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I visited a fluid reality, somewhere between here and there - Atropa. The place lies in that emotionless void where one doesn’t feel much of anything. I glanced at myself in a mirror, my pupils had dilated to almost the size of golf balls. My motor sensory skills diminished rapidly. The earth undulated underfoot. Before long, I found myself tripping and stumbling over shifting pavement – an ominous, looming jagged maze of razor-edged cracks jutting skyward from the sidewalk.

I entered a park. And there seemingly innocent leaves rustled and gnawed the flesh from my arms exposing bare bones. My elusive companion appeared to be sleeping on a bench. That scene vanished into the shadows cast by iodine quartz streetlamp’s light streaming through the trees. I don’t know how long I languished there, but the time passed simultaneously as infinite as light-years and as infinitesimal as nanoseconds.

Once again, searching for footing on some shattered sidewalk, stumbling, narrowly avoiding expanding cracks to avoid falling into the vast chasm below, I clutched onto air which existed there in solid form. And there under iodine quartz streetlamp, sandy anthill lay like an isolated island in a sea of grass. There, just beyond the anthill, a mushroom stretched forth in simple splendor and caught my fancy for a moment or what seemed like an hour or two. “So amazing,” my slippery companion yelled at me. Glancing back, the mushroom disintegrated and my companion hung entangled in cobwebs of iodine quartz light precariously clinging to the to the very edges of that tepid, liquid night.

I kept walking in circles. I’d been walking in concentric circles for sometime. I forgot where to go until an entrance opened in that stucco wall leading to a secret passageway. There, I think, I walked in circles and circles to where some woman appeared as a shadow emerging from the shadows.

And I saw that stealthy woman again standing next to me, and I fell in love with the apparition. I felt love surge into my soul. She was blonde with no eyes. She was deaf and mute. Electricity ran from the ground into her body and exited from her completely black mouth. I don’t remember much of what happened later, because canisters tossed through fragments of her dissipating illusion spewed smoke and obliterated the scene.

I ran to the sea for a swim. I found no hallucinations of any consequence there, but the sea happened to be playing more strange tricks than usual - waves came from opposing directions, spun then crashed around me. There was also phosphorescence there – ethereal, glowing fish trails gave that bit of information away.

At several points in time, I awoke, talking, smoking cigarettes, and drinking beer together with phantom friends. Occasionally, others appeared as shadows. They handed me cans of beer. Sometimes, someone dropped something, and it was gone as if it had never appeared. However, I do recall searching diligently for something, but I simply fell into another dream.

Sometimes, when someone fell asleep, curiously, the person appeared so peaceful; it was almost as if the person were dead. At that point, it was nothing more than an interesting observation of little value to me.

Sometimes, I fell asleep and woke somewhere in a dream, then five minutes later I woke somewhere else. It happened so many times I can’t remember the scenes. I lost track of whether I sleeping or awake, but it didn’t matter much because everything happening at that time was of such little consequence to the overall scene.

There were instances when I lost track of whether I was alive or dead, but it felt somewhat comforting, not caring as I drifted from here to there oblivious to the certain mortality that frightens most men. I could simply turn away and an instant later, everything disappeared. But after that experience, normality was nothing more than empirical hypotheses bandied about by Mensa members who had too much to drink.

Whatever I wished to exist would manifest, and anything boring vanished. However, in that continuous state of transition, paradoxically speaking, I found that I was constantly talking to myself, even when dreaming. I think it was an attempt to fill space. I spoke to myself in tongues, the random gibberish of a man teetering on the edge of insanity. Often I stood mumbling about nothing in a black void waiting for something to appear. That’s where my memories began to fade away into nothingness.

I forgot what day it was, and believing it was Monday morning, I decided to take a shower, but there was a line of strangers waiting there as well. If that wasn’t bad enough, a cop appeared from out of the woodwork and asked me to hide some cookies. He said, *Just wait, a little later you’ll see how important this really is. You know, it’s a matter of national security.”

I started to watch some television, and then as soon as the news began, the cop popped out of the tube and started yelling at me. Needless to say, I was somewhat confused.

Next, downstairs in some house I didn’t readily recognize, my pants were gone, and someone shook me. Then some girl walked by the door. I know this because the hallway light illuminated her, and then she faded away. Only in the hallway shadows, dimly illuminated, from time to time, she fleetingly existed again. There were many other similar incidences, but not experienced with any degree of lucidity I can readily remember.

I can't begin to explain whether I was in a dream or wakening state, or about the mystery objects I saw and believed that I touched. There were just beyond my grasp of reality.

Once, I tried to pick an object up off the floor that I actually thought existed, but then I fell through the floor. I even attempted to open doors, but my hand passed through them, and the objects for which I was searching just weren’t there.

If I blinked, the earth would disappear, and then suddenly I was somewhere watching myself die in some distant reflection captured in a cat’s eye. This all happened again, with books, pens, paper and new and old family and friends. It was all occurring while flipping through the pages of a moving picture book, reading images as words and words as thoughts - then it just disappeared, vanished! One could speculate that I relinquished my grasp on that particular reality.

People in the hallway, and I finally thought I understood what they were doing there as they turned into graffiti on the walls and melted into the next room where a party was taking place.

There were twice as many mattresses next door on the hallway floor than when I appeared there those times before, but tired partygoers took every comfortable space. Needless to say, I was somewhat perplexed and frustrated because I wanted to lye down, so I dissolved into the floor onto a couch in the room below.

Thought I was watching television, but apparently someone had turned it off. I don’t remember the programs, but I remember watching flashing images on the television screen. I remember people talking about something. However, someone told me that someone had turned the television off.

One moment you’re here, the next somewhere else; that’s what happened.

Glowing fiery orange, the sun sank into the indigo void; I became sleepy and slipped into a dream. The people were quite nice there. It all seemed to be as real as real can possibly be. Soon everyone seemed to dissipate into the diminishing incandescent light except for an old peasant man clad in tattered clothes. We chatted for a while, and when I reached out to shake his hand, he was nothing more than lifeless pile of dirty clothes.

Lightning crackled and flashed, clouds edges tinged in red swept past as the sky ripped apart and drenched the earth in blood. That was back at the park filled with people, gray shadows with back holes for eyes, thousands of them wandering about in disarray. The trees dripped blood on the cold gray scene littered with body parts. The eyeless people laughed and screamed, “The universe coming to an end!” But only I could hear them in my head or in my dream.

The lightening flashes became shapes and eventually eyes. Some human and others were animal eyes. I saw the eyes of hawks, eagles, tigers, coyotes and fish. And in the end, I looked deep into my eyes and saw where I had been as a coyote leapt from the depths and said, “I’ll bet you don’t want to visit that place again.”

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