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.