Psychonauts Journey to Another World in a '73 Datsun: With Watercolor Rendering

I had volunteered to take my friend Will across town to pick up the tickets for the trip he'd planned. Back in those days I was still driving my 1973 Datsun Pick-up truck and it ran well, so he hopped in and off we went. He directed me to a neighborhood, and then a house, where he left me to wait in the truck for a few minutes. When he came back, he seemed very serious, and he fastened his seat belt and then held his hand out. "The tickets are damp. I don't know where to put them, but I recommend under the tongue."

With that, he dropped a tiny piece of paper with the image of a little skeleton printed upon it into my hand, and immediately stuck one just like it under his own tongue. Smiling broadly, he looked at me with a delightfully mischievous giggle, and I was thusly persuaded to put this metallic tasting paper tab under my tongue, start the truck, and be fully confident that I could get myself and Will back to the safety of our own neighborhood quickly.

Psychonauts

We were psychonauts. We weren't equipped for outer space, but we found out that in terms of size and scale, there's just as much inner space as there is outer space-- they are both infinite, and both contain infinite data. In order to explore this inner infinity, volunteers were needed, and my friend Will and I stepped up as an exploration team. On this evening, Captain Will and I had both ingested a single drop of liquid LSD, I was driving, and everything was fine.

I had estimated to myself that we had about fifteen minutes before the final countdown to launch, and we were still about ten minutes away from the comfort of our home neighborhood, when Will insisted that he needed to find a restroom. I suggested that he could hold it in, but he still insisted, so I whipped the Datsun into a warehouse area and found a vacant lot behind one of the darkened buildings. I turned off the key and Will jumped out.

I still thought we could make it back home in time, but while he was outside the truck, it looked like it had started to rain. It was a quiet rain, and in the dim light it almost looked like the glass windshield was melting before my eyes. Watching the glass melt, I realized that it wasn't raining. Instead, my coherent 3D reality was beginning to buckle and fold before me, and I had to wonder if driving the Datsun in these conditions would be considered reckless. Will got back into the truck, very nonchalantly, and looked at me.

He looked like he was about ten years old, glowing from ear to ear. He knew that I knew that he was aware that the truck's ignition key was not going to be turned back on for a few minutes, even though the windscreen had already stopped melting. We would have to stay parked for the moment, until the conditions eased up.

There we sat, behind a warehouse in a Datsun truck, and I closed my eyes for a time, and immediately saw tall fluted columns passing by on both sides, connected by long stone girders, a long structure curving gently ahead through a deep pure blackness. Some of the columns had vines growing on them, while others had vines artfully etched into the stone, while each section of girder wielded hanging baskets of dangling flowers of purple and yellow, and as the columns went by, I felt like I was traveling along some sort of passageway through space.

"Oh that's cool!" Will was sitting with his eyes closed too, and he began narrating what he was seeing as he sat beside me there in that darkened warehouse shipping lot. "Man, I'm floating along inside this thing made of pillars, and they have these fancy capitals on top that are made of real plants, like, growing from themselves! There's these big arched beams overhead. Whoa! It's curving, I'm in space. Oh, man..."

I hadn't noticed before but the plants did seem to be part of the columns when I looked closer, but something up ahead got my attention-- the passageway was coming to an end, and was opening up into a hazy bright gold light. When we floated out into that hazy light, I knew that Will knew that I knew he could see it too, but I described it out loud anyway.

"I just floated out into a... place. There's a gold chandelier hanging, oh wow. It's as big as a... it's gigantic. It's hanging from the top of this gold dome, that's as tall as the clouds, I never... there's light coming in from outside, it's like giant-sized crystal panes in gold frames, all the way to the sky."

Will agreed that it was spectacular, and we were floating there, stunned by the beauty and grandeur of the scene. Somebody had built all of this. Where were we? This was a place, somewhere. We were both looking at it, both Will and I seeing the same vivid details.

While I was looking at the golden structure and wondering how it could have been built, I had the unfortunate memory that I was sitting behind a warehouse in a little truck, and in a flash, I found myself back in the driver's seat of the Datsun. I closed my eyes again and tried to go back to the chandelier, but I couldn't find my way out of the Datsun. Will's eyes were still closed, and I waited for him. A few seconds later he was back, and we reviewed everything we'd seen, wondering where it was we'd been.

Neither of us were aware of having bodies as we had traveled along the columned passage, we were simple units of consciousness, somehow being guided through a void and into the golden-domed world where we'd gazed upon it's giant ornate gold chandelier in clear detail. My painting was done with some artistic license, since it was created over a decade after the journey, some of the details eluded my paintbrush. It should be more fuzzy, or hairy looking, with more millions of dangling golden tendrils (the size of freight trains) catching the light. The landscape below I added because I never looked down, I was focused on the chandelier, but I got the impression that there was dense living foliage below us.

Now it's been over thirty years since the journey, and yet I remember it clearly, and I remember the surprise when I heard my friend describing my hallucination. We were somewhere, and we'd both seen a place that was not behind a warehouse. The dusty little Datsun was parked, but in it we went to another world, one that exists inside of us somehow, with elaborate architecture designed by someone-- solid evidence of intelligent life. Whether we were spontaneously astral-projecting or just bodiless soul travelling, we were there, at the big, big chandelier, seeing it crisp and clear from the cab of my 1973 Datsun truck.

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image mine: 'Chandelier World' watercolor and ink 14" X 17"

names were changed to protect the innocent, story for educational and entertainment purposes only, all stunts were done by licenced, trained psychonauts, void where prohibited

@therealpaul