PreterNothing

I have lived life in and out of the grasp of angels and demons for as long as I can remember. For we don't wrestle with flesh and blood, but with the principalities of and powers of the air.

I have seen demons. Not in some writer's license sort of way, but in the world of doors and windows and puppy dogs and station wagons. Demons of all sizes. Some floating in the sky over an evil valley where I was told they would be, sometimes in a half dream building a coffin around me as a lay paralyzed. They used to hang around, shadows of another world blocking the light of reason and intellectual accountability.

I haven't seen them much since I learned what they were. They exist, alright. In fact they are as real and as false as anything on this Earth. They live in your head and reek havoc from between the tissues of conscious and unconscious states. They sit on your chest and constrict your throat in completely explainable physiological ways.

I saw one the other night, as I lay dying to another day. I was at a point near exhaustion when my body hit the bed and my mind let me drift off. I was still in my very real room, lying on my very real bed, staring up at my very real ceiling. When we are awake enough for our nimble mind to jump immediately into darkness, it is impossible to see what hides in the shadows. I was so tired that my sluggish mind tripped along the road to sleep and fell into the brambles of psychotic dreamscape. I recognized the state. I have been there many times through meditation. In this stage right of reality, I have traveled the continents in single bounds and flown up to the moon. I have sank into the folds of the Earth and breathed in the cool soil under miles of sea, basking in the freedom of a playful mind.

This time, there was no sense of freedom. I drifted like a foundering boat into a morbid, decaying night. I felt my limbs go dead as wood, a feeling that I usually find preternaturally calming. This time, I felt them die. My jaw was locked shut. My neck had only the slightest movement with the utmost effort. Dread calm descended on the room like a lead curtain. The insects were silenced and the fear rose in my dammed up throat. The darkened air pulled away from me and sucked into a vortex near my east-facing window. I have lived through this before, only without cerebral knowledge of what was beginning to form. I knew any minute, I would have a Visitor.

The air thickened into a palpable clenched fist under my window. The room wavered in the waves of passing time. The chaos of spinning and fear escalated into a dull roar. Horizon and verizon fell off of their relative homes. The chaos crescendo in the blinding movements of everything around me and deafening noise of thought-words flew through my head and out into the void of my very real room.

I could have stopped it all. As any practicioner of the arts of altered states knows, there has to be a magic button. For me it is blinking. I can stop any spiraling experience in my lucid dreams or semi-conscious rambling by blinking. I have used it several times to stop a frightening fall.

I didn't want to stop this. I wanted to let all that was building up happen. Let the demons come. I knew their substance, there was nothing to fear. What valuable insights into my own psyche could be gained by allowing my eyes to see what my brain was desperately trying to avoid? It would be a shame, I convinced my shaking self, to let this rare experience go to waste. Who would I see? Any rational person could stick this out. The gravity of my room left me and pooled in the gathering ominous nothing in front of my window. Any rational person would want to experiment with this occurrence.

Right?