We walked down the long wide corridor, our footsteps echoing in the dark on the parquet floor. The only light we saw came from a room at the end of the corridor. We passed by paintings and sculptures of ancient and unknown origin. When we came to the room, I noticed there were pedestals of many sizes and heights. The museum took on an other-worldly energy at night.
Our guide, our instructor, left me with instructions and then gestured to the remaining students… second year students, that their lesson would occur in a different part of the museum tonight.
I was the only one embarking on the first-year lesson, and so I was left alone as they made their way out of the room and down the corridor again, laughing and elbowing each other as they went, jeering at me and making comments like “You’ll never understand it until you experience it for yourself.”
I wondered for a few moments about what I must be missing. Having no idea what was to come, I turned back from the crowd exiting the room and looked down at the podium in front of me. It reminded me of the podiums I had stood behind as a child attending church. It was slanted downwards towards me, and had a narrow flat strip on the far side. A small strip of wood at the bottom of the slope held a stone tablet. The tablet was made of some type of light colored stone. It was approximately 10 inches wide and 14 inches tall and about 1 inch thick. It had worn, chipped edges and some type of writing on it that I could not read. The fact that it was ancient was no secret.
Suddenly, a light appeared to come from the bottom right corner of the podium, shining up through the surface. I looked at it and an orange-yellow glow appeared, shining up towards the ceiling. It soon changed shape until it made out a word. I won’t repeat the word here, only because of the meaning I have discovered it has, but for some reason, the idea to press on it, like some sort of electronic touch-screen popped into my head. I reached out and touched on the word, as if pressing a button.
Instantly, the room spun around me, and within a split second, I was in a dark cavern. It was completely pitch black, the only light coming from a midnight moonless sky shining in the cave opening to my right. I looked back at the podium, wondering where I was.
A pillar of light descended from the ceiling of the cave and touched the top left corner of the podium on the part that was flat and level. Soon, images began to appear in the pillar of light, like floating photographs.
They were approximately 5 inches by 7 inches in size, and they floated as though someone had taken hold of a stack of pictures, picked them up, and dropped them straight down, one by one. They moved up and down inside the pillar of light. Strangely, I noticed that they actually were the light.
The images themselves had light coming from them. This is what was illuminating the pillar. I could not only see them from above, but as soon as they floated above my head, I could see the images from below also. It was as if they were clear, or some sort of hologram. The images also moved, like a video recording.
There were thousands of images. They emerged from the top of the podium and scrolled upwards and disappeared in the ceiling when I looked down the pillar. When I looked up the pillar, they moved in the opposite direction, coming out of the ceiling and moving downwards.
The images just kept coming and coming. The more I looked for, the more appeared. Soon, the image on one of the pictures caught my attention and I focused in on what was occurring in that scene. Soon the rest of the pictures started disappearing. One by one they went away until the only image left was the one I was observing.
I wondered where the rest had went, and even tried to will them to return with my mind, but they would not come back. It was then I realized that I was still, technically paying attention to just the one picture.
Finally, I tore my eyes away from the pictures and forced myself to look directly at the spot on the ceiling where the images disappeared. I then looked at the spot on the podium where I had also seen some of them disappear. Soon they started coming back, and as long as I didn’t focus in on any of them, they came back profusely. More and more, and more of them appeared. As soon as I started to focus on one, the others started to disappear.
As I was experimenting with this process, totally absorbed in making them both come and go by what I placed my attention on, I was completely taken off guard when a hand placed it self on my right shoulder. It was a shadow hand. It had form and substance, but seemed to be made only of a shadow. It had some sort of electrical sparks over its surface that lit up here and there in flashes of orange and gold.
I knew what it was. And it was the most intensely evil presence I have ever encountered.
I thought I had conquered these things when I was younger. I didn’t believe in Satan anymore. I didn’t believe in anything that my own mind didn’t construct, so what the hell was this thing, and why was it here. Fear gripped me. Fear of dying. Fear of being consumed. Fear of pain. Every possible fear I could imagine feeling, I experienced simultaneously.
Just as soon as it placed its hand on my shoulder, it leaned forward and whispered in my ear… an ominous warning.
“By the way… I’m here, too.”
I panicked. I was so terrified, all I could think about was getting out of there. I frantically began pressing that lit up “button-word” on the podium, but nothing happened. Finally, in desperation I picked up the stone tablet on the podium and held it to my chest, pressing that glowing word one more time. Instantly, the cave spun and within a split second, I found myself alone in the museum room again, laughter echoing down the hallway from a couple of the second year students… “We told you so!”
The following day, I talked to a friend who did a lot of shamanic drumming and astral traveling. I told him about my dream. He laughed as soon as I told him I was in a cave. I stopped the retelling of the experience and asked him… “do you know what all this was?”
He simply looked me deeply in the eyes and said, “So you found the entrance to your subconscious mind, have you?”
