Early Friday morning, July 7th, I experienced the most profound happenstance in the Dreamtime of my entire life thus far.

In the dream I am seated cross-legged in a small round room at the center of a small domed pod that stands on four slender legs in the midst of a lush rolling hillside. To my immediate right is seated someone very close to me. Her eyes are shut and she appears to be very much at peace. I glance to the center of the room, where a very familiar looking man is seated on a carpet facing me, monitoring me as I open my eyes and come to.

Its none other than Terence McKenna! ...

... He sees my eyes open and he smiles, then begins repeating a mantra to me: "Wake up, but dont wake up! ... Wake up ... but dont wake up!" Then he begins rapping on and on about how phenomenal reality is a construct of language, and those who know the words of this language have the capacity to reshape reality to their liking (in accordance with the will of the Gaian anima mundi, of course!). He also goes into detail about how many of the stars we see in the night sky and recognize as stars are not actually stars. He explains why astrophysicists believe it to be so, and he tells me more about what they actually are --but to be honest the information was over my head, and I no longer recall the details.

But that wasn't the important point anyway. He ends his rap and begins staring me down, straight in the eye-- "Wake up, but dont wake up! ... Wake up ... but dont wake up!" What does he mean?

And then all of a sudden I understand.

I begin to understand that I can indeed wake up-- I can wake up and become alert and aware of the fact that I am inside the Dreamtime. I can become consciously aware that I am dreaming. But theres always a risk of actually awakening into the phenomenal waking world, where a sharp division exists between the lives of the living and the dead (unlike within the Dreamtime, where the ancestors are very much present and alive (see my previous entry, Osho and Me)).

So I do it-- I feel myself awake to the fact that I am within the Dreamtime. I'm dreaming!

Everything becomes less nebulous, more distinct, more focused. Contours sharpen and colors brighten. I stand up and look over at Terence. He's smiling, beaming, obviously happy that I understood and I've managed to wake up, but not wake up, as he puts it. Very briefly he tells me how to speak the language that will help me effect the profoundest impact on the world I'm about to step into. --Its the language spoken by the self-transforming machine elves encountered in the DMT flash-- fans of Alien Dreamtime or several other of McKenna's recorded lectures know well what I mean, and how it sounds. He doesnt teach me a vocabulary so much as where and how to access this tongue of the gods in my own larynx. I give it a try, and, lo and behold! --I can do it. The elfin mother-tongue begins to pour freely from my throat!

I laugh and Terence laughs too. I step through a doorway leading onto something like a veranda or gallery that encloses the circular room I had just exited, ringed with windows. I can't believe I have such crystal clear awareness of myself in the Dreamtime. What to do next? How to keep this clarity? --Then I begin to recall a technique I first encountered in reading Castaneda as a teenager --looking at ones own hands in the Dreamtime keeps one lucid and consciously active and awake.

So I decide to look at my hands. I can sense my arms upraising but at first I see absolutely nothing with my eyes. Then, very rapidly, my forearms and wrists and hands begin to take shape-- I see a rippling contouring outline that traces them, then flesh and blood sets in, and I have my hands! I can see my hands! I laugh aloud --I've always imagined this day would come.

I decide to do things with my hands-- first I raid through a set of drawers, then begin to pull the drawers out and fling them wildly, then ramble through more of the veranda, knocking things about, just simply being in full conscious control of my own immediate environment in the Dreamtime. I decide to do what I've always thought about doing, should such a lucid moment ever occur while dreaming: I'm going to throw myself out of the window --I'm going to do things wholly irrational and unfeasible in waking life.

I take my right hand and punch through the glass-- I realize I'm still feeling a bit fearful and apprehensive. Then I look down at my hand and forearm, and realize that, despite the fact that there is a gaping hole in the window and broken shards of glass everywhere, there is not a single scratch anywhere to be seen on me. It just doesnt work that way! So, without further ado, I throw myself through the glass into the outside world ...

As I near landing on the lush green ground outside, I begin to chant in the elfish mother tongue and I become stabilized in my fall, and begin to hover a few feet off the ground, traveling where and when I will over the rolling hillside. ... I travel here and there, seeing other pod-like structures standing round about, as well as other people I recognize from waking life.

I awake into the phenomenal waking world a short while later, my eyes filled with tears, gasping for breath.