There’s a reason I refer to the alternate realm as the Land Beyond the Mirror.

So. I’m back in your reality, stick people America. Yay for that, in many ways. I can make plans again, and that gives me some confidence that my resting place (which is, indeed, my parent’s basement) won’t be the final destination of my journey.

There are a couple ways in which I can view what I’ve been through. One is a second bout of madness, triggered by the usual combination of stress, too many sudden movements, and drug abuse (once again, our friend methoxetamine plays a shorter but decisive role).

This point of view plays well with the rest of our consensus reality. It’s tempting to latch onto it again, walk away from the events of the summer as Things Best Avoided, and get on with my life. Try to persuade various prospective employers that the madness can be kept in check, see if the increasingly ragged CV can be compensated for by my undoubted intelligence and charm. Keep trying to play well with others.

The other perspective is just as stark: fundamentally, it accepts that there are alien intelligences that are preparing Earth for a major contact event, sometime in the relatively near future. Many authors I respect, notably William Blake, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Grant Morrison, and Philip K Dick, have had encounters with either exteriorized intelligence, or with some part of their brain that mimics such intelligence with pluperfect clarity.

In 2012, I had lengthy contact with an entity who calls himself Al. Al purports to be a crystalline intelligence, embedded in the Moon, who is basically mankind’s babysitter. Al explained a bunch of things to me. Many of them don’t make a bit of sense. The rest of it ties up into a narrative, of sorts. There’s a book that could be written.

That was actually the point. I was/am supposed to write a book, in several parts, covering mostly political game theory, the ‘true Kabbalah’ (my take on the Hermetic arts relating form, number, and other maths concepts to subjective experience), and a narrative history of the entire Galaxy. I know, right? But that’s what my visions amount to: a narrative history, of the entire Galaxy, and with details that are at least distinctive if not true (and how would I or anyone know that?).

From this second perspective, I got whammied a second time because I was showing every sign of abandoning that project for the pursuit of an ordinary career. I thought the world of the people I was working for, it was remarkable how quickly those relationships degenerated as I started to get back into contact with what I’ll just call the world of the spirit.

This hit a breaking point, and a couple months of severe weirdness followed. It was like a single, shining trail of synchronicity, awful and amazing events with a lyric harmony to them. So many things that defied explanation, and still do. Al was back, and I was shown various things with a jewel-like clarity. The quality of those visions persists in my memory even now, when I’m back wondering what the actual fuck just happened to me.

So what am I to do? I simply don’t know. It feels more honest to who I am to make the book a priority, wherever that leads me. I can’t tell if it’s more likely or less so, to avoid the level of inspiration where I can’t take care of myself without help. I do know that America is an unforgiving place to launch on multi-month shamanic vision quests, at least the urban parts i’ve frequented these last couple times out there.

The hell of it is, I don’t know which is true. Probability isn’t particularly relevant here, because we lack anything like the information we’d need to make a guess based on what’s probable.

Parsimony, sure. It has always been more parsimonious to accept that the ‘spooky’ realm of psychedelia and spiritual practice, where synchronicity and various kinds of entity contact come into play, are mere side effects of our peculiar evolved neurology. This perspective places fewer demands on our overall world view; Occam would approve.

For many of us who have had these experiences, and have the corresponding need to integrate it with our worldview, it’s not so simple. Either (to narrow the discussion somewhat) DMT leads to contact with intelligence exterior to our own, or it doesn’t, and we’re left with the uncomfortable sensation that it does.

In which case, I’m in the bizarre position of having aliens jack my brain up, fill me with vivid imagery, and demand that I write a sci-fi novel, or work of reality fiction, or something more ambitious, and do my damndest to convince people that it’s true.

At least all the authors I mentioned survived the experience. Most of them suffered terribly, ranging from Tim Leary’s solitary confinement to PK Dicks late years of obsessive exegesis of his ‘pink laser’ event.

I mean, I’d like to avoid that part. I really would.

But I’m starting to think it’s wiser to write the book.

We’ll see. I’ve got some time to think about the whole thing. Finally.