In California the second half of the 1960’s were times of free-love, free-spirits, war protests, and psychedelics- especially LSD.  As a physics student in college, I didn’t have the time or inclination to become deeply involved in the emerging “drug culture” – but there was something intriguing about the stories of LSD induced hallucinations.  By the time of the events described in this story I had read Carlos Castaneda’s first book, “A Separate Reality,” and was very curious about his claims of experiencing and encountering an actual parallel reality.  I didn’t have access to the plants that Castaneda used as the gateway to his experiences, but at the time high quality LSD seemed to have similar results and was readily available. The stories made it sound like LSD might offer a doorway to similar experiences.  In the spirit of “scientific experimentation” (and “fun”) a friend of mine and I obtained some samples to see what would happen.  What I experienced was so unexpected, and so profound, that I ended up adding it to my growing collection of experiences of the unknown.  This event started me on the quest for trying to learn how to see, or observe, the spiritual side of life – but without the use of drugs. 

I was about 21 years old, living as a student in Arcata in Northern California.  One Friday night, my friend and I decided to try some of the new “acid” (LSD) that was in town.  Not being experienced with it, we decided to take an amount that was guaranteed to be “good.”  We did that, and then drank a beer while waiting to see what would happen.  After an hour or so we decided that nothing was happening, and that our acid  must not have been as good as claimed – so we took another hit of the same amount.  Since nothing was happening, we decided to walk the mile or so from my house to a college beer bar/dance club called “The Keg” where there would be live music and lots of our friends. To this day I have not decided whether my experiences in the Keg were real, or whether they were just the effects of too much LSD.  I have tentatively taken the position that they were both.  

We walked through town and chatted as if nothing special was happening, which was the case at that point. When we turned the corner to The Keg, we had to walk next to an old three story brick hotel.  Suddenly, the entire building swayed out over the street as if it were made of some sort of soft rubber, then swayed back the other way.  My reaction was to duck so the building wouldn’t hit me.  Then it dawned on me that the building wasn’t swaying, it was only my visual perceptions that made it appear that way.  I looked around to see what other odd things might be happening – but that was all that I could see that looked of the ordinary.  I asked my friend what was happening with him, and he described the exact same experience.  In fact, we both had to duck when the building came back again.  It continued to move with a large vertical wave as we stood and watched. 

Since that seemed to be the extent of the experience, we decided to cross the street and get a beer at pub.  Upon opening the door we were in for the surprise of our lives!  We knew that it was going to be busy since it was a Friday night with a dance band playing rock and roll music.  What we weren’t prepared for was a room full of huge fibrous eggs where people should have been.  We stopped at the door and talked about the oddity of the thing.  I could tell that they were people because I could recognize the image of the people inside of the “eggs,” recognizing friends and others.  However, the striking feature was that they were all encompassed inside of large, glowing “cocoons” of energy fibers that extended a couple of feet in all directions from their bodies. 

I turned to talk to my friend about it, and was startled to see that he looked the same.  We talked about odd phenomena this for some time.  I was quite surprised that we were apparently both seeing the same things since our descriptions sounded exactly the same.  I was (and am) convinced that we weren’t seeing a hallucination, we were finally actually seeing reality.  We decided against getting a beer at that time because it was clear that we really didn’t need one, and it wasn’t at all obvious how we could walk through the crowd because the space was filled with people’s cocoons. 

I noticed that I could move my fibers with the same kind of intent that I normally use to move my body parts.    I could reach out with a long fiber just like I could reach out with my hand or arm.  At that point I realized that I could communicate with others just by using my fibers to connect with the other person’s fibers.  As a test, I projected a fiber across the room and touched a girl on the far side of the crowd.  She looked over at me and just followed the fiber back until she was standing in front of us talking as if it were the most natural thing to do.  My friend had been watching this experiment, and expressed great surprise at the results.  The girl soon left us to go dancing, and that allowed us to experiment a bit more. 

We found that both of us were capable of this feat, and that we could see each other doing it.  It was kind of neat because it made it so easy and fun to draw people over to talk to us.  We spent quite a long time with this activity, but finally decided it was time to attempt getting a beer from the bar.  It turned out to be easy to walk through the crowd; the cocoons were soft and comfortable to slide between.  Upon approaching the bar I was surprised to see a couple of male figures sitting at the bar who didn’t have the cocoons.  My friend expressed concern that instead of being fibrous, they were black.  I noticed that they were not only black, but that the black was more of a void than a color.  They were featureless and the color of the inside of a dark cave – there was no color and no light at all.  These men were solid so you couldn’t see through them, but they seemed to absorb all of the light that touched them.   At first I was tempted to go up and talk to them, but then realized that they frightened me in an odd way.  Not in a way that they would do me bodily harm, but in a way that was more like they would somehow damage my cocoon.  My friend and I decided to stay away from those guys.  We couldn’t figure out if they were dead, would be dead soon or maybe they were not humans.  I don’t know what we were seeing, but they clearly were not the same as the rest of the folks in the bar, and were not something that we cared to play with.   We quickly agreed to leave these guys alone; whatever or whoever they were was not our concern.

We spent the rest of that night enjoying the music, enjoying the interactions with the egg people, and basically having a good time.  After closing time we walked up to my friend’s house on the hill.  Along the way we found that everything was sparkling, and that all of the living things had their own – but unique – cocoons.  We finally got to his house in the pre-dawn hours, where I laid back on his couch and watched huge, glistening snakes intertwine with one another where there should have been a ceiling.  I found them to be beautiful and in no way frightening.  It was not like watching a movie because it was in full 3-D and in the room with me.  However it wasn’t at all scary or upsetting because it was clearly just the effects of the drug.  I rather enjoyed the show. At this point my friend and I were no longer “connected” and seeing the same thing.  He was describing his hallucinations, and I was describing mine, but they were different.  Finally the sun came up and things seemed to slowly get back to a version of “normal.”