B (28:32)
She acknowledged that hypnosis is not that it's not a science, it's almost more of an art, and that there's something creative about it. So that, like what you recover from a hypnotic experience, it may be changed, it may be confabulated, made up, or it may be something entirely new, you know, and it may be some mix of all of those elements. You know, I think it would be a kind of malpractice for her to be like, we're going to remember exactly what happened that night. She didn't do that, that she wanted to open up to this as a type of exploration, understanding that it might have types of overlay on top of it, but that there is something in there and that it's something worth doing, what you find in there. It may not be admissible in a court of law as a kind of evidence, but that it still might be extremely useful for you personally, you know, and spiritually. But she never was offering it to me as a kind of like, let's clear this up. It was more like, let's go inside and see what emerges and then see what sense we can make of that. Maybe symbolically, maybe just in terms of energetically how it feels in your body, that kind of thing. I've done my own hypnosis training, and I experienced years of hypnotherapy myself and the benefits from it. I mean, the real incredible benefits. And. And, you know, I've been practicing for 13 years at this point. So I think the trouble that people try to get into is like, thinking that they're going to get some type of, like, narrative clarity as to what happened. I don't think that that's what happens with hypnotherapy. I think you get things that are not that, but that may, in other terms, be very useful. So the session started, as always, with me gazing into a candle flame. And that was across the room, sort of to my therapist, off of her left shoulder. And I was sitting on her couch. And I think usually as I go into trance, I would sort of sink down into the couch and become more and more relaxed. And it's this state, you know, I'm sure many people have done this or experienced it just kind of organically spacing out, really. So it's kind of between wakefulness and sleep. You know, it's this highly suggestible space that you get into. But also, people find when they go into those spaces, that stuff emerges from them. Images, stories, impressions, feelings. So eventually I lay down on the couch, and entering the state would involve counting me down with numbers. And then there was a. A part where she's suggesting that you're going deeper and deeper underground, like, kind of underground or deeper. Deeper and deeper within yourself. And at that point, I start to go into probably something like a theta state, you know, where it really does almost feel like that. That sort of moment where you're about to fall asleep, but you're able to perch there and kind of hang out in that space where you're almost asleep, but not, you know, falling asleep entirely. And so she started asking questions like, can we go back to that night? You know, and, you know, there's a whole. I'm not great at this because hypnotherapy is not central to my practice, but there's a whole way of talking and using suggestive language that helps people to have these experiences. And I probably won't get that right here. But she would say things like, can we sort of move back and in towards that night, Moving back towards that space, that time, and then opening it up to wherever that takes me. Well, the first thing that I experience is being back in my bed, in the room. The room that I had in my grandmother's house. You know, lying there with the sort of the. The comforter over me and just looking up at the ceiling. I don't remember a lot of the details of the room. It's a sense that the room was dark, so I couldn't. You know, I didn't know where my guitar was. I didn't know where my school books were. It was just lying in the dark, looking at the ceiling. The next thing I noticed was that there was a feeling of, like, a magnetic energy in the room, like this sort of ambient magnetic dust floating in the air, and that you could just feel this charge that almost made your. The entire skin all over your body feel more alert and almost like it was being pulled outward. Well, this charge slowly began to kind of coalesce around my body, and it slowly sort of sucked in, sucked in until it was like a sheath around my body. And then it moved within my body. And as soon as it did that, I floated up off the bed. No sense of the. At this point of the comforter or the temperature in the room or anything. It maybe was closer to an out of body experience than anything but being brought up towards the ceiling. The ceiling was big. It was this. This big, like, gabled roof. I mean, I want to say it was like maybe 16ft high or something like that. So lifting all the way and floating up to that center beam and then floating below it. And there was a sense that there was a kind of swirling light beyond it, you know, like, I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. I don't know how to describe it other than that. So the ceiling just sort of ceased to exist and I was pulled up through the ceiling. The second I passed through it, these tears began to pour out of my face. In. In the room where I was having the regression, I remember feeling it. It's a type of crying where tears just dump out of your eyes. And so it's not like a convulsive crying where you're like, you know, you know, your stomach muscles are flexing and you're crying, and the tears come out when you do that. This is lying perfectly still. And it's also strangely kind of. I wouldn't say it's emotionless, but it's not associated with sadness at all. It's almost more. Has to do with like, just a kind of raw, energetic intensity. After the crying or while it was happening, I was brought up through the ceiling, and I was brought very suddenly into a room, a pretty small room. And I'm lying on a metal table, like an exam table, this sort of classic UFO abduction element. I don't have any sense of what I'm wearing. And I'm lying there and I'm in a room that's surrounded by heavy red velvet curtains, like in a movie theater from the 1930s. And I look around without sitting up, I'm able to kind of look around, and I see that there's a black and white checkerboard floor, kind of like the Masonic and diner, you know, diner pattern. And it occurs to me that the room that I'm in is very similar to the red room from Twin Peaks. Now, it doesn't have, you know, the, the, the, the. The. The dwarf talking backwards or the chair, and Agent Cooper's not there, but I'm there and the exam table is there. And I'm sitting there and. And at this point, I start to feel some fear. And I see these images begin to pulse in the left and right fields of my vision. And in the right side is a gray alien's face. And in the left side is a blank white mask. And you can see through the Eyes and the mouth, like it's empty and so it'll pulse. Gray alien in the right side, Empty mask in the left side. Gray alien, empty mask. Gray alien, empty mask. And that was very helpful to me. I think those two images being shown to me in that way kept me from going crazy from this experience. Because when I did the integration work around this with my therapist, I felt like I was being given a key to the experience, was that what I was being shown was a kind of a mask for something deeper, and that it was a mask that was using, like, my own personal symbol, set of stuff that belonged to me sometimes from pop culture, things that I had read, things that I was interested in. It was as if whatever intelligence guiding this experience reached into my head and used elements out of my own symbolic language to speak to me and to create this experience for me. And at one point, after lying there for a few minutes and describing the room to my therapist through the trance, I say, I'm gonna sit up. And she says, yeah, why don't you go ahead and do that, you know? And so I sit up, sitting on the edge of the table with my legs dangling off of it. I decide that I'm going to get up and walk across the room, and I'm going to part the curtain and see what's on the other side of the curtain. So I get down on my feet and I start walking towards the red curtain, and I walk towards it, and all of a sudden, appearing in the center of my field of vision is from Star wars, an Imperial Guard. You know, they have the kind of, like the Trojan slit mask. The mask kind of goes down into a piece that covers their shoulders all in one piece. And then there's the red flowing cloak underneath that and like a halberd or spear that they're carrying. And so it appears right in front of me, and I'm feeling fear. And I get the sense that this is some kind of guardian right now. Again, this is pop culture. This is coming from very early childhood. I loved Star wars when I was a kid. And here's this element from Star wars appearing in this space, and there's a sense that it's, like, threatening me, it's menacing me. It doesn't want me to cross this threshold. And so I sit there and look at it for a while, and then I decide, you know, whatever, I'm just going to walk right past it. And I just walk actually through it, and it just kind of dematerializes. But there was something about having to confront fear. In that moment. And to say I'm not afraid, that felt like that was the important part. And at that point, I walk up to the red curtains and I part them with my hands. And this is an odd thing to describe, but I'll give it my best shot. Part the curtain with my hands, and I stick my head out into this, like, utter blackness and void. And at this point, the. The perspective shifts from my eyes to way off to the side in the darkness, and I can see myself looking out. And floating in front of me is a huge, gray alien head floating in space. And it has these black, glittering, indifferent eyes. And like, the eyes were this incredible quality of black. They were like obsidian mirrors. And I just let myself gaze. I described it to my therapist. And again, at that moment that I encountered the eyes again, more tears squirting out of my eyes in. In, you know, in my actual body in that same way where I'm not crying. They're just my. My eyes are just dumping tears to the point where my, you know, my entire head is wet and the pillow behind me is wet. So gazing into these enigmatic black eyes. And I was looking into these eyes, and I was thinking, you know, what do you have to show me? You know, what. Why am I here? What is. You know, what does this mean? What are we doing? No answer. And so the head began to sort of tilt back and forth, almost as if it was like on a swivel. And it was, like, neither nodding nor shaking its head. It was just kind of tilting back and forth in this odd way. And so I sat with that. I sort of sat with the mystery of that for. I don't know. It's hard to tell what happens with time in those spaces. But I sat with it, and then I kind of just came up with something, an idea for what to do. And I said to my therapist, I'm going to go in through the eyes. And just through a force of will, I projected my consciousness along the beam of my gaze into the black eyes. And at this point, all of a sudden, I drop into this other channel of experience, which involves shooting through space at top speed, moving through colored landscapes, colored geometric landscapes, shooting in a very specific direction. And as I'm moving in that direction, more tears coming out of my eyes. And there's just a feeling in my bones, in the center of my being, that I am moving towards the star Sirius. And that's been. You know, it's significant to many different groups, both from the west and other parts of the world, but moving towards the star Sirius. So moving through all of these landscapes for quite a while. And eventually the flight stops and I'm in this place. It's like I'm in a realm of almost like the Platonic forms. There's all of these geometric shapes hanging perfectly frozen in space. And there's a sound as if the meditation bell has just rung, but it's sustaining endlessly. It's like this ding. And so I'm in this space where everything is held in suspension, held in suspension by this one musical note. And it's like it's a vast space, but somehow it's also contained. And I'm there, I'm looking around and all of a sudden, in a kind of a. It's like that old movie effect of solarization where it's kind of like a iridescent flash, solarized flash across my vision, and then it goes back to darkness. And then at that moment, my therapist's voice cuts back in and she says, okay, we're going to begin bringing this experience to a close. I'm going to count you back up, and you're going to feel the energy rising through your body, and you're going to feel yourself slowly entering the room, feeling more awake, you know, and sort of doing the sort of the, you know, counting you, you know, welcoming you back, counting you out of the hypnotic trance. I came back into the room, was lying there on the couch, you know, my face completely wet from having been crying, you know, for much of the experience. Just kind of mystified as to what the hell just happened. I didn't know what to think coming out of it. And. And I remember we didn't do like sort of immediate processing of what this meant. We kind of just wrapped it up, focused on grounding me, and I left. I think for. For the rest of the day. I was just kind of spaced out and a little bit in awe, but I didn't know what to make of it. It didn't have the indifference of the night of missing time, but it was a sense of confusion, a sense of not knowing how seriously I was supposed to take that. If it was real, if it was something I created in the moment, if it had any meaning for me personally, or if it was kind of just felt like off gassing of the unconscious mind. I wasn't sure. I didn't know what to make of this. I didn't walk. There was no takeaway from that experience. It didn't resolve neatly like that. I wish it had. I continued meeting with my therapist. It was For a couple weeks afterwards, making the best sense of this inner hypnotic experience that I could. But it wasn't like a slam dunk as to what it meant. I think, really the flashing mask and gray alien head, it was telling me to look at it as masks. And when I think about that, I think what that means is symbols and to work with those the best you can. It took me a lot longer than just the two weeks after that session to really figure that out. So I went on with my life. And I was doing this crazy job as a street social worker in San Francisco, and that involved a lot of things. But on that particular day, the particular day that we're talking about the sort of the next chapter in this experience, I was taking a client of mine to a methadone clinic in San Francisco run by the county called Ward 93. And I had also found a client of mine dead. I don't know if it was in that intervening two weeks, but it was around that period. So there's this, again, this sort of atmosphere of death, and. And, you know, so this was someone who I cared about very deeply. And anyways, I was dropping this client off at Ward 93 to get his methadone. And I remember dropping him off. And at the county, you drive these great big old white Ford vans, Like, what is it, like an E350 or something like that? You know, the 12 passenger van. So I was driving down Mission Street. I was driving back from the. From the methadone clinic back to the county clinic where I worked. And I remember thinking, God, my iPhone. It's just, like, destroying my attention span, and it feels so bad. And, like, what do I do about this? You know, how do I. How do I, like, counteract, you know, what the. What the iPhone is doing to my. My. My consciousness? And I thought to myself, right in that moment, I said, well, it's meditation. Like. Like the answer is meditation. And at that very moment, I looked up to my left and I saw a craft. The shape was a triangle, and I was looking almost underneath it and looking up from the bottom, There were these two triangles sticking out of the front of it. In aircraft, in aeronautics, you would call those canards. They're kind of like little forward wings on certain planes. You see them on, like, little tiny planes. And if you look at the overall shape, it's almost like a slightly modified Star of David. There was the. Definitely the triangle pointing up, and then it was like there was a smaller triangle pointing down. The. The lower point of which was inside of the Larger triangle, but the. The upper two triangles of the downward pointing triangle you could see sticking out. And I was looking up at the bottom of it, but I could see parts of the side of it. So it was kind of like looking up, you know, not perfectly underneath it, off to the side, sort of looking up at it and getting a sort of a diagonal view of it up in the sky. It was large, probably the size of a bus, and it was floating perfectly still in the air over San Francisco, like up over Noe Valley. It was sitting perfectly still. And it was also. If you've ever been underneath a plane when it's landing and it's pretty close to you, you can look up and you can see the seams in the metal and you can see the rivets, and you can see, like, the mist in the sky kind of like making certain parts of it fuzzy for a little moment, and then it'll pass through that. And it had facets. Like, it wasn't smooth. Like, it was kind of polygonal, which, again, gave it a kind of a aerospace look. But no windows, just, you know, black, dull surface, you know, as far as I could see all around it. It just. It had this incredible objective reality. And I think this really stood out in contrast to the hypnotic experience, which felt, like I said, fuzzy and impressionistic, this craft. When I saw it, it felt hard and it felt flat, and it felt like it was not of this world. But on the terms of this world, in terms of solidity, you could have reached out and, like, banged your fist on it. And also, something that's worth pointing out is that it was kind of a tactical gunmetal black. So it had a menacing quality, you know, the same color as, like, you know, a black assault rifle or a B2 bomber. That kind of dull, tactical black. And what I thought in the moment was like, oh, my God, it's happening. Like, that's. That's it. That's the thing, you know, this is what this has all been leading to. And there was a sense. I mean, I almost heard it like a voice in my head, and it was like, don't doubt it. Do not. Do not doubt this experience, you know, because the night of Missing Time was an absence of experience. The hypnotic experience was a kind of fuzzy, dreamlike experience. This felt hard and objective in a way that, like, I did not feel like I could push it away or question it. I was like, I'm seeing it. This is it, you know, and this is what it's like to see a ufo. So I Looked up, and it was perfectly silent. And I'm driving, so the car's in motion at this time. No one else notices it. I. Later on, I Googled to see if anyone had seen this craft. There was nothing about it. And I considered making a MUFON report, but, like, I don't know if I trust those people. And so I didn't do it. There was no sound, and it was just floating perfectly still. It was at 4:18pm in the afternoon. I saw it for maybe eight seconds. And what happened was that I was in motion and a building came between me and the craft, and I lost sight of it. And I did at that point what you're never supposed to do as a county employee. I put. Put the. The van in reverse, and I reversed quickly through a red, red light to see if I could get. So I went back into the intersection where. Where you. Where you could get the vantage again. And I looked up and it was gone. And luckily, I didn't smash into anyone doing that. But I was so flabbergasted that I. I had to do it. You know, I. I was like. It felt like one of the culminating periods of my life. That was the first time in this whole experience that the awe and the wonder just washed over me, and I was, like, totally overwhelmed. And I think these kind of things are traumatic because they, like, just rip a hole in how you think reality works. Like, it reminded me of being mugged. You know, there's a time I was mugged in a very violent way. It involved having a gun held to my head. And after I escaped and was okay, like, you know, shaky, short of breath, face feels hot, being like, oh, yeah, like, I'm here, I'm alive. This is all very real. I just survived that thing. Like, it was a similar feeling in a way. Not necessarily fear, but like, this. This feeling of like, oh, this is very real. This is very real, and this is very serious. And whatever this is, is not messing around, and it's coming to me. And came to me in this way that it felt like it was meant to confirm something about the previous two experiences. I mean, I remember I went back to work and I just, like, went into my office and shut the door and just, like, didn't talk to anyone for the rest of the day and then went home. I went home and I wrote out. You know, it's like what you're supposed to do with different types of consciousness experiences. You're supposed to go home and write a detailed account. Right? Because this stuff can be so squishy and hard to capture and easy to forget, that I went down and I wrote out all the details of it. This friend of mine pointed out. He said when I told him about the experience and I described the craft, he really latched on to the fact that the craft was menacing, tactical, military, black. He said, that's important. What does that mean to you? And I was like, well, I don't know. It was. You know, I'm sort of riffing it out. It was black, like a weapon. You know, it was a weapon. And he said, what did it destroy? And I remember saying, well, it destroyed my notion of how reality works. And now I'm building a new one, which involves a different sense of potential for mind being not necessarily a local thing, and for thoughts being causative and for things to exist outside of the sort of spectrum of what we're normally used to. And so, you know, something was destroyed for me, because I'll tell you what, this was a lot more powerful than psychedelic experience, because during psychedelic experience, you can always provide yourself with the reassurance that I have taken a drug, it's in my system, and it will go away. And I'll go back to seeing things how I used to, more or less, but with this. These things were coming unbidden, uninvited, coming to me, and were. They were changing things for me in a very forceful way that I had not asked for. Ultimately, I feel like these were. You know, I say it was like having. Having the gods back me up against the wall. You know, it's like. Like. Like they were making me an offer that I couldn't refuse in terms of the potential for reality to have much deeper aspects than we're used to acknowledging. And looking back on that first incident the night of missing time, I still have no idea what happened. I mean, if I had to guess, I would guess I went up, got undressed and got into bed and slept all night. And that this was an inner experience and that the hypnosis experience was a symbolic representation of what happens to me that night, which will. Will, I'm guessing, forever remain mysterious to me. But I think if you had been able to let yourself into my room, you probably would have just seen me, you know, sleeping peacefully. That's what I'm guessing. I'm not like, you know, they talk about the extraterrestrial hypothesis, the eth. I'm not an ETH person, which is, you know, the idea that aliens on Venus create a craft and then they fly over here and they look at us and. And then they fly back. You know, this seems to be something that's much more entangled with our consciousness and that's not to reduce it down and say this is just some psychological projection. I think it's more than that. I think it's a both end proposition. Ultimately, through talking about it a lot, I came to look at this experience as a kind of initiation into a different type of consciousness. An initiation into a totally new worldview. Lon Myla Duquette, the occultist, has a. Has a book. The title is something like it's all in your head. You just have no idea how big your head actually is.
