A Dream Within a Larger Dream

The ayahuasca trip of 2020, my first, was long and arduous.  It was also expensive.  I dropped about seven thousand dollars just on the journey to the journey in fact.

There were two days of spiritual preparation in the jungle.  I found myself in a state of high anxiety during that time of preparation.  I was in the company of a score of other psychic explorers, most of them young people from Europe and the British Isles.

In the event, on the third day and in the deep darkness of a large yurt, I drank the wretched brown liquid from a bowl held by our Colombian shaman.  Only about 15 minutes later I purged.  That experience was characterized more by relief than torment happily.  A young woman related to the shaman then took me by the hand and led me to what would become "my spot" for a week.  I reclined there with my back against the wall of the yurt.  She lay a large candle at my feet.

At about 2AM (we weren't equipped accurately to track the time) I lapsed into what felt like a lucid dream.  I was walking along a trail back home, not far from Walden Pond.  I turned a corner to find a woman sitting in a small clearing in a meditative pose, but with her eyes half open.  As I approached she raised her right index finger, gently to stop me.  She then opened her eyes completely and said "Young man, do you mind if I ask you a question?"

"Of course."

She sighed. "Now that everything material has come to dust, and everyone can see it, and we can see as well that we inhabit a realm filled with spirits, some real, some imaginary, some mocking our fears of them, who shall I choose to worship?"

Somehow inspired to speak without hesitation, and only half joking, I said "There's an algorithm for that."

She sighed more deeply.  She had by her side a plastic Halloween pumpkin.  She drew from it a single Chinese fortune cookie, still in its cheap plastic wrapper.  She tossed it at my head.  I caught it mid-air, but could not open it with my fingers, so I tore it open with my front teeth.  I cracked it in two and read the fortune aloud to her. "Garbage in; garbage out" it read.