Fairy Stones and Mystic Trains

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attacked ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Watched the glittering of sea beams at the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost like tears in rain..."

--from "Blade Runner"

Like Roy Baty, the christiate android from the movie, I've seen things most people wouldn't believe. There's one particular time when I saw a bunch of things during the course of a day or so. I'm not actually sure how long it was --I lost track of time. No, I wasn't on acid; who cares about acid trips? Everyone sees wild stuff on that shit. I might have been crazy, that I will admit. But this stuff sort of hangs together in a way that you don't expect from the shattered imaginings of the mad.

When did all this happen? Well, I got arrested for a public disturbance and they threw me in the Hole because I wouldn't put on their fucking jail uniform; especially after Seattle PD had tasered me to the ground. So I wound up in a tiny ten by ten cell with a water fountain, a toilet and a hard damned pallet. But I didn't rest.

Instead, I saw things, went places.

For instance, the cell became a Maglev train, like the ones they have in France. I could get upfrom my pallet in what had been a tiny cell and walk up and down the aisles and sit in different chairs. I know this sounds crazy, and it probably is, but I was told more or less that this was a train for magicians and that Sir Anthony Hopkins liked to ride on this particular one. I was told not to disturb him with my conjurations or there might be trouble. I met the magician who seemed to be in charge. He appeared to me as a line drawing in the air. He made me agree to certain rules and I shook hands with him in a particular way which sealed the agreement, even though the hand he offered me was intangible. At one point, I offered a sloppy handshake and the image in front of me comically wrinkled its nose.

"No!" he said. "This sloppy hand jive won't do. This is serious business!"

In the end, he told me that I had been on the train before and that he always had a good feeling about me, a sense of trust and seriousness.

It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a hallucination, at least in the way most people understand such things. I was in some anteroom of our bread and butter reality. Dreaming has a certain texture to it, and a certain fragility. When you wake up, the dream fades. But this resides in my memory in the same way a visit to the grocery store or a bowling alley does.

Other things happened to me, many things, and I'm only relating the ones that are the easiest to describe. At one point I rode a floating stone piloted by a fairy sorceress. She told me that it was crucial we make it to our destination and that I must be impeccable. But I failed her test in some crucial but unknowable way and fell from the flying fairy stone. She told me woefully that she had thought I might be the Merlin energy returned to Earth, but that Ihad tricked her and now she would die, powerless and crippled. I apologized, I begged her to tell me how I could fix things. But this sort of test, when failed, is not the sort of thing one can fix and she told me so. She said that I might be a good magician, but that I was not a great one. It might be the purest arrogance on my part, but I can't tell you how this stung. It was as if the Jews hadseen the Messiah approaching but he turned out to be Bozo the Clown.

The last incident I will relate is in some ways the most puzzling to me, though on the surface it was less fantastical than the first two. I rode another fairy stone to a location which was described to me as the interior of a different world than Earth. This time, I didn't fall, but arrived at a location which seemed to be a transformed bversion of my cell. Instead of a toilet and cot in a tiny room, the space seemed to go on for miles and was covered in these tall stone mushrooms. While climbing over one of these, I slipped and fell, bashing my nose. That's when the door opened and a man and a woman came into the room-world. The woman took a towel to my bloody nose and soaked up the mess. When they were sure that I was going to be all right, they left again. And when I finally got home from the jail, my nose was clotted with dried blood.

I had some other adventures, but some of them seem to have faded from my memory and I can only sketch them out in the barest details. For instance, I played some sort of game with a prince of the underworld. When I offended himn in some mysterious way, he left me in a closed stone room from which it was impossible to escape. Obviously, I seem to have done so, but the terror of being walled up alive is still with me to this day.

What's my answer for all of this? I was a little bit crazy, I suppose. But I think it's the madness of shamans and magicians, the crack in the teacup that can open up lanes to the land of the dead. I just know that I have spoken with fairies and stood accused in a court of monsters, and that all, all, all of it was real.