I am totally tripping my balls off!

The sweet familiar of an ether induced high fills my head after a 10 hour oil painting session. Muscles in my extremities start to constrict as the toxin works its way from my lungs into my bloodstream. I begin to float myself to sleep.

As the curtain drops on reality, a sickly solace fills my head and I am transported into a place in my mind. This is a cramped tube of a place; dark and smelling of standing water. As I make a path through the piped catacomb, I am confronted by a very gaunt, alabaster skinned man who glares at me as if to stare, through me, into the wake of blackness behind. The man is naked and attempts to cover his exposure with the bony and emaciated appendages that strain and hang from his torso. I watch as this man takes an exaggerated breath in, filling his abdomen with air, stretching his skin away from his frame like a latex coated balloon. Expelling this breath, I see a cloud of powdered blue smoke emanate from his mouth and his stomach collapses in around his ribs and pelvis leaving an empty hollow where musculature should reside.

I soon realize that I am cold and unprepared for where I currently am. Chilled and anxious, I work to cover my own body with my arms. As I move, the man adjusts his head on his neck like a dog and his eyes make a transition from the blank to the violent. He now stares directly at me, into my eyes.

Electricity shoots down the base of my brain and I become petrified. At once I am awash in guilt and defensiveness for disturbing this man. Although I am freezing, a bead of sweat appears on my scalp and burns its way down my face. As the sweat rolls into the orbit of my eyes; I blink. The man breathes in again, but this time it is deliberate and directed towards my actions. As he continues to breathe in, he grows in size. I am frozen.

Arms expand to ape like proportion, hanging far too low for his frame, causing him to become top heavy. He leans over to let the inertia of his arms pull his upper body downward to the floor. As his fists come in contact with the ground, his pencil-like armature develops girth. His body now grows enormous, too big for the dank and sweaty smelling area we are in. His skin stretched to ridiculous limits, his towering body now begins to press against the walls. As my jaw drops in awe, his growth exceeds the capacity of the room and bursts through the ceiling and walls. The place comes apart like a porcelain doll.

The once alabaster man now heaves red and white as he flails into the open expanse created from his mass. For the first time since I encountered this being, my view deviates from the man to examine the devastation. What I see causes my joints to go limp, and I collapse in a heap to the floor.

The beast had broken through the original containment of the dark and had exposed a world of imaginable beauty. Blue skies and autumn leaves filled the sky around this man who grew oppressively larger by the moment. The ground immediately around us contained the gross remnants of the blackness we came from, but expanding outside this area were rolling fields, forestry, and open expanses that were only interrupted by the mountains on the horizon. The air was a bouillabaisse of crisp, natural perfumes mingling with the faint smell of a farmer’s mulch burning. My head rotates about on the axis of my spine to return to the monstrosity towering into the heavens, destroying this landscape’s picturesque majesty.

The beast grows, larger still, until the sky is nearly eaten up by the vision of horror. Everything that touches the entity contorts and mutates. Birds that pass into the wake of this devastation transform into skeletal frames coated in wax and quickly become bereft of flight. Trees and foliage burst into flames and grow dagger-sized thorns. Soon, this once Nirvana becomes as bleak and desolate as the heath from whence this ordeal began. It is when this world is at it’s most mad, I realize what is happening. This is fear, in all of its hideous glory.

Upon the revelation of understanding, the beast ceases its developmental assent into the heavens and again transfixes its gaze unto me. Towering into the clouds, hundreds of feet into the sky, I see two milky eyes bead on my body. The face no longer looks alive but has the visage of a human skull wrapped in a semblance of dripping musculature. As a parent readying to discipline a child, the creature hunches and readies itself to come down to my level. As the head thunders downward from the sky, the wind slices through the features on the menacing face causing the sound of a thousand screams both animal and human. The head becomes so large that it absorbs everything in view. Just 10 feet from where I stand, the nightmare stops. Encompassing everything that was, all I can see now is my reflection in the eye of this vision. I open my mouth and quietly speak the one word that makes this all go away.

“No.”

In a moment of no spectacular special effect or anguish, everything in the world returns to normal. Forests are reconstructed and everything that perished in the devastation is covered over by new life. After all has been restored, I sit on the hillside and look off to the horizon as a large formation of geese fly into the perspective.

“It is truly amazing what can happen if you allow your fear to consume your world and your life.” I thought, as I lay my head back into the moss-covered mana.