closer towards his face—I could see his iris, swirling in a fantastic array of colors and lights, growing larger, until I was swallowed up by his pupil. I was adrift, then, in a smoldering war zone, which had been bent around the rim of a pipe—a spiral of skulls and bones rose up into my face as I held on to his legs. He was panicking—I felt his stomach sink, an overwhelming, psychadelic nausea filling his guts. I released him, and held up my hand—the visuals of anger and hatred I could feel within him were ones that I had felt taunting me once before—with focus and concentration, I began to replace them with fields of flowers, sunshine, landscapes that I drew from his childhood. As I did, I watched him run from me, and let him do so—the further into his own mind he got, the more I struggled to fill him with light, pulling it out from whereever I could find it. He locked himself away. Feeling the energy of peace that I had spread through his mind surge around me, I began to speak. “Don't listen to what those people on the internet tell you. Someone like Jill doesn't need to see you pretend to be strong or powerful—maybe you can show her pictures of your dog or something.”

“Get. Out. Of. My. Head.”, he fumed. The flowers were torn away as a river of blood ripped through them, a vortex of rage colored like smoldering embers erupting from underneath me, trying to suck me in. I pulled myself out of it, surrounding myself in light. But the sudden assault had thrown me off balance and left me vulnerable to attack inside what I knew was an enemy mind. The manager appeared beneath me, and dragged me underwater. As I fell, I could see my face, my pupils dilated and my face blank. My eyes started to suck me back towards my mind, but I did not follow them. At first, I began to choke under the water; he punched me, knocking the teeth from my skull, and sending me reeling as the two of us sunk deeper and deeper into his psyche. A raging and violent music pulsated around us—I ignored him, breathing deeply and searching for my center. This was all in his head—all in my head as well—if I returned his assaults with compassion, nothing he could do would hurt me. His anger would fall on deaf ears. A light again began to surround me, and I choked out the sounds of music. Suddenly, he was choking on the water he had pulled me into—again, his punches did nothing. I rose up and shot back into my body. The field of oneness which had encircled us receded, and my consciousness reunited with the rest of my mind.

The manager, with tears streaming down his face, stared back in agony, trying to move his lips. His body was paralyzed even as his mind began to regain control. “Get out....get out...”, he struggled to say. Meagan had been watching us with horror, as had several of the other employees, and a group of customers. The employees were hoping, almost all of them, that I'd punch the manager in the face. Meagan was happy the manager made himself look like an ass. A single father with four children shook his head, thinking that I'd provoked something; two older women on their way to a bible study wondered if I was demon-possessed; a teenager who'd come there to buy DXM was hoping that we'd fight. I quickly jammed the box of crystals into the backpack, and ran out the store as quickly as I could.

Frantic and mortified at what I'd just done, I didn't stop running until I got to the road, at which point, I knelt down, clutching my head and stifling a scream. Had it really happened? Was this just the acid? It shouldn't have been the acid. But if it wasn't the acid, then it had really happened. I rocked back and forth. I was hyperventilating. I looked insane—I knew I did because at least four or five people stopped at the stop light thought so—I needed to relax. I knew I hadn't eaten for almost a day. Maybe if I got some food in my stomach, I thought, I could go back to normal. Maybe if I drank some water—I'd been sweating a lot. I thought that must have been what it was—I ran towards a gas station, jaywalking through traffic and stumbling on the curb. Four or five people honked at me. I felt like I could vomit.

I set my pack down near the door to the gas station out of courtesy and quickly ran to go get a bottle of water. Frantically, I tore three or four from the shelf—the front desk worker, who had immigrated from Pakistan three years ago, had already called the police twice that day and in retaliation for the stores owner paying him less than minimum wage, had decided he wouldn't stop shoplifters any more. He had a Master's degree in Chemistry and told his parents he would help them come to the United States once he found a better job. I grabbed a bag of chips, and headed to the counter, slamming my bounty down and avoiding eye contact. I pointed towards the rack of hot food, my finger shaking, “Can I get a bunch of those too?”

“The taquitos?”

“Sure.”

“How many?”

“Yes.”

He had guessed I wanted four, and I meant to say that was right, but I'd gotten ahead of myself. Rolling his eyes, he decided to give me five, since they were going to expire in half an hour, and he didn't care if the owner lost money at this point. He'd taken advantage of the workers as long as they'd worked there, and no matter what his parents said--I needed to stop reading people's minds. It was none of my business. I dug through my pocket for money. “Don't worry, man. I got you.”, he opened the register and quickly slammed it shut. Giving charity to the less fortunate was part of his religious duty—he fantasized for a moment about giving me all of the money in the cash register, but recoiled in shame at his impulse. “Thank you.”

I sat down outside of the store, and guzzled down a bottle of water as quickly as I could, breathing. The visuals began to subside, but in my mind, I still felt like I was tripping—I still felt a chorus of emotions, thoughts and memories all around me. My heart was pounding, filled with anxiety. I was alone, in a strange city, awash with psychic powers. I scarfed down the taquitos, as quickly as I could—I didn't feel hungry—but my mind knew I should be—the food felt strange, richly vivid but alien as it slid down my throat and into my stomach. I could feel the tingle of serotonin in my gut as the food began to slink into my belly. Rather than dissipate, my senses began to amplify—I could feel, in vivid detail, the texture of the pavement, the energy in the powerlines coursing through the air. The smells of the town, a strange mix of cow manure and petroleum, the perfumes and colognes and sweat dripping off of people, the latent humidity in the air, all filled my nose with a palpable thickness.

A hulking black pickup truck, which reeked of energy drinks and chewing tobacco, the sounds of a gunfighting podcast playing at a low volume from the cracked window inched into the parking lot. An ominous wave of darkness came over me, dominating the air—the spirit of the surroundings turned grey. I felt something coming. A wave of psychic pain and terror. The car had driven from Wichita. I searched through the truck—two minds. Arthur Callaway—his brain tense and hyperaware after a police officer had followed them with its sirens on—he pulled over—the officer drove on—heading somewhere else. In the backseat, there was a boy—his name Zachary Mendez. He'd been kidnapped. I started shaking, watching Arthur, an old, husky man who had been discharged from the military in 1970, emerge from the truck and come towards me. His thoughts, as I peered into them, seemed immeasurably dark, and callous. 200,000 dollars. That was the price for this job. I stood up, trembling. If this was real, I needed to do something. Callaway entered the gas station ponderously. The employee at the front counter, who I should clarify, is named Ahmed, looked at him with an ounce of boredom. Callaway didn't like Ahmed—he didn't like having to deal with these sand niggers, he thought—and wondered if it was some kind of Arab who bought the kid he was transporting with a touch of humor.

I stood up and entered the gas station, coughing. Callaway looked at me with disgust, trying to figure out if I was a junky. I bumped into him. “Oh, I'm sorry.”, I said. Ahmed grimaced as Callaway stepped back. “Watch where you're going., he barked. I looked into his eyes. An aura of black surrounded his skull, a piercing grey dominated his eyes. He froze into a rigid stasis, and I felt my consciousness wash over his own. I searched through his memory—learning what he did—as I did so, a creeping sense of dread came over him as the memories surged from whatever part of his brain they'd been locked in. He tried to pull away, but it was no use. Those taquitos were very filling, and now I felt easily ten times stronger than I had felt before. I ripped Callaway's soul from his body—it shot from his eyes and into mine, being drawn deeper and deeper into my mind. Thinking of what he had done—to the kids, to the women, to his own family—my soul began to well with an intense anger. Outside, I watched his face melt into a terror. Within, my own mind began to burn with an intensity I had only felt in my own nightmares. Callaway shot from an icy black tunnel into a swirling mess of cataclysmic energy, being drawn deeper and deeper into my rage—he screamed in terror, crying for mercy. I held him there, overcome myself by anger. I tore the skin from his mind and began to tear at him until his soul was reduced to a skeleton—I threw the memories of what he'd done back at him, and replayed them thousands of times over—I pulled old wounds back to life and magnified them—I drew his consciousness into pieces until there was almost nothing left—tears streamed down his physical body's face, as blood gushed from his nose, and out the corner of his mouth.

Had I killed him? A sense of guilt overcame me—I was a killer—I stopped pulling Callaway in. His soul, now only a few, sunbleached bones, shivered. “Please—please—stop--stop it--” I could have been him, I realized. Only a few steps in my life different, a few missed chances to learn and I would have been him—there are lessons that we learn over and over, one of which is how destructive it is to hate, and I was reminded of it there—I had caught myself in an impulsive cycle of rage and only held onto it. And now here I held the broken soul of a person, one which I could heal, and I'd chosen to let it whither. The two of us both began to cry. I showed him where I came from—Sacramento—I was a healer, I said—I left my life as a geologist to sell healing crystals at music festivals. I showed him the life I might have had—money didn't matter as much as your sense of inner peace—all this time, I tried to show him, he had suppressed a heart full of chaos so that he could make money, survive. At the same time, his mind began to reach its own conclusions, filtering through what I'd said—he needed to turn himself in, he kept saying. He needed to go to prison. “You need to get help.”, I said, “You need to get better” “I need to get better.” “You need to--” “Yes—yes--”

I shot him back into his body. A dead eyed stare overtook what once remained. Ahmed was praying, afraid that something terribly dark had happened. I could see his words, drifting upwards through a thousand tiny frames into some kind of Ultimate. A huge and infinite light, an infinite, fractal nothingness, white as snow, dead as bones and pulsing with life. I cowered underneath it—I didn't know what I was doing—I'd nearly killed a man out of my own rage—the Ultimate was not indifferent, but at peace, at peace with us. Loving in a way where it knew all of our faults but believed in our eventual redemption. Callaway, still sharing his consciousness with me, stared upwards at it, trembling as he regained control of his own mind. The colors around his skull flashed white and blue, with trails of purple. Where am I? He wondered. Texas. I said. Fuck. I hate Texas. He shivered. Well, you'll be tried in Kansas, at least. He trembled. Don't be afraid. I told him. Don't worry. Plead guilty. Find a way to find peace with what you've done. He stared up at the light. What is that? He asked. I don't know. He stared at me incredulously. I've seen it before, but I don't really know what it is. I withdrew from the mans mind, receding. He patted his legs, searching for his phone. Ahmed watched us both with confusion. Either we were both on something, or this was just some kind of American thing he didn't understand.

“Hello. My name is...my name is...Arthur Callaway. I need you to come arrest me...I...I kidnapped a child. I was driving to Houston to sell him to a client....I can't do this anymore.”, he said. Gulping, the man hungup and ran to his truck, opening the door to reveal a child fast asleep in a car seat. Under the influence of sleeping pills. He carried the child out to the curb and sat, motionless, waiting for the police. His mind was blank, save a single phrase which he kept repeating. “I need to get better.” I looked over at Ahmed. He sighed. “You know, the police have already been here twice today.”

“Yeah”, I said, “I guess I did know that.”

<>Solemnly, I bit into the last of my taquito, watching Callaway and the kid sit in complete silence, waiting for the police.

Commentary
The idea with the series was to create a superhero who would fight crime or injustice via compassion and empathy. When I wrote this, I actually made the decision to turn off spell check, so there are quite a few typos, I am sure, that have snuck through before posting this online. Anyway, I hope that you enjoy the series. If you read it, and want to stream the actual podcast, the links are below.

https://riversofthemind.libsyn.com/blue-topaz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvUQUFD_-EM
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rivers-of-the-mind/id1278391177
https://play.google.com/music/m/I5obttfukzok6ggklvb5umo2mgq?t=Rivers_of_the_Mind

This podcast is based entirely on fictional events. Any resemblance to the many real cases of a man taking acid underneath a hole in the universe and developing superpowers is completely coincidental. Also, Timmy Vilgiate wrote all this. Please don't steal it and sell it on the black market or whatever. Instead, give me your money at patreon.com/timmyvilgiate

Rivers of the Mind, Episode 2 and parts of episode 3. The Dragon from Beyond and Ocean of Dreams

Episode 2: The Dragon from Beyond

Stumbling down the road through rural Texas, the starlight dripped down through my pores, a cool and serene ecstasy floating down the wind. Looming colors hung across the night sky along an infinite distance—the ground undulated ceaselessly through a forever's worth of hills and tiny houses, like waves of endless sound. I'd grown used to the thoughts—they swirled like a cloud all around me, doppler effected mumblings shone from the drivers zooming along on the highway, and poured out like fire from hearths inside of the houses I passed by. The power that now lied within my mind at once overwhelmed and enraptured me. It had to be more than just acid—enough people had taken acid, I thought, that by now, someone would have gotten superpowers, if it was possible. I thought back to the place where I'd taken it—the man who traded the tabs of acid to me for the healing crystals, half joked and half suggested that the government worked on dismantling alien spaceships there—I had to return to find the truth to myself—to crawl my way back to the womb where I'd been reborn. Blackberry Creek.

I felt aware of what I could do, even if, strangely, I was less aware of what I was feeling—trying to define my thoughts, the directions of them, was impossible. I was lost in each second that passed, drinking up it's sweet elixir and hoping it didn't eat me alive. Wandering through an empty field, and hoping I didn't step onto a landmine. Momentary thoughts and impulses were only that. Whirring by me for an instant in a thousand scattered voices, leaving me there. I didn't bother grabbing onto them. They moved too fast—instead, my mind was split up into a thousand pieces, all working at once like a watch with a thousand gears, springs and switches. It left me aware, but rudderless—I was a boat in the current of this new conscious energy. Each thought lost in that great river of the mind meant little, it's essence was ephemeral. In spite of that sense of momentum, the burden of choice still pressed in on me. Which of those thousands of meanderings and diversions I chose to pursue on this dramatic course mattered, and more than ever, I felt that each action, each step, each breath that I took was starkly intentional, the exercise of titanic willpower.

And what terrified me more than anything was the thought of doing wrong; it terrified me so much I dreaded doing anything at all. I really...I really felt like.... I felt like I could kill a man if I wanted to. If he looked at me, for a few seconds, I could suck his mind from his body, and swallow him whole in a torrential avalanche of memories and doubts, whithering him down to the bone. At the same time, I felt like I could kill myself just as easily—lean back into the chaos that surrounded me, and I would float away, never to return—stop myself from breathing, and fade away—step into traffic and be torn into bits like a bug on a windshield—light myself on fire with the force of my own energy. The slightest lapse of concentration, the slightest desire to fight the river or to cling to something in particular—it would devour me, I imagined. Even though I felt like I could walk across dimensions all at once with the slightest impulse, peel my mind and body apart and drift between worlds and times and planes of existence, I still felt strangely miniscule, trapped, confined underneath a snowglobe sky with no companion but the dead eyed Texas moon. All became felt. All became known. All became sensible and irrational and terrible and perfect. I felt a reason in the geometry of my surroundings, a unity with it, which transcend language becoming an perpetual, dialectic silence. I felt the deadness of the pavement, the life of the grass, the purgatory of the shoots of clover springing up from cracks in the gravel. I could start fires with my mind, and I could stop them just as easily. My every step and word could be at once a sword and a shield, cracking the earth apart and putting it back together. Even then, however, I was completely powerless—a true drifter.

Or else it was just strong acid. Very strong acid. I shouldn't have accepted it. Real LSD is super hard to find. Maybe it was PCP. I met a guy on PCP once, and he thought he could read my minds. A few months later, I saw him on the news, nakedly trying to fight a six year old girl dressed as a dragon.

Outside of the park where I'd camped, there was a police car blocking the road. I listened in to their thoughts. “Fucking weird ass shit.”, one of them thought, imagining an explosion of energy in the sky. Last night, something terrible had happened, and that was all he knew. All he remembered—he hadn't paid attention during the briefing, since he was more concerned with his son. He'd caught the boy smoking the devil's lettuce the other night; all he remembered was drowned out by his preoccupation. I looked into the mind of his partner. She was looking down at her phone. She was a middle aged woman, who had married young and joined the Navy. Neither of those decisions, had been a good choice. Especially in light of her history of migraines. With her phone in her hands and her headphones in her ears, she was looking at German bondage porn, wondering what her partner would think if he found out she was into that. Let alone her boring, vanilla-ass husband. I looked through her memories, tuning out the sounds of muffled, painful German orgasms which played in the background. The Air Force was managing the site. She didn't know why, but heard something about testing a rocket—lots of radiation. She wasn't allowed to know anything else, but the commanding officer had--

I bumped into the police car, not having watched where I was going as I used my magic drug powers to read the popo's minds. I fell over and whimpered at the all-too-real pain in my goddamn shin. The male officer stepped out of the car. His name was Phillip. He thought I smelled awful, and assumed that I was expecting to camp out in the field. He began to associate me with his son, and quickly jumped to worrying that his poor boy would end up like me. The woman, who's name was Grace, jumped out of the car with pleasure, hoping that she'd get to handcuff me. I jumped to my feet, disturbed by her fantasizing. “You okay there, buddy?”, asked Phillip.

“Yeah, I was distracted, sorry.”

Distracted by what, wondered Phillip. Grace prepared to search me, mentally. I couldn't stop looking over at her, deeply uncomfortable with her sexual fantasies. “Please don't”, I thought towards her. She looked back at me. “What was that?” Phillip peeked over his shoulder, jumping, “What? Did you see something?”

“He just said something”, she asked.

I raised my eyebrows, “What?”, I laughed, before thinking as an aside, “I'm inside of your thoughts. Don't say anything.” Terrified, her eyes darted back and forth. A flurry of possibilities flashed through her mind, before she began to decide she was hearing things because she was about to have a migraine. I said her name, projecting an image in her head of an especially gross fish. She hated fish. For some reason, she always pictured them right before a migraine. Wincing, her hand raised up to her head, and she breathed deeply. Phillip shook his head “What are you doing out here this late?”, he asked, intermittently glancing with concern at his partner. He knew her marriage was having problems. Sometimes, he wanted to make them worse, maybe try some of the stuff he caught her looking at on her computer...ashamed, he mentally slapped himself in the face. Someone had done the same exact thing to him, just a few years ago.

“I needed somewhere to sleep...I camped here last night...what's wrong?”

Phillip gulped, glancing back at Grace as he tried to remember the right lie. Grace gulped, gritting her teeth. Of course Phillip forgot. “Water main break. They need to repair the pipe.”

“Can I—Can I--”, I tried to look as pitiful as possible.

“We aren't supposed to let anyone back here.”, Grace snapped, rubbing her temple. Her head didn't hurt, but she was sure it was coming. Any second now. Ugh. I moved a little closer to the officer, trying to look him in the eyes. “I think I left my canteen last night can I--”, I reached into his mind, pulling forward a sermon he barely remembered from three or four years ago when he still went to church. “Can I go look for it?” Guilty, he looked back at Grace, who resented Phillip for being so soft, even if it also made her think quite a bit about tying him up and...oh God, nevermind. I backed away from her thoughts. “I can walk with him.”, Phillip offered. Grace sighed, too prepared for the impending migraine to do anything to stop him. “Okay.”, she begrudged, turning back to her phone. Phillip patted me on the shoulder, just like he did his son, and walked with me back towards the field.

“What's your name, buddy?”

“John. John Silvers.”

He nodded, carefully trying to remember his sensitivity training before he asked any questions that might offend me. Most of his most terrifying nightmares involved either violating what he learned in sensitivity training, or a camel, which he considered to be a horrible, disgusting and rude creature, coincidentally matching his own self image. We started trudging up a hill. “You from around here?”

“From California.”

“Really, what part?”

“Sacramento area.”

He looked around once we made it up the hill. I scanned the area, pretending to look for my water bottle, but really searching for any wandering mind that might explain to me what had happened. “I was staying further back there”, I lied, able to trace from his mind and the mind of his partner the location of the military base. “How about you?”, I asked. Mentally, I planted the thought that he might bring up his son. He rejected it, quietly, but firmly. “I'm from here. 5^th generation Texan. So—you uhm, passing through, or what?”

“Just passing through. I—I hunt crystals.”

“Crystals huh?”

“Blue topaz here in Texas, yup.”

Faintly, the officer could remember in college when he'd gone to a rave, taken way too much ecstasy, and found a patch of ruby quartz. A great sample. I was impressed. Anyway, he was studying Art History back then, and his parents didn't like that. On the comedown from the ecstasy, he got so depressed that he changed his major to Criminal Justice. He envied me, something that made me truly uncomfortable, but I released the feeling of discomfort as quickly as it came into my head, and tried to avoid looking too deeply into his thoughts. I already felt like I knew him better than his ex-wife, who'd never known about the ecstasy.

“You can find some nice crystals around here.”, he said, referencing the rose quartz.

“Definitely.”, I said, mumbling under my breath “I found—I found a lot of nice crystals around here--”

I still hadn't found anyone elses thoughts, but I read in the contours of his anxiety that we were getting closer. And even beyond him, there was certainly a tension in the air. I tried to look deeper into it, to understand it. No, that's not what it was. It was not a tension, but a death. An spiritual void. A sorrow. A death that spilled from the trees in a sap, running down the mountains. I stepped into it and looked down at my shoe. It dripped in thick globs from my boots. “You step in something?”

“Death. I mean...Yes. It's okay.”

“You know they got a shelter down about three miles east of here.”

I looked at him—it wasn't a very good shelter, he didn't think. I imagined if I prodded him, he'd admit it, and so I did.

“What's it like?”

“Not too bad.”, he lied, before clarifying his answer to imbue it with a sense of euphemistic truth “Not too bad for a little town out in the hill country...but--I guess I'd understand if you were more keen on staying in the great outdoors.”

“I used to stay in shelters, but it made me feel guilty.”

“How come?”

“I'm--”

My feet sunk into a glob of thick blue slime. I looked back over to the mountain, and then the officer, before I realized he could not see it. And besides. That was the least of his worries. Collapsed into the ground up ahead was a towering, slaughtered dragon, a beast from another dimension, who had been torn up upon impact. I scratched my head in disbelief.

“What is it?”, he asked, feeling a strange, forboding sense in his stomach.

He couldn't see. I was overcome by sadness—the poor creature. Only a shred of its life force remained as it atropied. It was strong, but unable to survive away from it's native dimension. I tried to pull myself into the dragons mind. It was dim, only barely hanging on. “I think I see it--”, I said, lying to the officer so that I could move closer to the titanic beast. I came close enough that my consciousness touched it's own. Though it's language was not one I could fathom, I knew at once it was a mighty beast in the place where it came from. This was not it's home. It pictured a stranger world, where the dragons all swam through vibrant cities built for an alien physics. It opened it's eyes and looked at me. I bent down, extending my hand and pretending to reach for a water bottle. Immediately, our consciousnesses merged. The senses that I felt within the dragon were not earth senses, and I knew at once that what it felt was cruel, unusual—it's body overcome by seering pain in a terrifying universe, one where it could not seem to die like a good dragon should. It's consciousness was a wonderland in full bloom, but only a ghost town in its current state. Who was it? What had happened to it? I looked familiar, certainly. The beast had seen me when it crossed over. Sorrowfully, I drew it into me. I didn't know why, I only knew that I had to. The beasts soul, long and winding, stretched around us like a snake. The police officer looked with horror at me as I started shaking. Though he could not see any of the dragon, he could see the bright blue lights streaming from the forest and settling in front of me, like fairies. I concentrated, shrinking the light until it was as small as the head of a pin, and infinitely bright. I knew I could not bear to bring it inside of my skull, or it could explode.

The hole in the universe. I suddenly remembered it—all at once it clicked. The beast had been sucked into our world from the other side. My mind had been near the edge, but had resisted the pull—why I did not know—but somehow it had. When I thought about it, I could remember, vaguely, that there had been something holding me back. And when I tried to picture it again, I realized it had been some sort of person—who I would never know. In the end, the two of us had shared a common fate, both of us victims of the same disaster, both of us homeless and far away from where we belonged: strangers, suddenly, in our own bodies. I focused on the place where he'd come from. It was sealed up—I found it in my mind's eye—the police officer watched as the sky lit up and my soul, radiantly visible, carried the dragon upwards. We were in a dance, almost—as we moved upwards, the dragon's wary heart filled with joy. It's body convulsed as it prepared for death. Climbing and climbing into the stratosphere, we passed a city within the clouds, punctuated with intricate invisible machinery and strange forms of life, until we were there—the hole in the edge of the universe, raw from the previous night, but sealed shut, seemingly. I concentrated on it. It flickered with light, and sucked the dragon back in.

My soul flooded back into my body with a shockwave of bright violet light. The police officer was trembling—able to see, briefly, the dragon, just as it had died, and the violent light show spreading across the forest. I stared at him—I knew I could plant thoughts in his mind. But I wasn't sure how much I could pull off—could I erase his memory. I rushed back to the forest, and then knelt down, looking for a water bottle. I mimed one, forcing with all of my mind the image of a small canteen. “What just happened?”

“Are you okay man?”, I asked.

He shook, wondering if his senses decieved him. Laughing, I brushed it off, trying to gaslight him.“Dude, some trippy shit happens in the forest sometimes.”

The officer looked back and forth, coming to grips with the fact that he had imagined it all. The illusion was holding. I looked into his mind, and found the memory, somewhere, drifting through a synapse. I didn't know, quite, the mechanism, but I pulled it, and the memory became remembered as a dream—a chemical shift to which I was distinctly attuned. Other chemicals in his mind began swirling about. His pupils dilated, and he released a cascade of serontonin. A familiar feeling. It felt like MDMA, but stronger. Much, much stronger.

“Maybe you should talk to your son or something. Like, just be chill about it.”, I said.

I always talk like this when I'm lying, I feel like. I act like a more stereotypical wandering hippy when I need to bullshit my way around the police. “I don't remember telling you about that!”, he said, nauseous. He chuckled, before letting his laughter give way to a flood of cackling. I smiled, laughing a little bit myself. It felt strange to laugh. Relaxing, but strange. I couldn't resist—from his mind I felt a strong empathy lurch out towards me, magnifying my own. I keeled over, overcome

Our consciousnesses had become inextricably linked to one another. What was this? It was certainly not laughter at anything in particular, but the instead release of a tension—I felt myself so overshadowed by the heaviness of reading into minds and I'd hardly taken a step back to enjoy the beauty that was all around me, or even to laugh at how ridiculous everything was. Night shifted to day, and I found myself there, in a meadow at the edge of a forest, where everything breathed and sang, birds soaring through the air with spectacular plumes of rainbow colors, pulsing trees and grass swirling in crop circle patterns. Fairies peeked up from toadstools, which too came to life and marched out to dance with us. It was so beautiful to be alive! And here in this forest. It was splendid, a magical world that I now lived in—and I didn't have to do anything, to be anything, I was floating along. I stared up and could see the moon shining in a perfect yellow sky—hulking creatures made of porcelain gears and spindly frames hovered above, calmly absorbing the sunlight. I held up my arms and let the breeze waft over me, washing me clean. It was so wonderful to laugh!

“My son—he was smoking some crap weed”, the cop cackled, “That's the shitty part too. He's risking going to jail and it's for smoking shit weed.”

“Don't they talk about that in DARE, man? Like, how to find good weed?”

“Yeah, and then they tell you not to smoke it cause it'll make you too cool. God that program, I swear that's why half the kids at that school are stoned out of their minds and the rest are cooking biker crank out of a trailer and shooting up heroin by 23.” He looked at me. The sky grayed with a passing cloud, and his expression grew grim. “That's heavy”, I said, gulping. “I just don't want him to go through what I went through.”, he said, his eyes glassing over, “I just want him to get out of this town. Go get a real education at a good school somewhere. That's all I want.”

“He's probably just having a hard time, man. With the divorce.” The cop frowned, looking off, tears streaming now down his face. “You're right. I just...wish I knew what to do.”

“He probably....he probably wants to be like you. And he sees you as a really strong man, he just doesn't know how to approach you—he doesn't know how to express himself or deal with girls cause his mom didn't set the best example and he always thought of you as really stoic and--”

“Yeah! Yeah exactly. Stoic and kind of—uhm. What's the word?”

“Dude. I don't know words.”

He started laughing again. “You don't know words!”, he slapped his knee, “I mean what are you a dictionary?”

I smiled, faintly inebriated, but slowly came back to grips with what I needed to do—laughing was fun—but I wanted to figure out what had happened--”Dictionary.”, I mumbled. The cop repeated it, coughing from laughing so hard, “Dictionary.”

“If you say it enough, it's almost not a word.”, I observed, with faux profundity.

The police officer froze, stupefied. It was true, he thought, as he stammered out the words over and over. It was so true that it was almost the truest thing he'd ever heard in his life. Even hearing something so true made every other truth he knew truly truer than true, in profoundest, and most true way he could image. I looked around, to see a pair of headlights rushed down from the top of the mountain. “It happened again.”, I heard the faintest thought come from the distant car, tinged with panic. They were terrified. I turned to the police officer. He was having an epiphany—all of it was so beautiful. Everything around him. A oneness with the universe. I hated to pull him away from it. I hated to think that I might take away what I'd said to him—what he'd felt. But the headlights had all stopped at the edge of the field, and now the doors were opening. And from their thoughts, I knew that something terrifying had happened. Some kind of radiation signature had come from the field, which matched the signature from the night before. They needed to contain it. I saw the glimmer of someone's glasses, behind which a deep orange aura hovered like a flickering candle. I reached out to him, feeling my soul leave my body and settled just behind his ear. He couldn't see us. We were lost in the trees, but we needed to move soon.

My fear seemed to leak over to the officer—I'd attached him, unwittingly, to my emotional state, but he couldn't read my thoughts—only percieving that I had grown especially grim. My soul was outside of my body—though my brain still active enough to give the appearance of muted consciousness. “You slip me something?”, he asked, terrified as he heard his words slurring. I looked into the thoughts of the military officer on whose shoulder I was perched as an astral body, trying not to get distracted. The officer was unstable, horrified—but zealously excited. His name was Barry Ramirez. He joined the Air Force 20 years ago and had an above top secret security clearance. He helped to design satellites. This was a project—a space project, not extraterrestrial, really—I—the police officer came closer to me, sniffing my body. “You give me something? Huh? Answer me! I'm not stupid.” I could sense anger—he wanted to hit me—but I was outside of my body. I needed to return. unable to hear more of Barry's thoughts, I began to race back as the police officer, losing control of his emotions, reached for a gun. I landed in my skull just as his hand met the edge of his belt, and flooded my consciousness over his, paralyzing him for an instant so that I could calm his mind—I knew not to touch the part of the brain that could make a memory into a dream—not while someone was awake. I withdrew my powers from him. I had not only weakened the boundaries between the zones of his mind, but activated the dreaming center of the brain, forcing him into a psychedelic state not unlike psilocybin or, well, LSD, I guess. He was confused as he came down, uncertain of his own memory. “I found the water bottle”, I said, holding up the illusion. Or so I thought. It wasn't there. “It would've been about this round.”, I nervously added. The officer sniffled. He felt like he was coming down off ecstasy all over again, and couldn't quite remember what had happened. It was all blank, totally fuzzy.

As we stumbled back to the car, I worked hard to redevelop my illusion. Grace and Phillip both believed it—before there eyes, there was a water bottle—Phillip mumbled something about the military searching the forest to his partner. I'd picked up scattered thoughts and pieced together a story—they'd made a wormhole, or so they thought, trying to put a sattelite into orbit around Mars. The wormhole had unexpectedly crossed into another dimension, releasing an unknown energy referred to as, “Gamma Triple Prime.” Everyone had been killed, save one scientist: Dr. Whitebalm. Dr. Whitebalm was still asleep after the accident. They were returning to the field, after a burst of Gamma Triple Prime was unexpectedly detected, in order to sweep the area with geiger counters and detect the residual radiation.

I felt like I could collapse from exhaustion myself. My vision was going black, interpolated with strange fractals zooming out from whatever I looked at; whirlpools of interconnected headlights and stop signs came at me in an unending kaleidoscope. I could hardly walk straight—the rigourous mental exercise through which I'd put myself was almost too much to bear now. The power was still there, overwhelming, but my thoughts were losing their energy, instead giving way to a surge of dream-tinged energy—I wanted to collapse into it. I stumbled down a hill and ended up near a slow moving creek. Shaking, I tried to lap up the water. Probably unsanitary, I imagined, but it helped me stabilize enough to realize a little bit too late that I still had an unopened water bottle in my pack. Perhaps I'd committed too hard to the idea that the water bottle was missing earlier. I climbed back up to the road and followed it, unsure of where I was going, sleeping intermittently and keeping myself on path through intuition.

I found, eventually, a little thicket, guarded by a small bit of barbed wire marking the edge of a ranch. No one was around—I quietly set down my bag and pulled out my blue topaz crystal. Blue topaz symbolizes eternity. And now it signified an eternal trip—I didn't quite have the heart to let go, but only the vaguest inclination to hold on. It dangled before me, back and forth, swinging with the kinesis of my indecision. The tracers forming in it's path filled my vision—swifly, I became lost in a haze of visual echoes, symphonic colors which hummed in a drone about my head. Sleep seemed so inviting. I wanted to dream about normal life. Real perceptions. What it felt like to watch a car drive by without seeing tracers or to walk through the forest without it breathing. I missed it already. I wanted to throw the topaz into the river, but I knew that, maybe, it could do someone some good. I fell asleep with it clutched in my hand.

Commentary
In this episode, we get the first example of the unintended consequences that can result from John's powers. Fun fact--I committed so hard to John lying about this water bottle that I actually forgot he had one, which is why, you know, he remembers only after trying to drink the dirty water in the ravine.

Streaming Links
riversofthemind.libsyn.com/the-dragon-from-beyond and riversofthemind.libsyn.com/ocean-of-dreams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGjVUTLmJ5A&index=2&list=PLrgRg23PudnnjLwFUxjm412WZuzFJS55A and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFX99AXZA30
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rivers-of-the-mind/id1278391177
https://play.google.com/music/m/I5obttfukzok6ggklvb5umo2mgq?t=Rivers_of_the_Mind

All episodes by Timmy Vilgiate. No drugs harmed in the making of this podcast. Nothing in this is real. Nothing at all is real. Everything is a lie.

Rivers of the Mind, parts of episodes three and four. Ocean of Dreams and Lords of the Field.

Episode 3: The Lords of the Field

I guess I had superpowers. That only really occurred to me when I started to fall asleep, lying there in the bushes, my stomach and head both feeling still strongly overcome by latent LSD. As I started to fall asleep, I was treated to an endless fractal display rotating across my eyelids—I fell deeper and deeper into the center of it until it bent around me like a tunnel, and I began to plummet towards it at the speed of light. Time drug to a halt...a word crossed my mind. Dimethyltryptamine. DMT. I'd heard of it. A chemical released in the brain during sleep, and near death experiences. Used in ayahuasca, a traditional brew from the Amazon—that's what I heard at least—at one party I went to in college, there was a guy who said he extracted it and was letting people take hits from a vaporizer for five dollars each. A few people tried it, and said it changed their life—I passed. It smelled like burning tires, and I was too stressed with midterms, I thought, to really enjoy it. Reading the wikipedia article sufficed. I was conscious as I fell asleep, and could feel the DMT shooting through my brain, in a cascade of chemical reactions that renewed the connections between different sections, making my eyes jolt back and forth. My body was paralyzed—I felt my mind being renewed—at last I could rest. I leaned back—laying in what felt like a celestial ocean. A hum came from the sky, a deep and relaxing vibration. I stayed there for what felt like eternity. Complete peace. Complete nothingness. Complete rest, where I was. The uncertainty that had permeated my day began to slip away, as I began to accept all that had happened.

I sank into the water, feeling it overtake me and drag me further into it's complete and perfect solace. I was unafraid—I knew deep within my heart that this was, fundamentally, not a unique, superhuman process—only an everyday process of which I was now keenly aware, brought to life in a new sensitory symbology. I looked up at the sky through the water, filled with stars, lit by the light of the moon. The branches which dominated the thicket where I'd gone to sleep peered over the edges of my vision. Looking up at the watery sky, I felt my body begin to turn, until I came to rest on the ground. The ground rose and fell softly, breathing. I looked around me. I was standing on top of my own sleeping body.

I studied myself. I looked older than I was, my facial hair patchy and my hair grey. I was dirty, a consequence of my lifeway. My body was surrounded in the faintest white light, my skin alive with what seemed to be holographic tattoos, memories written on my skin. Gazing upon myself, I thought of my body like a ship—a ship which had taken good care of me—adventured with me to the edge of the earth. I could trust myself—care for myself—it had carried me this far, and the creaking substance of the vessel still bore the traces of many near-shipwrecks, arrows fired from distant shores, patches left from hard fought battles. But it was okay. I was okay. We were alive, and we were safe here, lying by the roadside. In some way, we would always be safe, no matter what happened.

I flew off of my body—finding myself not unlike a fairy, a small dot of light which hurtled down the highway past cars and streetlights. I drifted back into the town, looking over where I'd been, hearing the thoughts of those who paassed by like muffled, underwater voices. At the gas station, Ahmed was being interviewed by a news camera. I couldn't hear what they were saying. Six or seven police cars were there, including two from Kansas. I flew inside one of them, but still couldn't hear any of the sounds. On the dashboard, I could faintly make out the reading of the time. 2:00am. It was the first words that I'd successfully read since I took acid—the written words were easier to percieve when I was in this strange astral form. But the voices—I couldn't make sense of them. I could only surmise that, say 5 hours or so had passed since I left. I flew out, catching a glimpse of Callaway, who stared up at my astral body with awe. I came back to him, and he pointed up, hand shaking. The police looked back and forth, unable to see. I hushed him. His consciousness reached out to me, and I found myself coming closer, able to hear his voice. “I told them everything.”, he said, “I need to get better.”

“Good job.”

“Thank you for doing that for me”, he started to cry, “I needed that. I needed...”

“Of course...”

I drifted away from him, and soared over the Walmart. I could see Meagan, just getting off of work. She looked irritated, her eyes bloodshot and exhausted. In the light, I could see her more clearly. She was the nicest person I'd met in the entire town, she must have been. I settled into her car, sitting on the dashboard—I wondered if what I was doing, sitting there and watching her, was wrong. But I wanted to talk to her, if I could find a way. The tables turned in my dreams—I could watch, I could receive, but I could not hear thoughts, not as anything more than a muffled voice. Callaway had reached out to me—he could see me since I'd been inside his head, there was still a part of me with him. But not Meagan—she couldn't--I needed to be invited when I was still asleep.

She leaned down and, trying to stay out of anyones line of sight, fished a pipe from underneath her seat, then a small plastic bag filled with marijuana. Grinding a piece of flower down between her thumb and index finger, she filled the pipe and lit the edge with a lighter, looking suspiciously over at the police as she did. She inhaled deeply and then blew a cloud of smoke over me, which passed through my body in a bright white fog. A few hits later, the car filled with a faint haze, Meagan cracked open the door, and then retired the pipe into a little fabric bag. Exhausted, she laid back against her seat, wringing her hands over her face, and silently screaming into them. I could see small tears drip down the edges of her nose. I wished I knew what she was thinking—I started to cry myself, watching her. It was hard to watch the world break down good people. She cried into her hands for two minutes or so, before blowing her nose into a tissue and throwing it into a plastic grocery bag with a host of other trash. Breathing deeply and trying to regain her composure, she pulled her purse to her lap and unzipped it. I slipped off of the dashboard and walked closer, standing next to the transmission so that I could see, knowing that I needed to leave, and soon. She pulled out the tourmaline crystal that I had given her, a brilliant and clean polished specimen, which bled gently from pink to green. Smiling faintly, she stared at it a moment, before hanging it from her rear view mirror. It dangled and sparkled in the flourescent lights. Around her skull, I could see the faintest tinges of thought emerge in a swirl of color. Meagan started the car, and drove away. I quickly left her alone, flying to return to my body.

I quickly became lost in the beauty of the world. Flying over the Texas hill country was magical—in the three am starlight, I could see the countryside illuminated for miles and miles, until it met with the city of Fredericksburg. I rose higher and higher towards the clouds, in awe of what I was beholding, circling around the tiny little city. Whenever I focused on something, it would rush up to me, and I could see it in minute detail—there was a rich beauty to everything, even the trash in the city. A welcome escape into reality—the racing thoughts and clamor of my waking consciousness was absent in this dreamscape. I touched the edge of the clouds, and felt myself splash, like a dolphin, out of the real world and into the infinite ocean in which I'd floated before. My astral body rose up, before dipping back down, into the real world. A rush of wonder overtook me. I rose out of reality again, piercing the cloud canopy, and flying again over the ocean in the form of my astral body.

As I did so, I saw something strange—there, stretched out in the ocean, there were thousands of bodies, all perfectly asleep, minds resting on the cloud canopy, unmoving. High above, it was difficult to tell which one was mine. I flew closer, along the edge of the water—seeing the sleeping faces of old married couples, of children, bunched close together where houses sat, but almost nowhere to be seen in the country—that was where I'd slept— A desolate stretch of pure, untouched water. I dipped back down to reality, shooting from the stars and into the Texas countryside. I'd traveled to the city limits. I came to a rest there for a moment, trying to identify the road—the same one I'd walked to get to the campsite. Meagan's car sped by, heading the same direction.

I rose up and flew along the highway. Her path overlapped with my own path back to my body, and I started to worry that she'd see me lying on the ground. Racing, I found the thicket where I'd fallen asleep and stood guard by it. A cow had found my physical body, and started licking my sleeping feet. Meagan turned left onto a county road not far from me. I came to a rest on top of my forehead, and studied the cow. Could it see me? I saw it's eyes, and locked onto them, becoming overwhelmed with the beauty and detail within them. I looked into the texture of its deep brown iris and the magnificent structures within. I started walking closer, and closer. I kind of wanted to pet it. I was half curious to see what would happen if I used astral projection to go touch a cow's face, but also simply fascinated by the animal. I studied every part of it, it's hair, it's nostrils, it's feet, it's tongue—all of them became remarkably intricate and almost magical as I studied them more and more. I put my hand on it's nose, and the animal, froze, not seeing me, but somehow, suddenly aware that a physical presence had reached out and touched it. It sniffed the air, not finding anything, and then turned it's head to search for me. I floated up and ran my hand along the side of its neck, before it got spooked and ran away.

Without thinking, I found myself chasing after the cow, as it sped through the tall brush and out into an open pasture. I passed through what looked like a brightly colored field, and all at once, the colors around me shifted, becoming just slightly unreal. I could feel a pulsing in the earth, a sense of unity with it, and a feeling of spirits all around me. In awe, I hovered cautiously, wondering if I'd entered into the dream of another person. The cows, all unanimously aware of me, stared in complete silence, sniffing the air. Their skin, once dark brown, had become a pale blue. I settled onto the ground, surrounded by a forest of tall grass, worried that I'd upset them, and they would wake up the owner of the farm. I could feel their energy, if not their thoughts—the world felt remarkably alien to me—the cows recognized me as some kind of spirit, and the other cow, who was young, though I couldn't tell how young, had come to be near the others for protection. I drifted through the field, suddenly acutely conscious of my existence as a fragment of my own consciousness. Were they doing this to me?

A bright light came far out into the pasture—I began flying towards it, followed by the herd of eager looking but wary cows, who watched me with intense curiousity, but whose demeanors seemed increasingly hostile. I began to panic, losing the grasp I had held all this time over my fear. The cows were all staring at me, their eyes seeming to surround me, their thoughts erupting as one monolithic, wordless flow, molten and steaming hot like lava shot from beneath the earth. I headed closer to the light, which shot straight up to the sky, and bent out to form a forcefield. Disturbed, I circled around it, trying to focus my vision on what was there hidden in the light. A strange, foreign voice spoke to me, surrounding me from every side, sounding vaguely inquisitive. I froze. The cows had formed a circle around me, watching the light see me. I could hear the cows murmur in anticipation, in some strange, and earthen tongue. I felt myself pressed towards the center of the circle by some kind of collective will, shrunken down and made one with the earth, until I was brought to my knees in front of what looked like a towering, incandescent mushroom, with a bright golden cap and a vibrant blue side.

The mushroom spoke to me in a deep and ancient voice, murmuring in a tongue which I could not hope to understand. I felt it's presence rush through my brain, interrogating every part of it. I knew that the mushroom contained something more than a mushroom—I remembered taking a dried mushroom just like it at a music festival in college—some kind of spirit within, one which felt a distinct guardianship over the cows. The cows had brought me before the mushroom in order to stand trial, and all watched with solemn and impassive gazes. It slipped through every corner of my past, holding me still and trying to discern whether or not I was a good or bad spirit. Croaking dark and austere poetry as it studied me, the mushroom, shaking, sent out a signal through its roots, which lit up a constellation of other fungi that had spread across the plains. I felt my soul drawn out, my consciousness stretched between the underground limbs of the creature—a thousand voices danced back and forth around me, almost singing as they spoke and debated my fate. I struggled to wring myself free, breaking myself into one solid whole, before a bright purple lightning bolt shot from the hills and pinned me to the ground. The cows mooed in a terrible choir, and a great trembling came from within the earth.

I felt my consciousness jolt back into my body, crumpling my spine and sending seering hot pain through my nervous system. Jumping up, I brushed myself off, my heart pounding. My vision was seething, seeming to melt. In front of me, I could see, barely, an almost oily forcefield surrounding the pasture, rippling with the noise of the cows anguished moos. Through the branches, the jet black eyes of a cow stared me down. Suddenly, I couldn't move. The same, croaking voice spread through my head. What are you trying to say?,I asked. I felt a vastly larger consciousness press against my own, and, struggling to regain control of my breathing, I pressed in against it.

My consciousness shot up from my skull and into the ocean, where I beheld a vibrant, purple sunrise. The waters of the ocean chased after me as I rose, higher and higher, towards the second sky, which I pierced through like a gunshot, rising into a pristine reflecting pool, surrounded by tall, overgrown fungal matter reaching high up towards a glaring full moon. I could feel the water reach up towards me, but I was able to dangle just out of its reach. The voice tried to speak to me again, this time in a softer, and more whispering tone. A chorus of murmurs shivered out of the darkness within its walls. I was spinning off balance, overwhelmed by a primal and inhuman fear. Breathing in, I reached out for thoughts, trying to understand where I'd been taken. Ineffable memories rushed through me—the old people of this land—their tall stone houses, their mounds of earth, their languages and ways of thinking, the anguished cries of villages torn apart by alien disease, the melting of the wilderness into cold and dead pavement—the creature, which I hesitate to call a plant, knew the bald monkeys well, but did not know me. I was strange blooded, carrying the mark of some far away universe—the very sort of spirit from which they were tasked with defending their earth. I could not speak to them, not in their language, which I knew only was very old, primordial, but tried to reach out to them by lifting up my memories. Out of nowhere, a vivid image of rye, growing in a field, entered my mind, followed by a pair of blue flowers. The mushrooms were familiar with the ergot fungus and its cognate plants. A sense of relief came across the collective consciousness, as they reached the unanimous conclusion that I was a mold of some kind which inhabited a human body, using the human's brain to magnify it's own powers. The waters beneath me subsided.

“Speak not our language, does the old one?”, the mushrooms said in a familiar yet still alien dialect. I felt them draw me up, higher, above the sky over the reflecting pool, and into a world made of energy. I reached into it's memories, and tried to understand the ettiquette which it expected of me. They were too vast for my mind. But at least now it was speaking to me in a language that I understood. “Leave the bald monkey and come settle in our fields. Not far from here is much wheat, corn. Help us guard against the coming of the Beyond.”

“The Beyond?”

“The Beyond comes. It comes in the last nightfall. It tears open the earth above the earth.”

“The hole in the universe”, I thought to myself.

“You know?”

“I was there.”

I could feel the other mulling this fact over. “You were there? And you did nothing?”

“I didn't know what was happening.”

A seething anger shot through the world in which I found myself. A piercing and totalizing gaze drove itself in between the two lobes of my brain. I felt my limbs catch fire, and my stomach begin to boil.

I turned tail and shot down out of the sky and back towards the reflecting pool. Violent and raging torrents of energy, which took on the form of rushing water from the heavens, followed in pursuit as I dove through the pool. My lungs filled with it, igniting. As I fell through the other sky, I saw the ocean was leeching with magma, turning it into a black and tumultuous archipelago. “You have been corrupted, Old One. You have betrayed your earth and you will pay.”

“I am not the Old One.”, I spoke as I dove into the water, my skin flayed by the flakes of lava rock and hot magma. Burning, I crashed into my body, my head dizzy and my vision blurred as I saw the pasture seeth with hot black anger.

“How do you speak their tongue?”, asked the mushrooms. I stepped back, feeling their intensity like a knife up against my throat. My maimed and bleeding consciousness shivered, sending convulsions through my body. “I was tripping...in the field last night...and...”

I hadn't realized I was speaking outloud. The farmer had woken up with his shotgun, and was looking out the window with terror in his eyes. Another one of those damn heroin addicts.

“You must have merely communed with the Old One.”

“Yes, yes, yes. That's it.”

“You were drawn near the Beyond, and the Old One sacrificed itself so that you could live. That is what happened. I see the truth now.”, the mushrooms sighed, all as one, mourning the death of their friend in a massive, wailing cacophony. I began to step back. The farmer walked out onto his porch, and trained his shotgun onto me. “Wait! Wait!”, I held up my hands.

“Bald monkey, can you communicate with the one who lives in the brick abomination in our field?”

“Y-yes.”

“He lives among the the Buffalo which we protect. They are tenderly fond of him. But in the past months, he has grown negligient and has not left the porch to make noises to the Buffalo, bringing them great anxiety. Tell him that we, the Lords of this Field, wish for him to speak with the Buffalo.”

“I—I--”

“You got about ten seconds before I call the cops on your ass.”

“The bald monkeys have communed with our kind and worship us as the guardians of this earth. We taught them to make their thought noises. Only fools do not recognize our power. We will give you the words to speak, as we have always done.”

“Just a second, let me explain.”, I said. He lowered his shotgun and I inched out of the brush, my hands up. “I—uhm--”, I entered the field of protection the mushrooms projected about the cows, seeing thousands of their bright and glimmering forms lining the hills, burrowed underneath the ground in a mass of luminous veins. The mushrooms were stationary, immortal creatures. They had guarded this land, the three or four square miles of earth here, from dark spiritual forces, but they were unalone—other masses of similar creatures, I knew, lay far beyond their boundaries—their knowledge was no more universal than any other animals—the traditional lore that they spread to one another, between boundaries, indeed said that they had given us language. But little had changed, in their minds. Today, the cows were still buffalo, as they had always been. The bald monkeys still treated them as a sacrement, if they did not outright worship them. “If he tries to kill you, do not worry. We will let you will decompose in glory.”, they tried to reassure me.

I crept out onto the pathway, feeling the uncertain and terrified thoughts of the old rancher scald my barely breathing soul. I did not want to anger the mushrooms again, and knew that if they pulled me into their world one more time, I could easily be killed. But I also did not want to be shot. “My name is John.”, I said, my hands above my head as I keenly listened for the mushrooms to tell me more of what to say, “I speak on behalf of the Sacred Mushroom, Guardians of this Pasture and Most Beloved of the Kind Buffalo.”, I said. On the command of the psychic fungi, the cows lined up alongside me, staring towards the farmer. My voice trembled as I spoke their message word for word, “The Infinite and Exalted Mothers of Language honor me with the right to speak on their behalf. The Kind Buffalo have been delighted when you have emerged from your brick abomination to make noises to them, but are troubled as of late by what seems to be your withdrawn nature. The Sacred Mushrooms wish for me to ask you to emerge and to speak once again with the Kind Buffalo when the sun is high, and again sing to them peaceful hymns.”

“I don't know what the hell you're talking about, but you can take that hippie bullshit and shove it right where the sun doesn't shine.” I tried to translate this statement to the mushrooms. They fumed with anger. “Please, maybe you should negotiate.”, I suggested. The anger was at once directed at me. “You dare to challenge our directive?”, they fumed, “We, the Mothers of Language, Protectors of the Earth, Masters of Nations and Most Beloved of the Kind Buffalo, will not negotiate with the Bald Monkeys, especially not when they resort to such blasphemous indecency. Tell him that his impudence will be his undoing. The Sacred Mushrooms shall command seven dark forces from the Underworld over the next seven suns, and seven pestilences from the Heavens over the next seven moons until he answers to our demands. If he remains stubborn, we will condemn him to Xibalba, the dreaded place of fear, until his soul begs for oblivion.”

“Let me--”, I breathed in, trying to lie to the Mushrooms, “Ahh---the Old One is speaking to me.” Murmurs of confusion and wonder filled the hillsides, “It wants me too—too—Ahh!”, I feigned panic as, with all my might, I drove the field of my consciousness to meet with the farmers, escaping from the bonds of the mushrooms empathic defense field. My sense of bodily autonomy returned, and I, with relief, felt a wave of humanity come over me as I clung to the farmer's mind. He looked on, terrified. The mushrooms wondered what I was doing, with awe. The Old One had spoken in judgement from beyond the grave on their behalf.

“What in the h--”

“Please, listen to me. My name is John. I was sleeping in your field. It's filled with psychedelic mushrooms and they want me to talk to you.”

“Get away from--”, he looked out at my physical body, drooling and half asleep on his driveway, seeing that I was almost ten yards away, and felt himself totally paralyzed. At once, he realized that I was some kind of psychic force, and thought for a moment that he must be dreaming. I searched through his memories, which were weakening with age. His name was Gerry. He was eighty seven years old. He'd built the ranch with his wife and children, and was now alone. His children were off in a number of different cities. None of them had taken too much of an interest in ranching. In the old days, he'd walk around, singing old bluegrass music to his cows and taking care of them, but he had instead found himself unable to walk like he used to, and would sit inside by his window, watching the cows. Every week, his oldest son would come out, watch TV with him, and they'd show his children the cows. But his sons wife was, in his words, a stuck up little bitch, and she couldn't stand the smell. The two would help clean up the house, and help him take the cows to market. I looked through his memories. A tear started forming on the corner of his eye. I started crying as well. The mushrooms looked on with awe. I tried to pull myself deeper into his mind, which I could feel shivering around me, and show him what I could see—the glowing mushrooms—for only a second. He looked on perplexed. “Those live on your farm. They're psychedelic mushrooms. You may not realize it, but they can think.” It took a moment for what I was saying to sink in. “They've been here a lot longer than you or I have. They want me to tell you to talk to the cows again. They say the cows miss you.” The ranchers face contorted into an expression of sorrow. “I just can't anymore. Can you tell them that?”

I returned to my body, leaving the rancher crying on the porch with his shotgun at his feet. I pleaded his case to the mushrooms. The collective wept with the realization that it had so deeply misunderstood, as the cows all lowered their heads in comprehension. Together, the herd began to crowd towards the porch, at the behest of the mushrooms. “It will be enough for the Buffalo to see him, so long as he makes noises for them to hear.”, the mushrooms said. I reentered the farmers consciousness. His mind was awaft with memories of sitting in that same spot, playing mandolin and singing to his herd. “All they want to do is see you. Maybe you can come back out here more often.” But he hated them seeing him like this, so weak, and old. I told him it didn't matter. They understood. Solemnly, I withdrew, watching the farmer move down the porch in order to pat the first cow on the head. Tears in his eyes, he looked at me, “You need a place to sleep?”

I held out the blue topaz in my hands, offering it to him. “Yes.”

Commentary
Because the episode before this was split in half, one half ended up combined with this episode. I am just posting it based on what was originally in the script. "LSD" is the old one because in this universe, that includes LSA and other ergot like compounds, which are all what you could call a "trade language" that facilitates interactions between different plants, molds, and animals to coordinate defense against the Beyond.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnmAA8JCRQ0Upi0jlPZqAog
https://riversofthemind.libsyn.com/lords-of-the-field
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rivers-of-the-mind/id1278391177
https://play.google.com/music/m/I5obttfukzok6ggklvb5umo2mgq?t=Rivers_of_the_Mind

All episodes by Timmy Vilgiate. No drugs harmed in the making of this podcast. Nothing in this is real. Nothing at all is real. Everything is a lie.