Nightmare at 20,000 Feet: A Tale of Premature Enlightenment
(Art by Michelle Horsley)
(Audio at the end)
As I am revisiting old journals while working on the next book (or books?), I am sharing a passage from 25 years ago, “the time I lost my mind on a plane.”
In late 2000, shortly after my DMT “red pill experience” with Mitch Fraas, I flew back from Guatemala to the UK because I wanted to see my family (specifically my brother, who I believed was in danger). After a couple of weeks in London, and having failed to get a Visa for the US, I decided to fly to Canada and try to enter the US by land (to visit Mitch in Portland and make a trip to Hollywood to hand out copies of the just-released Blood Poets).
It turned out to be the most harrowing flight of my life.
Since it was a long flight, I had taken a joint of pure superskunk along for the ride. I normally never smoked marijuana straight, and if I did, a couple of hits were enough. On this occasion, since I wanted to be high for the whole flight and obviously wasn’t going to take it onboard, I planned to smoke the whole thing immediately before boarding. Having checked my bags and made sure I knew exactly where I needed to go to find my gate, I took the spliff into the parking lot and smoked it down to the roach while gazing at the setting sun.
I entered the airport in an altered state of consciousness. Everything seemed unreal, like a simulation. I was Neo returning to the matrix after having been unplugged, seeing with new eyes for the first time. Everything felt effortless, as if I were just an image projected from another reality, a lucid dreamer, moving through my own dream state.
Fearless, I passed through security without a hitch (this was eight months before 9/11) and found my gate. I had timed it so I wouldn’t have to wait, and there were just a few people left waiting in line to board. I stood behind an Indian couple with my boarding pass in hand, and behind me there was a woman with a small child, a boy of five or so. He was acting up and I heard her say to the boy, “Stop it!”
Those two words stopped my world. It was as if the sound waves created a ripple effect in my consciousness and through the whole spacetime continuum. Time slowed almost to zero and I felt waves of energy flowing through me, rapidly unraveling everything I thought I was. In that moment, with those two small words, something in me ended. Something huge had occurred, but I didn’t know what. I was floating in a vast sea of awareness, and part of me was gone.
I didn’t have a moment to question what had occurred, however. I handed my pass to the agent and he or she nodded me past. I entered the tunnel to the plane, a few paces behind the Indian couple. Both of them were extremely short, and the man was wearing a sparkling purple jacket and a large turban. In that instant I knew, by some unfamiliar means, that they were not people at all. I recognized them as gnome-like entities disguised as humans, who were leading me (I felt a connection to them in my mind) onto their ship.
Like Whitley Strieber when he wakes up and finds himself walking beside two blue gnomes, I was having an abduction experience. I was seeing behind the curtain to another reality. At one level, I was boarding a place (I could still see the ordinary world); but at a subtler level, previously invisible to me, something else was happening. There were two realities, co-existing. I was in a magical realm where nothing was what it seemed, and like Alice going down the rabbit hole, I had no idea what would happen next.
We reached the plane and I entered the cabin. I looked around at all the passengers. I thought, I wonder if they know that they are all going to die? I didn’t quite understand the thought, but it sowed the first seed of doubt in my mind. Mercifully I was still able to function in ordinary reality, and I found my seat without problems and sat down. It was an aisle seat and sitting next to me was a middle-aged woman with brown hair. As far as I remember, I didn’t look at her or greet her. Now that I no longer had anything mundane to focus on, I was free to concentrate on what had happened to me. I was in some profound way altered, and as a result, I was unable to hold more than a single idea in my mind at a time.
To begin with, all I could think, the only thing I knew at that point, was I have lost my mind. The thought reverberated through my consciousness over and over again, on an endlessly repeating loop. Some other part of me—the part that was panicking—was trying to figure out what to do about this, yet since I was now longer able to reason, it wasn’t having much success. I sat there and stared at the vastness where my mind had been, while the single thought echoed through my being over and over again: ‘I have lost my mind.’
Presently, I heard a hissing in my right ear. It was just as if someone had leaned against me and gone “Pssst!” in order to get my attention. I turned abruptly, and directly in front of my eyes was the bare back of a young woman. She was putting a bag up in the hold and her sweater had been hitched halfway up her back, revealing the naked skin.
The sight of her flesh calmed me. I was entirely convinced that no one on that plane had made the sound, that it had been just for me and that the spirits were drawing my attention to something which they knew would help me. Seeing that patch of female flesh didn’t stir my desire, exactly, but it reminded me of my sensual being and of my physical existence. The effect, however briefly, was both grounding and reassuring. I had a moment of relief.
I took my boots off and was amazed—and relieved—to see how well I was able to function if I had something ordinary to do. Yet the moment I was left with nothing to do besides observe my thoughts—or the absence of them—I was thrown into a state of panic. I took out the book I was reading (Castaneda’s Tales of Power for the umpteenth time), hoping it would distract me. As my eyes ran over the lines and I tried to make sense of the small black marks on the page, a new thought came blasting into my mind: God does not want to read! I was so surprised that I threw the book down. It landed in the aisle, at the feet of a stewardess. She leaned over and picked it up.
“Oh, Carlos Castaneda!” she said, in a loud voice, drawing the attention of several rows of passengers to me and my reading preference. I felt utterly exposed. The stewardess asked a question about Castaneda—“Wasn’t he born in Brazil?”—and I managed to force myself to answer her. Probably discouraged by my tone, the stewardess handed me my book and carried on. Now I knew that reading was not an option, and the voice in my head had given me something else to think about.
Apparently, with my mind gone, all that was left was “God.” And God didn’t want to read Castaneda or anything else. God had other things to do. But what? While I knew that I was God, I also knew that everyone else on the plane—everything in existence—was God too; but if I was the only one on that plane who knew he was God, that meant that I was in charge of that section of reality. It was up to me to fly the plane, and if I didn’t, we would never leave the ground!
This was what I now had in place of ordinary logic: magical thinking taken to pathological extremes. The next question was how was I supposed to fly the plane? I have no idea how long I sat there struggling with that dilemma, but I must have been showing signs of distress because the woman next to me leaned over and, perhaps even patting me on the arm, said, “It’s going to be alright.”
It didn’t occur to me that, if she was saying this, it was probably because I looked like I was about to die of a heart attack. This wasn’t simply a woman comforting a nervous passenger: it was a direct message from the spirits. God had leaned over and told me that everything would be alright. This helped somewhat, but I was still faced with the dilemma.
Time passed; I don’t know how much, because I was no longer cognizant of ordinary things such as time. I was in limbo, we were all stuck in limbo, and it was up to me to get us out of it, to get the plane off the ground and on its way to Canada. As I racked what was left of my brain, I had an idea: I would take all my clothes off, jump into the aisle, spread my arms and legs wide like a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, and shout the word “Happy!”
