Fractal Labyrinth

Sit cross-legged, fingers folded, elbows jagged. 

Concentrate on that which is invisible, concentric, and eternal. 

Relax your thoughts; focus on the integration of time and experience. 

Feel your body lose weight and your extremities tingle with immaterial electricity. 
Become ethereal. 

Release your grip on that which is physical and fall into the sea of dreams. 

Embrace the trance that will take you there, that magical place far away from here, into the dominion of imagination. 

Slowly you feel your nerves coalescing into an orb of transport: a vessel for the land of projection. 

Extend, reach high, fly to places you’ve never been before. 

Enter a hallway of morose decadence. 

You can’t feel the air on your skin, but you can see dim lights from torches that converge into the darkness ahead. 

What’s that sound? 

You turn around but no one is there. 

 

Walk ahead, place your steps carefully to avoid the bones laying near the wall. 

Now you’re afraid because you aren’t used to this. 

Your mind plays tricks on you and the hallway begins to blur. 

Now you are falling back into your body and a monstrous entity is attacking you. 

You’re trapped in your physical body, but you can’t move it; the entity settles on top of your stomach. 

You try to open your eyes and look at it, but you can’t; you can only feel it shifting about on top of you as fear grips your psyche. 

But have no fear, for fear of the unknown is what makes it real to you. 

You realize that when you let go of the fear, the entity moves away from you. 

It only comes back again when you return to that feeling of being completely powerless and immobile. 

So, to the best of your ability, you ignore it and focus on the trance again. 

 

This time you can feel your spirit levitating over your body, and then your mind seems to spin 

around on an axis before entering a higher realm. 

 

Climb the steps at the end of the hallway. 

The place is still dim, but it seems to be getting brighter as you ascend. 

At the next level you come to a spacious room with another stairway on the left, going up the wall diagonally. 

You see that on the level above this one there is an open door that secretes a bright red glow to the right of the stairway. 

The glum atmosphere makes you shiver and again the fear gives you the sensation of falling back into your body. 

You recognize that your emotions control the scenery, so you regain control and climb the second stairway. 

When you reach the balcony, a snake slithers its way into the room with the red glow and you follow it. 

 

Hear the carnivorous moaning when you enter. 

To the left is a bathtub with red water and a dripping faucet. 

Sex toys are placed on all the furniture, and the wall patterns are erratic and circular, spiraling around this way and that, reminding you of a Matisse. 

Lights adorn the ceiling perimeter, accentuating the room’s sexual appeal. 

Stronger is the pull from the next room, the room from which the erotic moaning is coming from. 

You enter and see two women, one brunette and one blonde, feeling each other with silky hands. 

They merely glance at you, knowing that you want them. 

The women are naked and lusty, their flesh chilling your own and arousing your desire. 

Their eyes ask you to join them, but instead you move on. 

More snakes materialize from the orifices of their bodies, crawling around them, intertwining with each other as the women spasm with pleasure. 

After the snakes are free, water comes out and begins to flood the floor at your feet. 

You wonder if you should force yourself awake, but, realizing this is a dream, you walk into the next room and close the door so that the water can’t flood this one too. 

 

Now you’re walking down a blue hall and roots are growing everywhere. 

There’s something magical about the environment, 

You can hear faint harps, chimes, and violins squealing over a soprano chorus. 

You round a corner and now find puddles of mud on the floor. 

Your fear is gradually subsiding, your curiosity propels you forward. 

You pass a green room of ferns, moss, and insects, but you don’t want to enter it because the insects will swarm you. 

The cuboid orientation of these rooms makes you feel like a prisoner to conformity. 

 

After you round another corner you come to more stairs, at the top of which is a glittering mist of yellow and green that shrouds the blue ambience below. 

As you are climbing these stairs, psychedelic phosphenes invade your mind. 

You feel woozy and tired, as if you were being enticed into a higher realm that is both more magical and pleasant. 

 

Next comes a room with mirrors that scatter colors everywhere. 

This makes you feel disoriented because the movement of your body plays tricks on your mind. 

A voice is laughing behind you, and you must find the way out of this room. 

If you get stuck in the kaleidoscopic trance, there is a chance you’ll never get out. 

With what seems like a stroke of luck, you push the mirror that is closest to you and your momentum carries you out of the room onto some ramshackle boards extending to the base of a wall of roots. 

But these roots are not underground. 

You realize that this hallway is a tunnel leading to the outdoors. 

The air is even more distorted and mystical out here. 

 

You make your way outside and above you stands a gargantuan willow tree whose  

yellow-green leaves look like the hair of a dormant female giant. 

Birds are swooping in the air, calling you forth, so you climb the wall of roots and find yourself inside the umbrella of its canopy. 

Halfway up you relax and take in the meaning of this mysterious journey. 

Your path is leading you upwards, but you don’t know why. 

Each time you’ve elevated, you’ve felt that you’ve been transported to a higher realm, a realm in which the air is lighter, easier to breath, and the colors are more distorted, while the sounds have a higher pitch. 

 

Right next to you, you see a delicious apple hanging, so you pick it and eat it. 

This fruit suggests to you that perhaps you’ve risen from the depths of Hell and are eating from the Tree of Knowledge, or that you are climbing the Tree of Life. 

Perhaps this is all an hallucination, but even hallucinations are meant to be learned from. 

Everything is harder to discern in this dimension. 

You become aware that you may be undergoing a spiritual pilgrimage. 

Your thoughts continue to wonder where this journey will lead you, so you keep climbing. 
    

When you reach the top of the tree you find that you are standing in a garden. 

All around you are flowers, and sunlight permeates the air. 

You wander through the clusters of flower beds and pass some unusual types of plants- from giant neon mushrooms to braided vines of drooping buttercups. 

Bees and butterflies sing to you, calling you forth into the foreground of the music you heard before: the violins and harps being more audible now. 

But while the music is more clear, the setting is not. 

Reality is getting more distorted after you pass through bushes shaped like animals and walk over cobblestones shaped like brains. 

After that you begin to hike up the side of a snowy mountain. 

At the top you can see the sun shining: an opulence of attainment. 

You are anxious to reach the top, but you have to slow down because you are breathing hard, and your muscles are tiring. 

 

Hear angels sing and bells ring as the garden on top of the willow that grew from the cavern gets farther from view. 

From up here you can see a whole array of them down below, presumably growing from the canopies of many other trees. 

This great forest of life is a spiritual fractal, and the mountain is the center. 

You are almost at the top, and as the voices of the angels become clearer, you notice that the sun is in the center of a spiraling sequence of wings. 

When you reach the top of the mountain you grab one of the wings and it spins you around in circles. 

The momentum increases as you swirl inwards toward the light at its center. 

Gradually, you feel a peaceful integration with All That Is, a supreme Wholeness of Being, a return to the Source that split everything apart when time was bifurcated. 

 

Awaken now to the quietness of night. 

Slowly raise your head and take in all that has happened. 

Recognize the power of enlightenment and imagination. 

Your eyes now have a more ancient and wise understanding in them as they open before the dancing screensaver emanating from your computer. 

You perceive from the way the figurines on the screen are moving that they are communicating a testimony to what you’ve experienced. 

You also notice that the numbers on your digital clock are blinking instead of staying fixed: a curious detail. 

It seems to you that electromagnetic forces have some inclination to telepathy, as if these electrically charged appliances could read your mind. 

You know now that you are One with all humans, snakes and birds, angels and demons, caves and trees and mountains too. 

Even music and color, the computer and the clock, and all other material things.