Snorkeling. Me. Yesterday. Out in the depths beyond the tourists and the reef holding them and the fish in. I saw a moray eel, finally. I’d been wanting to see one for a few weeks after I heard some people talking about spotting one. I saw a couple of types of fish I hadn’t before out there in the blue floating in schools above scattered monolithic boulders. You’d swear there was a city out there swallowed by Pele and time.
But I also saw the usual scenery and heard the usual, too. Part of what I normally hear alone in the water is voices. Human voices. Scattered bits of conversation. Edgar Mitchell talks about this type of thing in the deep of space so perhaps it’s related to sensory deprivation or an inner journey that spills out when the outer one is a blank canvass. Or perhaps I am hearing conversations of tourists rippling through tide and reef. I don’t know but I’m satisfied with a mundane answer and suspect that there is one. What I find curious, however, is that I emailed free dive instructor Ted Roe that evening to ask him his thoughts and the next morning I had the most baffling audio hallucination I’ve ever heard of sans ‘shrooms!
It’s about 5:00AM. Yes, followers of this blog, that pattern continues. I didn’t check the time but my favorite two roosters were working together to alert the ‘hood about the rising sun. Shout the new position or all is lost!
I made the error of leaving my window open. Naturally Big Red and Sir Cockington took that as their cue to Rrr-r-rrr-r-rrrrrrr! directly into my ear. Picture two of the Three Tenors belting a high A-flat in your face at five in the morning and you get what’s going on here: torture. Torture enough to create that perfect chemical stew of dream brain, DMT, and probably the energy that moves me around, within being awake.
I recall a smattering of nifty visuals flittering through my mind’s eye as I struggled to remain asleep. Patterns and things. At one fleeting point seeing through the eyes of another man seated somewhere outdoors. All of this is old hat by now. What was new to me was the sequence of audio hallucinations. They started with an amazing song. The song built itself out of nothing. It sounded like a typical New Age instrumental piece made from a synthesizer and Peter Gabriel leftovers. Naturally, I was staring at a cosmos behind my eyes as this song came. As it got going more and more elements added themselves. In the end, there was a rock guitar lead whaling over it and a male reggae vocalist. This song went on for a while. I should have written the lyrics down but they are lost to me now.
As this is playing I’m lucid enough to pay attention to my physicality. My head feels like it’s swelling with energy and I wonder if this is what it means to have the energy center at the top of your head opened and linked to universal consciousness. Are ya turning on a radio?
I decide to risk breaking the spell by opening my eyes. Now here’s where the holy crap moment comes in…. I open them both a hair and the song shuts off. I close them and it fades back in. I open my right eye and the guitar solo shuts off. Shut my right eye, guitar solo fades back in. Open my left eye, everything but the guitar solo shuts off. Close my left eye, the song fades back in.
Anyone ever heard of this?! What would be the scientific answer to this? What would be the crown chakra answer? What about the shamanic answer? Anyone got an answer or is it just one of those mysteries that lets us know we have not a clue what we are and what this body so many spiritual seekers condemn is capable of?
Shortly thereafter, the song fades out and another builds itself. Then another. Then another. In fact one of them features Sheryl Crow singing. I wish I’d written those lyrics to see if they exist… yet.
I didn’t try the eye trick on any of the other songs but I did notice that the skin on the back of my scalp felt like it was pulling in tight and releasing with each new song introduced.
I also didn’t jump up and write down any lyrics because I wanted to see what this was leading to. As usual, it lead nowhere. It was its own thing I guess and so there is no moral to the story and no ending wrapped in a bow.
Perfect for a blog post.
JayVay 