Explorations: Zone Horizon (1 - 18)
Explorations: The Second Sphere of Action (19 - 30)
Explorations: Through the Forest, the River (31 - 50)
High Oak, The Southern Line
It was a hot day in the middle of summer, and I had accidentally changed onto the Southern Line at Green Park, while trying trying to get to Victoria Station. The violet-coloured line on the tube map indicated that the next stop south was Maze Hithe. A few days earlier I had been told that, having reached the Kovak threshold of trance states, I could expect to have experiences of slipping sideways into parallel worlds. However, having just spent four years in the highlands of Papua New Guinea - out of contact with news from London - I was more inclined to think that a new line had been opened while I was away. I read the names of the stops to the south, stretching further in this direction than the Victoria Line - Maze Hithe, High Oak, Kelvingdean, Wassland Reach, Delta Heights.
I decided to get off at High Oak, because it seemed likely to be near my destination in south London. When the lift doors opened I was confronted by bright sunshine, and a bare, empty lobby, with a few leaves on the floor. As I walked to the exit I realised I was dreaming. However, I kept enough focus to keep walking and keep looking around me, rather than risk waking through introspection or through a state of wonder in which I had become fixated on a single object. The sunlight had the quality of being too real to be the light of ordinary reality, and I avoided looking directly at the sun, which I knew would wake me. There were trees and a grassy slope leading to the top of a hill. I walked up the slope through a long glade of oak, sweet chestnut and silver birch.
The summit looked out southward to more hills, some forested, some grass-covered. On the next hill was a largish house, amongst trees and small fields. I could see people in the garden, and occasionally I could faintly hear laughter, and people calling out to each other.
But it was the sky that took my attention.
In the white-blue sky to the south was - a vertical delta. The fluid curves of filaments of light - like soft, motionless lightning - were fanned out intricately from a central filament that came up from the horizon. In turn the outspread zone of light-streams reached an immense space of sky, which was at the same level of brightness as the delta of filaments below it. This vertical ocean of light stretched up toward infinity.
As I looked I came to see - or to see and feel at the same time - that the whole space around me and in front of me consisted of the rivers of energy or light that somehow became visible above the horizon.
The rivers consisted of something both less substantial and more intense than what is normally conceived of as energy. I knew, and saw, that the joy and delight and sensuality of individual people was inseparable from the vastest, most magical shared dreams of the future, and from the wider, deeper worlds of reality contacted and created in the process of realising such dreams. Two dimensions of one immensity.
I could sense an unbelievable joy, possible, already in existence, somewhere in the future.
I was beginning to wake up. There was a scatter of images, a forested ridge of the Carpathian mountains, the plane trees outside Holborn tube station.
And a voice somewhere was saying in an intense, light-hearted voice -
"You're falling awake!"
(written 2005)
*
From 1998 onwards there was a shift toward two aspects of the process or movement-forward which I had embarked upon earlier – in 1993.
The first of these was a sustained exploration of the potentials and productions of dreaming – of the faculty of ‘dreamings’.
The second was a focusing of attention on the planet, as opposed to the human world, with the human world being seen as an element within the planet.
In relation to dreaming a very wide domain of different processes and experiences was involved; dreaming up the future along new lines; writing stories; re-perceiving the nature of dreaming; dreams in sleep; semi-trance experiences in the form of sustained processes of envisaging; encounters and re-experiencings in relation to written and filmic fictions and to other forms of narrative. (it might be argued that dreams in sleep could only be included here as source-material for the exploration, but, on the contrary, there are very good reasons to see them as in the fullest sense immanent to it).
Writing stories was evidently a very active exploration of the potentials of dreaming. And the exploration was not a blind process of drifting: even though I had no ‘programme’ of any kind for writing (and ideas generally just came to me) there was nothing random about this exploration. At the level of my overall ‘dreaming up’ of what was going on in the world – and of the potentials of individuals and groups – I had a radically transformed domain of oneiric starting-points: groups and individuals could set out to travel further out into reality; the planet was Spinozistically on the same level as human beings; the human world was in fundamental ways an ongoing disaster; dreams recurrently were glimpses of wider realities; becomings were vital, in particular processes of entering into becoming with women.
By the time I wrote the story at the start of this section – toward the end of 2005 – I knew that something was emerging within my writing, whether or not this emergence had value.
There was a sense in which I had done the only thing that was straightforwardly possible in relation to escape-groups. I had set out to explore them within the virtual-real. And it was also the case that I had tried to draw on all available sources of inspiration. One vital place from which I was working was the series of dreams I had experienced between 1996 and 1998, and then – equally important - there were the micropolitical accounts found in A Thousand Plateaus and the works of Castaneda (and very soon there would be those of Donner and Abelar). But by 2004 I was drawing on a range of other resources which I had found within the domain of novels, short stories, film and TV. Very prominent amongst these were The Waves, the film of Picnic at Hanging Rock (I had not yet read the novel); aspects of the work of J.G. Ballard; and the John Foxx story “The Quiet Man” – but by this time I was also drawing inspiration from elements within P.J. Hammond’s Sapphire and Steel.
What will follow will be an account of this whole progression which will follow the lines of specific oneiric events.
However, the overall emphasis in relation to dreaming should not obscure the fact that the process – after 1998 – of entering into a deliberate, heightened becoming with the planet was not in the least the less important of the two developments which were described at the outset (and it should be added that there are many reasons that can be given in relation to this, but for now it is necessary to stay primarily within the space and the context of the question of dreaming - though this is more than enough). Firstly, this is because the dreamings were always themselves an expression, to one extent or another, of a becoming in relationship to the planet. Secondly, it is because they were very recurrently inspired by journeys to semi-wilderness and wilderness terrains that, as such, were substantially less connected with the human world, where these journeys involved a deliberate planetary focus, and where the terrains became zones within the virtual-real worlds of the dreamings. And, thirdly, it is necessary to see that the faculty of dreaming is only one modality in relation to the abstract (alongside, for instance, perception, lucidity and intent), and to see that a deliberate heightened connection to the planet is something that runs across all of the modalities. (see Section 36).
And there are two other issues, both of which will be shown to have a connection to an end-point - around 2011 - of the phase that began in 1998. The first of these concerns the fact that the writing of fiction was an element of a wider process which eventually would begin to express itself through a primary narrative which was not fiction (Hidden Valleys), and through an inter-fused engagement taking place to a great extent along the - philosophical - lines of faculties other than than the faculty of dreaming (lucidity; reason). The second issue is that by 1998 I had completed the transcendental-empirical journey through 'the cities' (Section 35), but in a way where I was about to be placed under the grim, dampening pressures of living, empirically speaking, in the middle of a very large city - London, to which I moved, with a group of friends, in 1999. It feels almost as if the shift - beginning around 2011 - toward a planetary hauntology (we are haunted by the Future, and we are haunted by the planet, in the sense that these are the directions in which we need to wake) was the only form of intellectual exploration that had the power to keep me moving forward: the writing of fiction was not enough, and primarily had only been working by virtue of the fact that it had also all along been hauntological.
*
Note about 1993 and music.
In the global human world of 1993 two elements had gone into place which were generators of new forms of suffering, and which simultaneously were instigators of conservatism. The first of these was zealous deregulationism (with its molar forms in relation to financial institutions, and its molecular worsening of circumstances in relation to work). The second was the first Gulf War, which had succeeded in raising up the image of war in a way that had not been achieved since before the war in Vietnam, and whose consequences were ongoing in terms of the instigation of terrorism. In fact, two progressions had been set into effect, one of which would culminate in the financial crash of 2008, and the other of which would culminate in 9/11 and the start of an era of intractable wars across a 'front' from Afghanistan to North Africa. However, in 1993 the facade was of a generalised success story. The future had already receded, but now it was slipping even further away.
The alternative cultures of the UK set out to follow the future: they did not get far, and ended up creating a fringe-zone encampment which over time would be de-populated and brought back in the direction of the interestablishment. In the USA the Clinton campaign had been a conservatising force (in the way that the process of the election of Blair would be, seven years later) in that it prompted an identification with a zone of ordinary, capitalist reality. But the situation in the UK was different - the re-election of the Tories in 1992 temporarily created a massive intensification of a counter-cultural domain that was already hypercharged.
It was a poignant situation, in a way that was not perceptible at the time. The 1962-1982 phase of higher intensity had been a time where music had been fundamental - it had been the phase of pop-rock modernism. Now, as the attempt was made to escape toward the intensity, music was in a sense even more fundamental than it had been previously, though pervasively it was now very closely associated with uses of drugs that meant people were likely to be rapidly thrown back to where they had started, or worse. And the 'window' was not going to last long: New Labour was not far away. The new forms exploded: techno, drum and bass / jungle (drawing for their primary beat component on the 60s), trance, gabba, garage - coming on top of the acid house that had started in the late 80s. And then, before long, the whole process would start to fade - becoming an inreasingly minimal and denuded zone across the world of post Blair-victory Britain.
At that time I was therefore confronted with two forms of response to the new, very grim modality of the ongoing human disaster. Landianism happened to be present in my immediate milieu ("we just have to accelerate the deregulation"), and then simultaneously across the whole alternative-culture zone there were currents of what could be called 'Rhoda-ism' - only half-awake movements of escape:
"Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might rise and set in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from the here and now." (The Waves, Penguin, 1992, p.172)
Even the more inspired dance-associated microcultures were almost certain to be bubbles that would rapidly burst, and yet the whole process in these zones was the work of the currents that led away from ordinary reality into the Future. And it is important to see that the fragility of the escape-zone is in fact contingent all along on the strength of its pragmatics and its immanence metaphysics (the will-to-party would have to undergo a full metamorphosis into the intent to travel toward wider realities).
My instinct had always been that in some sense music was a vital part of the Way Forward. There was a sense in which I was right about this, though in escaping toward space as a transcendental spatium it is recurrently only very specific, hyper-charged songs and pieces of music which in the fullest sense can be 'components of passage' - door-openers, generators of visions, creators of trance-states. (this is in part because, in that we are trapped by the line of time, the temporality of music all along has a problematic aspect).
It is important to follow - or to give attention to - the role of music in the experiences which will now be described, experiences from the years after 1998. And it is also important to say that in thinking about the time after 1993 I am left with the impression that, although the path forward before 1998 was A Thousand Plateaus, the combination during these years of Tess and dance-music microcultures in some sense propelled me a very long way forward, or relocated me to a much better version of the same path. As if we had been given a lift in a very well equipped vehicle driven by a Rhoda who had overcome her fear, and who had taught us about a pragmatics of lucidity. And as if somehow, after us having been dropped off in a town, I had found myself on the edge of the countryside, in summer, on a road leading to Harbury Lake.
Everything here concerns journeys into the outside, and most fundamentally it concerns journeys into a specific direction in the outside, a direction which, as we have seen, is not just Love-and-Freedom, but is also an awareness of death. This does in fact directly involve journeys into the outside of urban spaces, or, to be precise, the outside of spaces where the ordinary human world is in the foreground (this is because, done in the right way, these journeys intensify your abilities to love and to be free, and because under these circumstances they intensify a love for, and an awareness of, the planetary world within which the human world exists). But it needs to be seen immediately that the question of choosing which connections with the outside to increase is very much a question of choosing your relationships with people, and is also - very crucially - a question of deciding which zones or attributes of the world you should focus on (which is to say, which faculty or faculties you should now set out to wake), what practices you should use, and what areas you should select for within the zone-of-encounter of a faculty.
In going to live in London, in 1999, all of these issues were suddenly viscerally urgent. But they were not urgent in a way where I was aware of the nature of what was pressing upon me. Which immediately gives the opportunity to say that the fundamental decisions in relation to directions in the abstract can not really be described as having been taken by you (although the opposite is not strictly true either). It is more that after a while you learn to go very deliberately in the directions opened up by the inspirations which have appeared in you, rather than ignoring these inspirations, or letting them be recurring elements that never get taken up by a pragmatics.
A few months after arriving in London I finished writing my Ph.D thesis and took it up to Warwick University, where I was told by the department that it could not be accepted because it had taken too long (it had been seven years, which is not that unusual a time), an outcome that was no doubt more connected to my having not been very punctual or accessible in terms of re-arranging dead-lines on the way (and specifically in the last few weeks), in that I had nervously prioritised writing over contact with the department. On my return to London, after a pause of two or three weeks, I started writing a philosophy book, Dimensions of Contact: a Nomad Guide to Intensification, a project which I finished three years later. I feel that that this is a valuable work (I feel it would be good for it to be published), but despite this, it remains the case that at this time new directions had opened up - as a result in particular of experiences between 1996 and 1998 - which were setting me up to work at the very least along parallel lines (lines of philosophy and of stories), and it remains the case that I was ignoring this direction in a way that - initially, at least - was a failure to stay immanent with my inspirations (which is not at all to say that I should not have written Dimensions of Contact).
In relation to the people around me the situation would culminate in the point, in 2003, when I realised that I simply had to walk away from zones of my life where no creative or Futural alliance was possible (Section 34). By this time I had learned, in part through working on londonunderlondon with Mark Fisher, that in a genuine friendship when you brought up the ideas that had a cutting-edge aspect these ideas would take flight, or at the very least would be met with openness and enthusiasm (whereas in other circumstances there would be a dampening process of everything being fendingly turned away toward apparently relevant issues which at depth ignored or mis-heard the point of what had been said). During these years I learned about creative friendship-alliances from Mark, from Yildiz, and from other friends, including the friends - most of whom were women - who I made in the years after 2003.
In connection to London the task was that of temporarily departing from it in ways that moved me forward (I went to several different places on the holidays that I could afford, and settled quite rapidly on journeys into wildernesses; and whereas initially I went with other people, at a certain point I shifted toward a long phase of travelling on my own), and was that of finding a way of living within it which was minimally impeded by it (by 2003 I had found a life within London - working at a college, and working on projects - which was effective as a temporary strategy, but it was necessary to find a way of making this life an entering into composition with the planetary world beyond the human domain, so that it was as little affected by the interiority of the mega-urban as possible).
The strategy I took up with drugs was to take them only under rare circumstances, ideally somewhere in the countryside or outdoors, and to take either drugs that I had found or grown (psilocybe mushrooms, datura) or other powerful halucinogens available by mail-order, such as yopo (psychotropics which, like datura, were so intense in their effects that no-one has bothered to make them illegal).
Lastly, it is clear that in terms of what I was reading I had fallen into a river. I had fallen into this river in reading A Thousand Plateaus, it had picked up speed where I started to read Castaneda's books in 1998, and now - unknown to me - I was being swept toward four books by two women writers, Florinda Donner and Taisha Abelar. However, it was simultaneously the case that I was being recurrently moved forward, and that on a deep level I was clinging on, though often these ways of clinging on were disguised. Instead of burrowing into abstractions and embodying an off-in-my-head combination of scepticism and agreement in relation to Castaneda I should have got on to a greater extent with becoming-perception, and with processes of entering into composition with the planet, quietly getting on with embodying the path of deterritorialisation which both Deleuze and Castaneda were pointing out. And in doing this I might have realised a little sooner that I was ignoring sources of inspiration that in fact had nothing to do with Castaneda, in that almost all of them - and certainly the most intense of them - were from the two years before I embarked on reading his books.
The problems were therefore about perception and dreaming, as fully active processes. And the crucial issue in this context is the second of these faculties. In terms of creating dreamings, in the first years after 1998 I was ignoring the inspiration that I was now carrying with me (and it should be pointed out that Castaneda and Deleuze do not tell you how to embark on a line of flight of writing stories, any more than they tell you about the pragmatics of taking part in setting up an escape-group - perhaps, with both issues, because of lack of knowledge, but perhaps also because of the subtle and serendipitous nature of these forms of emergence).
In terms of the process of writing narratives I was not following the lines pointed out by the dreams and story-ideas of the phase from 1996 to the point when I left for London, in the October of 1999. But, in contrast, the river was definitely in effect in terms of reading. And this was true not just in relation to the main line of abstraction that continued from A Thousand Plateaus: it was also true in terms of fiction. The exceptionally intense dream in February of 1998 (Section 24) took place after starting to read The Drowned World, a few hours after finishing reading Cities of the Red Night, and from the outset I had a feeling that an 'oneiric-abstract adjustment' had been made at this point, an adjustment that I would now describe as a shift from transcendental west to transcendental east. And this inspiration - which of course involved reading rather than writing, and in comparative terms was a minimal issue - was something which from the very beginning I did not ignore, even though this was not really a deliberate strategy in any way. What happened was that over the next few years I read quite a lot of works by Ballard, and shifted away from reading Burroughs. I have not returned to Burroughs, and although it is not the case that Ballard has gone on to be a major inspiration, it is definitely true that in the years after 1998 my processes of writing fiction are describable in part as departures from Ballard's worlds, where the departures carried a little of these worlds with them.
*
In July of 2000 I decided to cycle from London to Leamington, to visit friends, and for the pleasure of the long cycle rides (if I had not been extremely short of money I would probably have succumbed to laziness and taken a train or bus, but I think my description of my motivation is correct). It was good weather for the whole trip: I cycled from Stoke Newington to Leamington on the first day (arriving at about 9.30 in the evening). I stayed with my friends for two nights, and then the next day I decided I would stay in the town for a while, and then cycle the four miles southeast to Harbury Lake, so that I would spend the night there, before doing the ninety mile ride to London the next day.
The visit had gone well: I had enjoyed meeting up with my friends, and the ride from London had been exhilarating. I also liked the idea of spending the night at the lake (I had not done this before), because it was a place I liked, but also because of the sense of freedom that the plan gave me.
At some point on that ride the idea of the story "Ktarizon: Deep Water" came back to me (see Section 18). I remember clearly that I was looking at the blue-white sky to the south, and the story was unfolding in my mind. New aspects of the story started to emerge, and - overall - I had on overwhelming impression that the process of dreaming up this story was in some sense at the outer, most positive edge of my experiences of joy and lucidity. The midsummer Warwickshire sky was somehow fused or melded with the story, and the feeling was of having arrived at a new place, a new level of the sublime. In fact, the place was somewhere I had been the year before when the idea of the story arrived, only I had gone round a turn of a spiral, and the joy was more intense than it had been the first time. And the feeling in relation to the story was that in some way it had all the necessary dimensions, whether explicitly or implicitly. Intermittently I had been working on other stories over the preceding year but the feeling given to me by these other virtual-real worlds was not quite the same: they had not been taken over some oneiric threshold, and they felt attenuated in comparison. It seemed that in comparison to "Ktarizon: Deep Water" these other stories did not quite catch the light.
Not long after returning to London I took three weeks out from writing Dimensions of Contact, and I wrote the story. I wrote the end first, and then worked my way toward it from the beginning. Suffusing this process - as its primary tonality - there was the same feeling of a kind of lucid, solar bliss that had been there on the way to Harbury Lake.
The compass in the story has been brought across from The Drowned World, although there has been a transformation in the process. But the ocean is not the ocean of Ballard's novel, despite there being something in common in relation to there being a 'natural-world' quality of energy being the transcendental.
It is clear that in writing Ktarizon I was writing about groups, about planetary terrains, and about the use of psychotropic substances; and if the story is read carefully it will be seen that its line of flight - along with the escape group - is the sky, sunlight and a place somewhere in an an area of hills, as opposed to this line of flight being the ocean. And yet of course the ocean is fundamental in the story.
What is this ocean?
*
At this point there is another event that needs to be recounted, one that in a complex way is barely part of this current series of faculty-of-dreaming experiences. In fact, an additional reason for recounting it is that it will give a faint hint of the need for these experiences to be divided into two separate series, both beginning around 1996.
In August of 1999 I hitchhiked across Europe to Romania, and I did a walk across the Carpathian mountains. This was the first time I had been in a large deciduous forest: across the southern areas of the mountains there was an immense terrain of beech trees, which further down became an area with a very large diversity of both trees and smaller plants. I was blown away by the beauty of this forest.
The friend with which I was doing this walk was taking a different, more numerics-oriented direction within philosophy ('schizonumerics' was of course a central element of the thought-world of the CCRU, and my friend was a part of the CCRU), and our intellectual rapport on the walk was fractionally disjointed. But the 'fraction' in some sense perhaps related to a larger gap, at another level. The impression I have now is that I was there in that forest, and so was my friend, and yet somehow the two of us were not in the same place: as if - sometimes at least - we were in two different versions of the same forest.
On the fourth day of walking we found a northeast-facing alpine meadow which had psilocybe mushrooms growing in it (liberty caps, psilocybe semilanceata). We picked around 150 them, and two days later we ingested some of these mushrooms in a narrow, semi-glade in the forest, at around 10am, on a sunny day. (for reasons that are now a little unclear this semi-glade - which was the place where we were during the height of the trip, around midday - was very near to the path: no-one came along, but it is an enigmatic detail, in terms of it being a bit disfunctional).
We were sitting down, on rocks, facing toward the light. And at a certain point I closed my eyes, and found myself looking at something which I experienced as a kind of 'haunted ocean.' (although the word 'haunted' does not all capture what I saw, and only very minimally evokes what I felt). I was seeing a kind of underwater space of nexuses of narrow tube-tentacles, which were transparent, looked in some way organic, and had tiny coloured points of light moving slowly though them (I think the main colours were violet, green and pink). The perspective was skewed, in the sense that there seemed to be a nexus out of sight to my right, alongside me, and there was one that was visible ahead of me in the middle distance, but to the left. In front of me a transparent filament or tube-tentacle went diagonally from the cluster-point to the left, becoming larger as it became nearer, because of perspective, and then disappearing toward the nexus that was an implicit presence on my right. The three-dimensional meeting points consisted of eight or nine filaments in a kind of small organic-looking bulb that was a faintly anemone-like spheroid-with-projections, where the projections faintly tapered - over a short distance - into the slightly narrower width of the filaments that went between the nexuses. Scale was not discernible, and had a quality of being irrelevant: I could have been looking at a city or the nervous system of a sea-creature, but the feeling was that what was extraordinary about what I was seeing was on another level. And a last point is that the impression was of looking through a window, rather than of being within the space I was seeing. I was viewing the ocean through a window (so that I could not have looked around me), although the idea was that in the place where there was the 'window' there was no structure in the world at which I was looking, only ocean.
The light was half-light, as it would be under the ocean, and although there were no features in the far distance the light was brighter higher up. The feeling was that the points of light were travelling under circumstances of maximal protection, and that in any case the whole world of these nexuses was hidden away, deep in some oceanic zone that was itself protected (as if there was some barrier that I could not see, that went around everything, but let in some light).
There was a quality of the natural world about what I was seeing (its organic aspect was a fundamental feature of it), and yet it was an eerie place - though in a slightly dark, or 'penumbral' sense, not in the sense of the eerie-sublime (for instance there was none of the 'solar trance' affect that is evoked so powerfully in Picnic at Hanging Rock). It was serene, unearthly, faintly lit, and it was both a natural world and a domain of the eerie.
This was my fourth full trip on mushrooms. At the time I don't think I noticed that the 'linearity' of the experience was totally different from what had happened before. On the previous three occasions I had had very fast-moving, coloured geometrical visuals, which had sometimes taken the form of intricate metal-like lines that passed above and underneath each other, weaving intricate curved and coloured patterns across a two dimensional plane, but these had remained at the level of intricate, fluidly geometrical, shifting arrays, so that the linearity had a quality of being a primary aspect of a geometrical phantasmagoria, with it, generally speaking, not looking at all organic, and generally also with it not having much depth. It was 9 years since I had first seen visuals, while on marijuana, and 7 years since I had seen them at very high intensity on LSD (see Section 35, and Section 10), but now, under circumstances where I would have expected to see them there was a linearity which was very different, and which had a much calmer quality. The lines themselves were serenely motionless, and the only movement and colour was that of the tiny points of light that were moving through the filaments.
I was struck by the consistency and unusual, atmospheric aspects of the experience, but I did not give it much thought (it had not lasted long, and although in the course of the trip I kept getting similar 'views' nothing new was added, so far as I remember). Given
that it had a slightly 'dark' or penumbral-eerie quality - and given the 'brightness' and joy I associated with experiences on psilocybe mushrooms - it had not been at all what I had been expecting from a trip in an exceptionally beautiful forest, on a sunny day in midsummer: initially I put the thought of what had happened to one side.
The ocean in "Ktarizon: Deep Water" is the world as it is encountered during certain kinds of drug experience, but it is also very much a planetary ocean in an ordinary sense (as opposed to it having the quality of it being a hidden-away dimension of the planetary). And when something anomalous occurs it is experienced as entirely positive: the indications are that if a channel of contact has been opened up (if the moment of the anomalous is not the functioning of Kerry's unconscious) it is with a futural dimension, a zone of the present consisting of multiplicities which have crossed a threshold of awareness. This ocean is a very bright place - a place, that is, which is fundamentally about contact with the outside, and, in particular, the South of the outside.
When I started working on londonunderlondon with Mark Fisher (toward the end of 2000) the energy and the areas of thought-and-dreaming which I brought to the new project were very much those of the line-of-escape within Ktarizon: Deep Water. And the escape-group appears within londonunderlondon, though this time more implicitly, and seen from a distance (it is more faintly encountered, but you could be left with the impression that this group could have traveled further into the Future than the one in Ktarizon). However, the ocean which appears in the last part of this work is a brightened, more externally-connected version of the ocean that I saw when I was in the forest in Romania.
londonunderlondon is about "London fictions" which in some sense involve the city being inundated by its outside, but where the emphasis is on fictional worlds where for individuals there is also a specific further process of being suffused or swept away by an exteriority, whether this is directly or indirectly connected to the one affecting the city (in The Drowned World London is flooded with the ocean and overgrown with jungle vegetation, and in his dream Kerans feels "the barriers between his own cells and the surrounding medium dissolving" and his experience is of spreading out across the lagoon).
The space of londonunderlondon is broken open by The Drowned World, and by John Foxx's story The Quiet Man (discovered by Mark), which is included in its entirety at the beginning (these two fictions appear at the start and end of the 1962-1982 - pop-rock modernism - phase of western-world high intensity, and it should be noted that Foxx has departed from music in producing this story, and that The Quiet Man in vital ways is a deepening of the world of Ballard's novel). The other crucial fiction is Nigel Kneale's 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit, a film in which the gothic is fundamentally naturalised, but remains just as horrific, in that within this story all human beings have been pre-suffused - as a result of genetic tampering by another species - with something monstrous at the level of their intent. And this contrasts with The Quiet Man where the suffusing of the individual with the outside is of a very different kind: London has been taken over by vegetation and animals, and the lone individual has himself been taken over by the perception of this parallel-world London which in fact we have no reason to believe exists in the future.
The role of the fiction which concludes londonunderlondon (the story about events at a three-day warehouse party) is in particular to communicate with these last two fictions, The Quiet Man and Quatermass and the Pit. (there was not enough time to realise this fiction at a full level of effectiveness, so despite some aspects of the realisation being strong it is best to focus on the writing). And there are two primary points here. The first is that the escape-group is included (in contrast with the lone individual), and, inseparably, the future is explicitly set out, not chronologically, but as existence at higher and higher levels of intensity, one world after another, so that the journey of the escape is a movement into wider and deeper levels of reality ("when space breaks open, time turns sideways"). The second point is that a connection is made leading from Nigel Kneale's dark-transcendental to another direction which is brighter, and which should be seen as a means of understanding what is anomalous about human beings, and merely as a waystation - a transcendental southwest (which as such in a deep sense is a cul de sac) leading to transcendental south. Instead of the Martian insects there are the 'moth-creatures' which come through interfaces between two co-existing or superimposed worlds (I chose my friend Samia Iredale to communicate the bightness of this venturing into another world), and instead of an interaction in the distant past between the Earth and Mars there is the idea of an ongoing connection between two superimposed dimensions of one world.
"it was like it was all deep in an ocean, an ocean filled with coloured lights, and ... nexuses, and London was somehow stretched through it"
*
It was at some point in 2001 or 2002 that I had the following dream. I don't remember anything specific about the circumstances at the time of the dream, but my impression is that the lens involved owes something to Ballard's stories, and simultaneously owes something to Tarkovsky's Stalker, which I had watched (for the second or third time) in the months before the dream.
I dreamed that I was in a very large derelict structure which was partly underground and partly above ground. The part that was above the ground seemed to be a large metal framework the height of a five story building, and the part that was subterranean seemed to be a system of basements and tunnels that went the same distance below the surface. The whole structure was derelict, with a quality of being post-industrial, but at the same time there was an aspect of the building which was 'in operation,' although the feeling within the dream was that this was in some way accidental, as if a machine had been left running, or had been turned on by someone who was exploring the building. The part of the structure which was functioning was an oval shaped conveyor belt that went on a shallow diagonal (perhaps thirty degrees) from the highest point of the building to the lowest, and back again, in a very long oval-shaped loop (it can be seen that the whole structure would have been much longer that it was high, and the space of basements and tunnels through which the conveyor passed was not directly underneath the above-ground structure but was displaced from it, sideways).
In the dream I had been trapped on this conveyor belt for a long time. In some way there were no places where it was possible to get off it, because of height in the upper part of the structure, and because it was in some way closed off in the lower part. However, there was a point when I was coming up from the subterranean section when I saw a - very dangerous - opportunity to jump onto the ground. As I jumped there was a sharp, projecting piece of metal which I had to avoid by throwing my head to one side, the second after I jumped, but I succeeded in doing this, and landed unscathed on the ground, which was some kind of metal walkway (I had not had to jump far, or from any significant height: the main problem had been what I had to avoid, together with the fact that I was jumping from a moving and tilted surface).
But almost immediately I landed on the ground I was somewhere else. For a moment the new terrain was in front of me, and the structure I had escaped was behind me, and then the structure was gone, although the feeling of relief at having got off the conveyor belt was still informing the new experience. I was in a suburban street of a city, in bright sunlight, in early morning. It was the kind of suburban area that would generally be a long way from the centre: the houses might have been semi-detached or detached, and there were gardens with smallish trees in front of them (it felt relatively new; it seemed to be an area where there was wealth: and it had a nondescript quality).
There was a serenity about how I felt which was in part about the escape I had achieved, but which primarily arrived from a serene quality I was experiencing in what was around me. The light was serene, and so was the place and the early morning sky; and everything had a visionary quality.
The quality of a visionary perception was associated with the fact that everywhere on the ground and in the garden there were sheets of newspapers - lying flat, or moving a little in a breeze. What I was perceiving was that at that moment I was free of the words that were the content of these sheets of printed paper, and more deeply what I was seeing was that a terrible ongoing disaster was taking place within the human world, and that this disaster was very deeply connected with words.
A newspaper boy went past me on a bicycle with a nonchalant quality, cycling away out of sight - the feeling I have is that he might have been whistling (and this now reminds me of a conversation I had many years later with Mark, when he said that an unknown individual who is confidently whistling can be an eerie figure).
However, what was most fundamental about this whole phase of the dream was that in becoming serenely aware of the human disaster around me something new arrived - something that suffused the serene feeling of the dream and turned it into a perturbed feeling unlike any I have ever known. I dreamed that I was smelling burning lives. The experience within the dream was that the smell was of peoples' lives burning - not their bodies, although the horror was the same as this, but their lives.
I was jolted by the feeling, and I started to wake: and at the last moment, just before I woke, I was in a quiet side-street in somewhere that might have been Covent Garden or Holborn, an area that at this time I had visited on only a few occasions (I think it was still early morning), and I was looking at a street sign. I don't remember what it said for certain, but I experienced the name as having no obvious interest - I think the sign said "Mabel Lane."
This dream gives a very clear view toward the third and fourth aspects of the empirical-transcendental (see Section 34), and it also gives a minimal - and somewhat occluded - view toward another of these aspects - the second sphere of action. Which is to say that primarily, in relation to the empirical-transcendental, it breaks open a perception, firstly, of the ongoing human disaster, and, secondly, of the inseparable fact that human beings are travellers who have been trapped, so that they go round and round in circles. And the dream does this in a way which points toward the fundamental problem of language as a primary element of the trap (an issue which - when understood in relation to the freeing of perception in a process of leaving behind the fixation on words - relates directly to the second sphere of action). It simultaneously draws on awareness of death as a jolting force, that concentrates attention. The dream is an abstract-oneiric machine of quite a powerful kind.
It can be seen, nonetheless, that this dream gives an emphasis to critique, and that it in fact it has a curious feature of not going very far into the outside. It is 'a component of passage' but to function well it needs to be connected up to other outsights. It gives only a blocked view of the second sphere of action, and the current of Love-and-Freedom is barely visible through it at all.
However, this entire section directly concerns the sixth - and most important - feature of the empirical-transcendental: the current of Love-and-Freedom (Section 34; Section 1). And the dream when swept up into this context becomes a component of passage in the fundamental sense, rather than in a relative sense (a relative sense involving a cul de sac direction of the outside).
Everything here concerns an intensificatory - and deeply intermeshed - connection between the faculty of dreaming and a process of entering into becoming with the planet. And as we have seen (Section 36) the dynamic of entering into composition along these lines does not just involve movements from predominantly human-created 'insides' into more obviously planetary 'outsides' (from Coventry to Leamington; from Leamington to Harbury Lake; from Britain to a mountain forest in Tuva; from a building to the street) but also involves becoming capable of unbroken, spheroambient perception, where the perception is unbroken by words.
The dream is very radically about an escape into the outside, but it is very timid about where it goes when it reaches the outside (a suburb, and then a moment later the very centre of a large city). However, it is working simultaneously along two, very closely related lines. In relation to perception and language it could scarecly be more effective - the point is made at a shocking level of intensity, an intensity which of course is all the greater in that it has a cosmic-serene, desubjectified aspect. It is just that - again - this needs to be taken further: it needs to be connected up to the fact that we do not just need to wake perception, but need to wake a perception which is in the horizon of the planet, through a planetary envisaging that exists along with it, as a - non-cognitive - additional element coming from the faculty of dreaming. The multi-sense sphere of perception with its Immense, envisaged correlate, the sphere of the planet.
The dream therefore conducts toward an entering into composition with the planet in a much deeper sense than is involved in connection with its leafy suburb. The movement toward the outside that is a waking of perception is in itself already a movement toward the planet, although an oneiric attunement then needs to be made so that the perception occurs within a planetary perspective.
*
There was a year between the arrival of the idea of Ktarizon: Deep Water (at Harbury Lake, in 1999) and the point where I started to write the story. With the dreams about escape-groups in the years between 1996 and 1998 (culminating in the dream in February 1998) there was an even longer delay before what had taken place started to impact on me as something to be taken up as a dreaming - as virtual-worlds to inhabit and communicate. However, it needs to be seen that the initial events were very different, and that the length of the hiatus is only a minor indicator of this difference. Although Ktarizon: Deep Water was initially a kind of reverie (in the moments when, looking at rocks just below the surface of the lake, the world of the story appeared) it very rapidly - as part of the same initial process - became something that I saw as an idea for a story. In contrast, with the dreams and waking oneiric 'flashes' of 96 to 98 I never viewed any of these as the basis for a fiction It was more that they were anomalies which seemed to point to a direction within the human world - the direction of the group escape - and which in different ways had an extraordinary feeling of joy associated with them. With the dream in February of 1998 (see Section 24) the experience had in fact been so overwhelmingly intense that it had left me with a persistent feeling of it somehow having involved a wider and deeper level of reality. So even though this dream had a sequence of events that was in fact a basis for a story, it did not at all occur to me turn it into a fiction: it seemed to need to be recounted rather than transposed (for instance, if an explorer had discovered a system of geoglyphs across the surface of an area of jungle, would their response be to turn the experience into a novel, rather than tell people about the geoglyphs?).
In writing Dimensions of Contact the idea came to me, that given the virtual-real is no less real than the actual, a dream which has a higher, more encompassing level of joy and exhilaration than anything experienced in waking reality in fact pertains in some way to a higher level of existence, and should be treated as a guide in finding a way forward in your life. This thought arrived through thinking about the dream in 1998 - and there was no other experience which could have had this impact (the joy involved was encompassing because it involved perception, sensation, friendship, love, and the outer-edge joy of a journey across a dimensional boundary to a more intense level of awareness). (a point that should be re-iterated about the sheer, ultra-bright intensity of the dream is that in its crucial group-escape phase it had people and an action which was taking place - a process of attunement - but it had no images, so that everything was a kind of seeing or understanding - involving space, individuals and an event - that in some way, as seeing, was inseparably feeling/sensation, and that was not visual in form).
The above idea stemmed from thinking about the dream, but evidently this thought-and-argument is something very different from a story (it would be four more years before a story started to arrive, and the process - which became an element of The Corridor, and also became the story The Far Glade - was only 'completed' in the years between 2010 and 2015 (Section 27; Section 7). However, with the earlier dreams - about a group living in the countryside, somewhere near Malton, in North Yorkshire - something did begin to happen which was a functioning of the faculty of dreaming. It was a recurring, prepossessing 'reverie' that seemed to have a life of its own, while at the same time having the quality of simply being a thought experiment. It was the thought of a group of people whose existence was about travelling into the unknown, and who were living in an area of countryside. They had been living in this place (a place specifically chosen by them for the purpose) for about two years, and over the time during which I was experiencing this reverie the characters and names of the different individuals began to appear, in a process that was like dreaming up a story, but with no plot. But what made the reverie a powerful process was a sublime feeling of sunlit intensity that came from the thought of the place and the circumstances, and a specific surge of feeling that came from taking up the perspective of one of the individuals as they contemplated the situation - a joyful wonder that condensed into the phrase "I can't believe we've actually managed to do this."
There were two main versions of this recurring reverie. In one of them the place was somewhere in an implacably indeterminate area of countryside which was perhaps somewhere in the southwest of England, or in Sussex, but which also had a quality of being in a more southern terrain, as if it was in France or Spain. In the other it was the place from one of the dreams in 96-97 - a house about five miles southwest of Malton in an area of forest that was a creation of the dream. In the second form of the reverie the terrain was very clear, and the atmosphere was extremely positive, but it was in the locationally indeterminate form that the feeling of sublime joy from the dream in February 98 broke through (in this dream there had been no images: no specific awareness of a house, and no awareness of any terrain, or any location). At the time I knew that most importantly I was re-connecting with what had broken through - in some sense - in the 1998 dream, and I feel certain I knew that the indeterminacy in the first form of the experience was not something I should resolve: there were the people living in a house in an area of countryside, and there was their intent to travel into wider realities, and that was what I needed for the lens to work. This all continued for several months, and initially intensified, but after a while the most intense form began to fade, leaving - in relation to the two original forms - only the reverie about the house in the forest in Yorkshire. Towards the end of this phase the first form was 'replaced' - or was transformed into - an image of a semi-derelict house in a hot, quite arid country (that felt a bit more like southern Spain than anywhere else, but which again was indeterminate), where this house had just been discovered by - or was about to be discovered by - two or three people who were on the edge of becoming part of an escape-group, and for whom the house was fundamental. It can be seen that I had brought the story back by two years, and that in the process - for no apparent reason - the latitude had gone closer to the equator. Simultaneously the place had come into the foreground: in a main form of this third reverie I was simply seeing the house from inside, but without there being any presence of any of the protagonists. It was always bright sunlight, and heat, and silence, but where the silence was broken by the breeze, in that an external door of the house would be gently banging, swept open and then shut again by the wind.
There can be no doubt about the planetary aspect of these experiences, an aspect which only on a first level concerns the fact that all of the locations of the reveries are outside the urban worlds of towns and cities. Beyond this nonurbanism there was also the fact that the groups were not connected to any nation, and insofar as there was any specificity they were fundamentally in an encounter with the planet, as opposed to an encounter with the human world (travelling into wider and deeper realities has nothing to do with nations, and it is evidently barely a beginning, in characterising it, to call it transnational). It was also the case that the locations on one 'side' of the experiences were either indeterminate or had settled - as they did at the end - on a place that was a closer to the equator than Britain, and which had become determinate only in latitudinal terms (it was never fixed that the place I was envisaging was in Spain, and after a few months some versions of the third form of the reverie were on the same latitude relative to the equator, but in Australia). And the fourth planetary aspect consists of the breeze, and the silent, sunlit atmosphere of the terrain around the house in the concluding form of the series of reveries - the only recurring, well-defined action of any kind across all of the experiences was the action of the wind opening and closing a door of an empty, semi-derelict house (something that was emphasised by the fact that when this was happening none of the protagonists of the reverie were present).
These reveries were the view from the dream in 1998 asserting itself within me - and my faculty of feeling told me very clearly that this was a view toward the Future. In going back over my relatively recent experiences I had brought into focus the event from four years earlier, and this event had swept me away into the sequence of reveries. However, although my faculty of feeling could see that this view was the direction of Love-and-Freedom, my faculty of lucidity did not succeed in bringing into focus the details of the form of existence of the group, or the details of how such a group could come together. And my faculty of dreaming also did not get far, and for whatever reason did not even begin to cross over from the 'perceiving-potentials-of-existence' modality of the question 'what would it be like?', to the modality of exploratory story-creation (unlike with Ktarizon: Deep Water this view was so sharply in focus as a view toward a wider reality that I did not even think about exploring through the invention of stories). However, the faculty of dreaming did nonetheless go increasingly into effect over the course of the experiences: and what appeared through the work of this faculty was the finding of a house somewhere in a semi-wilderness with a warmer, brighter climate than that of Britain, and was a faint but insistent foregrounding of the planet through the terrain around the house, and through the door being opened and closed by the wind. As if there was now a calm, but emphatic knocking taking place, somewhere in a dreamy, sunlit part of my mind.
*
During these years there was a subtle movement in which my attention was turning toward the 'sky' of the planet, as opposed to the ground or the oceans (to be specific, it was turning toward the atmosphere). The subtlety lay in the fact that new or modified channels of envisaging and dreaming were in effect, and also in the facts that the process was gradual, and made up in part of occurrences in sleep (which did not belong to any deliberate, unified exploration).It would be right to say that the faculty of dreaming was coming into the foreground, and with it the sky, and it would also be right to say that a process of stopping thinking and of becoming perception was associated with the overall shift, but, as will be seen, although there was a movement away from language (from the 'internal dialogue') this did not mean that language had disappeared - instead it seemed to mean that although it was slipping back from the foreground, language was also shifting toward different modalities.
At some point in the spring of 2002 I was listening to the album Geogaddi by Boards of Canada, I was on my own in my room, and the music, together with the allusive - and elusive - title of the album, somehow assisted me toward a semi-trance process of envisaging the atmosphere through the perspective of a tactile sensation field (envisaging the atmosphere in relation to its contact). I don't have an impression about what prompted me to go in the direction of the sky. For instance, one of the most striking 'planetary' references on the album is the sample 'when lava flows underwater it behaves differently'. But this is what happened, and it rapidly became a very striking experience. And one of the reasons it was striking was of course that the process was taking up a spheroambient sense - the tactile - and pushing the non-spheroambient sense of sight towards a kind of tactile-as-sight synesthesia, so that there was an experience of spherical vision, with which it is possible to see the entire sphere of a surrounding world of stars.
Dream you are a hollow spherical body with great thickness and laminar complexity, and with a vast body inside that is wider than your thickness.
Dream you are a white spherical world of flows, influxes, vortices, layers, seethings, incandescences.
Dream you are an immense world of different temperatures - of zones, bodies, layers, clouds and fugitive track-networks all with different degrees of heat.
Dream you are vastly and intricately touched and boiled into by a world of oceans.
Dream you are vastly touched by the multi-level contours and temperatures of worlds of land masses.
Dream you are always spread out under stars in vast, slow moving masses of night air.
Dream you have a world of clouds of water vapour within you, and you are always filled with birds and insects.
Dream you are always threaded with lightning.
Dream you are always suffused with deep-level expanding worlds of sound waves, spreading faster laterally than upwards - sound worlds of storms, volcanoes, the wind, fires, animal cries, music, insects, machines.
Dream that on one side each of your zones on every scale is being suffused pre-eminently by a stupendously vast world of light-contact with stars and galaxies, and that this contact is suffusing you across the entirety of your surface.
Dream that each of these encounters with a star or galaxy is its own intricate, incandescent motion-world of colours and intensities - of light at different levels of activity.
Dream there is a huge, very near spherical zone of searingly powerful light combustion seething into you vastly and continuously - searing, glorious, primarily white-yellow, blasting out light and photons into you and a continual intricate wind of plasma.
Dream you are spinning, and your shifting zones are continually encountering the light-worlds of the encompassing spherical world of stars and galaxies.
Dream you are a world of sudden tracks of acutely hot air created by small solid masses coming from outside.
Dream you are a spherical world of zones and levels of white motions - foldings, laminar flows, fusions, vortices, standing waves of spiral updrafts, gusts, winged fronts, areas of different density, hurricanes, tornadoes, drifts, zephyrs, curving low level winds, ripples, pulses, slow drifts, and breathings.
Dream the area around one end of your axis of spin is bright and cool-warm, and the opposite area is a star-filled world of extreme cold.
Dream you are intricately riddled with tiny hexagonal plates, either suspended in shifting masses, or moving rapidly to your lower surface.
Dream your upper layers are serene, starlight-filled expanses, and are shifting worlds of plasma.
Dream you are touched endlessly across your inner surface by the zones of motion of trees, waves, fires, lava flows, animals, machines, plants and rivers.
Dream you are a vast world of colours, sounds and flows.
Dream you are a vast world of contact.
My dreams in sleep at this time had a double quality of turmoil and serenity, whether these two aspects were in some way sequential (as with the dream about escaping from the conveyor belt) or were in some way simultaneous. A good example of the simultaneity-form was a dream in which a phrase appeared at the end, where this phrase had an impersonal quality of a 'tutelary' energy-formation leaning in and expressing something valuable, where this formation could evidently have been a normally non-accessible part of myself (it was the third of three dreams of this kind that I had between 1999 and 2002). And here again it was the sky that was central to the experience.
I dreamed it was a sunny day, and that I was on hill a few miles from a city. A very strong wind was blowing, and in looking up into the sky I could see intense, bright points within the air - points which were sublimely beautiful. The points were quite a long way apart from each other, and I knew withing the dream that I was seeing formations of intent, and that these formations of intent in some cases were human beings (it would be right to say therefore that the sky had been taken up as a lens to look toward the second aspect of the transcendental, the body without organs). There was a quality of serene brightness and of exhilarating lucid energy. And although there was a very strong and gusting wind it seemed that the intense points could both stay in place in the sky, apparently unmoved by the wind (although still in motion), or could, on occasion, be swept away by it. And as I looked (just before the dream ended) these words arrived:
a jeweled gale
*
The impression I have is that during the five years after 1998 my life was indeed a kind of 'gale' or quiet storm - a kind of bright tumult within which I was scanning and searching, on different levels, for ways of moving forward. And it seems important to recount that there were two other dreams around 2001 - 2002 where phrases arrived at the end, and also to give an account of the nature of these dream experiences. The feeling given at these moments was of seeing or understanding a situation (with or without images), and of the words coming, not in any sense straightforwardly from beyond me, but from an anomalous, perhaps more lucid and concise form of myself who expressed what was being perceived. The idea here is that I was perceiving a situation or set of circumstances where this perception suggested words for expression by a different form of myself.And yet - at the same time there was a quality of an impersonal, 'alien' lucidity leaning into me, as if I had for a moment found a channel in the body without organs which gave me something that conducted toward understanding.
The first of the other dreams was one where I have been left with no memory of images, but only of a phrase:
the way is forged
The meaning of forged was 'made' (made as opposite of found), and inevitably involved the idea of an intense process of construction. The bringing together of the quietly abstract (and recurrently 'non-constructive') idea of 'path' with something being forged out of fire was powerful: the idea being suggested was that on some crucial level there was no path that could simply be found, waiting for you (as it were), but that you would have to create the path yourself. On top of this, there was also the unsettling (and very indeterminate) presence of the other sense of forged, as if, for instance, the phrase was a simultaneous warning that counterfeit forms of the way also exist. The four words together had a quality of being exceptionally positive and challenging (they affirmed the existence of 'the way,' but indicated a very high degree of activity would be needed, as opposed to passive path-following), and - inseparably - they had another aspect which was more perturbing than reassuring.
In the second dream the concluding phase (I don't remember anything other than this part), was me seeing down a long valley which had a river running along it, and of me seeing the sea in the distance. Only it was not experienced as the sea, and the river was something other than water: the phrase that came with this dream was not fully focused, in that it had a gap where a word was in some sense 'under erasure:'
a river of leads to eternity
The word under erasure was 'tears' (it was actually seen astears). There was an exceptionally positive quality about the dream, and the word tears being under erasure fitted with this, although the idea within the dream was not that the word was completely inappropriate, but more that it was not at all adequate, and even in some sense 'trite'. As if the river all along was joy, but on another level for a long time would be the struggle and distress of a journey of escape from ordinary reality (a journey in which awareness of eventual death would be crucial in taking you toward an 'eternity' understood within the dream as an aspect of the natural world of forces/energy, and not as either external to it, nor as anything to do with immortality).
*
It can be asked at this point - in what direction were these dreams looking? Or, to put it another way, from what direction did these dreams arrive? Asking these question (without setting out to answer them) is helpful for disturbing any sense of a fundamental distinction between journeys into the outside and dreams. But it is also helpful in relation to what all along is the most vital (and widest) perspective for the description of the oneiric experiences and journeys that took place after 2003. The main thread of this account will initially be the immanent inter-relationship of these two processes, but what will be most important will be the issue of places, and - specifically - the issue of the place or complex terrain around which everything during these years was to a great event 'revolving.'
*
(Clearly it is being stated that during the years in question dreams - of different kinds - were deepening my attention in relation to the planet, and that journeys toward terrains which were more 'planetary' than my point of departure (less inflected by the human world), were generating dreams. But it can be asked, were all journeys into countryside and semi-wilderness spaces equally generative of dreams? (the answer is straightforwardly no - it depends on the where and the when, and equally it depends on those individuals with whom you travel, if any, and on the state of mind which you take with you on the journey). And it can also be asked did dreams generate journeys, as well as journeys generating dreams? And to this the answer is yes, although it will be a while before this second side of a reciprocal influence can be clearly delineated.)
*
It was the afternoon of the 22nd September, 2000. I had taken my bicycle with me on a train from London to Banbury, and I was now cycling through a hilly area of southern Warwickshire (afterwards I would find out that the area is called the Burton Dassett Hills). It was a warm sunny day, with a slightly diffuse quality to the sunlight. I was going to stay for the weekend with friends who lived in Leamington (twenty miles further along the train-line), and my plan was to look for liberty cap mushrooms. I arrived at a promising-looking field that was not overlooked by farmhouses and, leaving my bicycle by the fence, I started to search. My past experience of looking for liberty caps was only from the previous three years, but I had been fairly successful, without a huge amount of effort, so I was not particularly surprised when the field (which I had never been in before) turned out to have to have a large number of the mushrooms growing in it. It was the right time of year, there had been rain, and the field had the kind of deep green grass that there had been in other fields in which I had found them. But the number of mushrooms I found was probably more than twice as much as I had found on any previous occasion. In a relatively short amount of time I found enough for four or five people.
I returned to my bike, and cycled the remaining ten miles, through country lanes with ripe blackberries in the hedgerows, and with the sun beginning to set on my left.
The feeling was of being swept smoothly forward - a feeling of having chosen the right direction at the right time. I was hoping that my friends would be on for tripping that evening. And slightly to my surprise all three of the people at the house thought it was a good idea. All of them were people with whom I had taken psychotropics before (primarily grass, although with one of my friends I had taken mushrooms on a previous occasion) , and everyone was in a good, start-of-the-weekend mood, without any alcohol being involved, and without any prior commitments.
If you are taking halucinogens with friends it is best for the relationships to be strong friendship-alliances, or at least for the relationships to be without tension. There was an ease to my own lines of friendship on this occasion, perhaps in part because of different areas in which we were primarily engaged, and perhaps also because we had only known each other for two or three years, so that there had not been time for tense or jaggedly critical responses to become natural. My friends were all musicians who were interested in philosophy, and I was working in philosophy and had a love of music: this gave strong connections, but without much tendency to impinge of specialised areas. And yet what also should be said is that the friendship that evening were exactly as they should be, from any perspective (a friendship-alliance was virtual within the friendships, and in fact at that point was completely actualised). There was the sense of humour and courage and fascination with the anomalous that were needed for what we were doing.
And we did not take the mushrooms in the modality of an indulgent binge in a living room. Not long after they started to have an effect (it was now dark) we went into the street and set out to walk across Leamington to an area of parkland (called Newbold Comyn) where there was a hill on which you could sit and look back across the town.
The liberty caps had affected me in the form of a feeling of joy, and in the form of a slight, but sustained feeling of insubstantiality or 'hypersubstantially' on the part the surrounding world (as if the surrounding world was the same kind of sensory substance as my own form). There is no doubt that the joy had affected everyone, and as we walked through the streets the impression was very much that all of us were primarily in the modality of perception, despite the fact that conversations were continually taking place, and that we were primarily in this modality because perception of the visual world had become like music, producing joy in the same way.
I discovered that through taking off my glasses the out-of-focus 'globes' of the street-lights became striking: the amorphous spaces of slightly 'fibrous' luminosity in these distortion-globes had an intensity and precision which felt as if it was beyond what I would normally have experienced, and as we continued walking theses spaces of light started to be slightly augmented by a 'jeweled' patterns. I feel that seeing patterns during psychotropically-induced states is probably far less important than other aspects of these experiences, but, although this was not deliberate, taking off my glasses and looking at the lights was a way of remaining focused on perception, and of not becoming too caught up in conversation.
We were on the edge of the town, and were starting to climb up the small, grass-covered hill which looked out over the southern part of Leamington. What was about to happen was something so minimal that it is likely I would simply have forgotten it, if it had not been associated with a further event, a few hours later (and even then the conjunction of the two events would be nothing more than a tiny fissure in a field of certainty, a kind of faint but indelible question mark).
A conversation started about the drone music tradition that had begun in the 60s with the music of La Monte Young, and about drone music in general.
We sat down at the top of the hill, looking out at the lights of the town. We had been swept forward: there was a light-hearted but ultra-intense quality to everything, and a feeling that escaping permanently from the distresses and miseries of ordinary reality was as easy as walking out of your house into a summer night. The conversation about drone music was continuing, and bringing to mind the subtle intensity of this form of music made me think about electrical fields, which led me to think about the electro-magnetic field of the planet. At this point I had an experience of envisaging the interior of the planet beneath me not as solid but as a kind of gold-yellow space of energy that produced an impression of feeling rather than matter, and which had a faintly crackling, vibratory quality.
"What if drone music" I said, "is all along an expression into music of the planet's electro-magnetic field...." The next phrase seemed to arrive as something tightly-formed (adjectivally excessive in relation to ordinary uses of language, but correct under these circumstances) and it seemed to be as necessary as the completion of a melody, with the last word being the resolving note.
"....an expression of the planet's ceaseless, vibratory, electrical hum..."
As I said this this I was looking - slightly downward - at a horizontal line of street-light globes (I was still not wearing my glasses) which was probably around five or six lights in length, and which would have been around a mile away. And as the word hum enacted itself in the form of the emphasised sound (taking me back to perception through the auditory channel) I had an experience that the lights looked back at me, or, to be precise, that something looked back at me through the lights. It was just for a split-second, and the look had a neutrality - it was neither friendly and affirmative, nor curious, nor hostile and predatory. And nor did it have any quality of hiding an intent, nor any quality of not being capable of an intent. It was just a look. And then it was gone.
I don't think I said anything about this very fleeting experience. The conversation continued, and after around an hour we returned to the house, returning through Jephson Gardens. In this park when I looked into areas of shadow I could see small intricate 'whorls' on my visual field (slightly crystalline, like frost flowers, but in roughly circular, radiating arrays) which had many different coloured, prismatic modalities, as if the tones were varying from suggesting oil-sheen colours to being reminiscent of a crystal in sunlight). Back at the house we talked and listened to music for several hours - a lot of the tracks to which we listened were drone tracks or phase-music minimalism (I remember we listened to Reich's Music for 18 Musicians).
Towards the end of the evening one of my friends became emotional, as a result of remembering an incident a few years earlier (before I had met him) when one of his friends had experienced a bad trip on LSD, and at the thought that his friend, who had decided not to take halucinogens again, would not be able to experience what had just taken place through taking the mushrooms. I tried to respond with helpful perspectives in relation to what was a kind of onrush of sadness, while trying to avoid any valorising of what had just happened as in any sense the way forward, and while also being aware that the whole question of bad trips was not an ideal terrain for the conversation given that the wave of sadness was in itself a kind of distant relative of a bad trip (the emotion being sadness as opposed to fear). Eventually my friend started to feel better, and at around 5 in the morning the night came to an end, and I was left on my own in the living room.
My bed was a sofa and a blanket. When I lay down I set out to clear my head and perceive. I think I was aware that there had just been a large amount of talking and that it would be good to return to perception. But whether or not I was giving any thought to the previous few hours, I definitely had a strong feeling that the thing to do now was to become unbroken perception, letting go of all thought processes. I closed my eyes, slowed down my breathing, and almost immediately I felt a shift into a more focused state where I knew it was a little easier for me to fend off internal verbalising. This focused perceptual state - without thoughts - had lasted for around half a minute, and then there was a jolt which felt as if a truck had knocked into a wall outside the house, or as if someone in a neighboring house in the terrace had knocked over a large wardrobe. I didn't give much to to what had happened, and before long I fell asleep.
In the morning I discovered that the jolt had been a 4.2 earthquake. The epicentre had been thirteen kilometres below the surface of the earth, beneath a village called Budbrooke, which was six kilometres away, on the opposite side of Warwick (it should be said both that earthquakes are not at all uncommon in Britain, and that Warwickshire is apparently criss-crossed with small faults, but it can be added that this was the largest UK tremor for nine years). Across the affected region there had been no damage from the earthquake, apart from very minor occurences - there was a report on the radio that some plates had been broken in a house in Coventry.
There was evidently nothing to say, but my memory of what had taken place on the hill the night before would now not be lost. The crack in my unconscious certainty about the planet beyond its life-forms being nothing but inert 'matter' had been opened up, and although tiny, and yielding of no knowledge or even faint opinion, it was both quietly visceral and indelible. And more than this, it felt like a breath of fresh air to have this experience-generated question mark in effect within me.
*
In the space of six years there had been two anomalous events (or sequences of events) in Leamington which stood out very powerfully for me, as very striking singular occurences, whatever their value might prove to be. And the two points that need to be made at this stage are that in both of these events Leamington was in effect as a radically displaced centre - as a place which in pointing beyond itself was fundamentally effaced, or placed to one side -; and, secondly that Leamington had become a place which in multiple direct and indirect ways had become a displaced centre in this way (for instance, by the year 2000, going to Leamington had already become a process of going to a terrain which included Leamington, but which most importantly included a place 6 miles away, Harbury Lake).
In the dreams which culminated in the escape-group dream in February 1998 (Section 24) the location in which I was dreaming was Leamington, but the places about which I was dreaming were Yorkshire (the horizontal beyond) and, in the culminating dream, it was the space beyond the solar system (the upward or outward beyond). In the experience in September of 2000 the place again was Leamington (during part of the experience I was even looking directly at Leamington, in the form of the view of the town from Newbold Common) but the overall event pointed to the zone (that is, the planet) on which the town is constructed, and, most specifically, it pointed toward a point thirteen kilometres below its surface (the downward or inward beyond).
It will now be becoming clear why it is that on one level 'the plane of consistency' of this book can be described using the name Leamington as one primary term, and why it is, simultaneously, that it has almost nothing to do with Leamington. It can be seen that Leamington for me was the place where space arrived, both in the more ordinary sense - although here it should be said the primary issue on this level is the singular and encompassing space that is the planet - and inseparably in the sense of the transcendental-empirical space of intent/energy (in which wider realities exist one beyond another, and in which journeys in intensity take place in the form of threshold-crossings).
On the one hand there is the terrain stretching from Harbury Lake to Leamington. On the other hand, there are the oneiric events and abstract-perception emergences that took place in the town. Together these took a problem of places to the to the point where it was fully effectuated and deliberate, and they posed a problem of expressing, in the form of fiction, the potentials which had been glimpsed through - most powerfully - the series of dreams about escape-groups. (It will be seen that these correspond to the issues of 'journeys into the outside' and 'dreamings').
The problem of places is in fact the multiplicitous problem of intensive nomadism, with its micro and macro aspects: Where can a base be constructed from which journeys can take place? What form should this base take? How can a group come together whose aim is to travel into wider realities? Where, at each moment, to go or explore next? Where to go during the gaps (holidays) within phases of paid work? Where should be an ephemeral or temporary 'base' (for a moment, or for a day, or a week) within an area of wilderness, or semi-wilderness, or countryside? With whom do you travel? At what point, and in what ways, do you travel as part of a group, and when do you travel on your own, or as part of an alliance between two individuals? What form would a group take, and how would it function? If there is a semi-group in the form of a loose nexus of exploratory/creative alliances, what are the best projects for collaborations with individuals or for wider collaborations within the nexus? What relationship of proximity should a base have to towns and cities? Are there advantages to being in mountains, or forests or deserts? There are two reasons why this multiple problem can be said to have become focused in Leamington, and the series of dreams was fundamental in relation to both of these reasons. The first is that the question of groups had come emphatically to the forefront in these dreams, so that the modern, middle-class lockdown into questions of families, individuals, couples and societies had been decisively left behind. The second is that the blocked, ordinary-reality perspective of the empirical had been broken open, and had been replaced by the perspective of the transcendental (the transcendental-empirical). The culminating dream was about a group, and everything concerned a movement across a threshold to a wider level of reality, and the wider level of reality was on one level describable as 'the ocean,' where this term is another way of saying 'the body without organs' (the journey involved, and 'the ocean' relating to the sixth and second aspects of the transcendental-empirical, as set out in Section 34).
And the other problem (that of writing fictions which in some sense provide views of obscured aspects of the world) is in fact a contingent, specific issue within the immensely wider issue of the abstract-perception faculty of dreaming, which has its own movements across thresholds. But here, again, the issues of the group and the transcendental-empirical were in the fullest sense fundamental to the problem.
(It is necessary to point out out that there were in fact three problems that to a great extent emerged in Leamington: the third one being that of the difference between transcendental awareness and empirical awareness (section 2). It could be said therefore that the three problems were those of travelling/exploring; fictions in their function as maps; and the overall problem of maps and compasses in relation to journeys into wider realities.).
Taking the escape-group dreams and psychotropically-induced experiences of the years in Leamington from 1995 to 2000, and then placing these alongside the works which assisted me during this time (A Thousand Plateaus, etc) it is not immediately apparent that in leaving Leamington there would be any subsequent connection to the town, other than the process of working on problems which had emerged there, but which in themselves had no abstract-oneiric connection to the place (for instance, none of the dreams were in any way about Leamington). However, the situation is given a different perspective by the fact that for the next twelve years years after leaving the town I visited Harbury Lake at least once every year, and that for several years I also visited two friends who lived in a small village a few miles to the northwest (this is of course to say that at the level of the actual I was consistently choosing to 'revolve around' Leamington). It is also important to point out that during the last two years in which I lived in the town I had a strong, persistent impression that this was the place in which in some sense I had 'woken up.' The line of thought here leads to the view that Leamington for me is a 'natal terrain,' but it it should immediately be said that it is only a natal terrain, and that the area around Malton and Helmsley (see Hidden Valleys) was also a natal terrain, and not just in the more physical sense of me having first been in this other area when I was a very young child.
Despite my returns to the area, and the events which had taken place there, it is not at all clear that the unfolding of the problems of travelling, groups and maps would be inflected by it (it should be remembered that by the time I left I was 'spread out' across a west and and an east in a way where Central America and the east of Eurasia had become Far more intensely-impacting and Tutelary zones than Britain, and that this has only intensified in the time since ). And in fact there is no doubt a fundamental level of contingency about what has happened. It should also be added that in that there has been a circling around the terrain that stretches from Harbury Lake to Leamington this has really only become clear at the point where a new central terrain has come into focus, as if the movement all along has been a progression in the form of a spiral which only becomes visible as such at the point where the line diverges toward a fundamentally different spiral movement.
Leamington and a long process of circling around it together become a way of looking in a specific, anomalous direction. Leamington is the radically displaced centre which has very little to do with itself, in that it points toward other regions, toward the planet, toward the sky. And starting from Leamington and circling around it there is a movement over many years which takes the form of journeys to other places on the planet (journeys in the actual), and of explorations in the virtual-real - in the form of dreams in sleep, semi-trance-experiences, and the writing of fictions, impersonally personal narratives, and philosophy. What kind of view could this be, a view which is as planetary as it is oneiric? And in looking in this direction what kind of eyes might open?
* * *
*
Note about 1993 and music.
In the global human world of 1993 two elements had gone into place which were generators of new forms of suffering, and which simultaneously were instigators of conservatism. The first of these was zealous deregulationism (with its molar forms in relation to financial institutions, and its molecular worsening of circumstances in relation to work). The second was the first Gulf War, which had succeeded in raising up the image of war in a way that had not been achieved since before the war in Vietnam, and whose consequences were ongoing in terms of the instigation of terrorism. In fact, two progressions had been set into effect, one of which would culminate in the financial crash of 2008, and the other of which would culminate in 9/11 and the start of an era of intractable wars across a 'front' from Afghanistan to North Africa. However, in 1993 the facade was of a generalised success story. The future had already receded, but now it was slipping even further away.
The alternative cultures of the UK set out to follow the future: they did not get far, and ended up creating a fringe-zone encampment which over time would be de-populated and brought back in the direction of the interestablishment. In the USA the Clinton campaign had been a conservatising force (in the way that the process of the election of Blair would be, seven years later) in that it prompted an identification with a zone of ordinary, capitalist reality. But the situation in the UK was different - the re-election of the Tories in 1992 temporarily created a massive intensification of a counter-cultural domain that was already hypercharged.
It was a poignant situation, in a way that was not perceptible at the time. The 1962-1982 phase of higher intensity had been a time where music had been fundamental - it had been the phase of pop-rock modernism. Now, as the attempt was made to escape toward the intensity, music was in a sense even more fundamental than it had been previously, though pervasively it was now very closely associated with uses of drugs that meant people were likely to be rapidly thrown back to where they had started, or worse. And the 'window' was not going to last long: New Labour was not far away. The new forms exploded: techno, drum and bass / jungle (drawing for their primary beat component on the 60s), trance, gabba, garage - coming on top of the acid house that had started in the late 80s. And then, before long, the whole process would start to fade - becoming an inreasingly minimal and denuded zone across the world of post Blair-victory Britain.
At that time I was therefore confronted with two forms of response to the new, very grim modality of the ongoing human disaster. Landianism happened to be present in my immediate milieu ("we just have to accelerate the deregulation"), and then simultaneously across the whole alternative-culture zone there were currents of what could be called 'Rhoda-ism' - only half-awake movements of escape:
"Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might rise and set in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from the here and now." (The Waves, Penguin, 1992, p.172)
Even the more inspired dance-associated microcultures were almost certain to be bubbles that would rapidly burst, and yet the whole process in these zones was the work of the currents that led away from ordinary reality into the Future. And it is important to see that the fragility of the escape-zone is in fact contingent all along on the strength of its pragmatics and its immanence metaphysics (the will-to-party would have to undergo a full metamorphosis into the intent to travel toward wider realities).
My instinct had always been that in some sense music was a vital part of the Way Forward. There was a sense in which I was right about this, though in escaping toward space as a transcendental spatium it is recurrently only very specific, hyper-charged songs and pieces of music which in the fullest sense can be 'components of passage' - door-openers, generators of visions, creators of trance-states. (this is in part because, in that we are trapped by the line of time, the temporality of music all along has a problematic aspect).
It is important to follow - or to give attention to - the role of music in the experiences which will now be described, experiences from the years after 1998. And it is also important to say that in thinking about the time after 1993 I am left with the impression that, although the path forward before 1998 was A Thousand Plateaus, the combination during these years of Tess and dance-music microcultures in some sense propelled me a very long way forward, or relocated me to a much better version of the same path. As if we had been given a lift in a very well equipped vehicle driven by a Rhoda who had overcome her fear, and who had taught us about a pragmatics of lucidity. And as if somehow, after us having been dropped off in a town, I had found myself on the edge of the countryside, in summer, on a road leading to Harbury Lake.
Everything here concerns journeys into the outside, and most fundamentally it concerns journeys into a specific direction in the outside, a direction which, as we have seen, is not just Love-and-Freedom, but is also an awareness of death. This does in fact directly involve journeys into the outside of urban spaces, or, to be precise, the outside of spaces where the ordinary human world is in the foreground (this is because, done in the right way, these journeys intensify your abilities to love and to be free, and because under these circumstances they intensify a love for, and an awareness of, the planetary world within which the human world exists). But it needs to be seen immediately that the question of choosing which connections with the outside to increase is very much a question of choosing your relationships with people, and is also - very crucially - a question of deciding which zones or attributes of the world you should focus on (which is to say, which faculty or faculties you should now set out to wake), what practices you should use, and what areas you should select for within the zone-of-encounter of a faculty.
In going to live in London, in 1999, all of these issues were suddenly viscerally urgent. But they were not urgent in a way where I was aware of the nature of what was pressing upon me. Which immediately gives the opportunity to say that the fundamental decisions in relation to directions in the abstract can not really be described as having been taken by you (although the opposite is not strictly true either). It is more that after a while you learn to go very deliberately in the directions opened up by the inspirations which have appeared in you, rather than ignoring these inspirations, or letting them be recurring elements that never get taken up by a pragmatics.
A few months after arriving in London I finished writing my Ph.D thesis and took it up to Warwick University, where I was told by the department that it could not be accepted because it had taken too long (it had been seven years, which is not that unusual a time), an outcome that was no doubt more connected to my having not been very punctual or accessible in terms of re-arranging dead-lines on the way (and specifically in the last few weeks), in that I had nervously prioritised writing over contact with the department. On my return to London, after a pause of two or three weeks, I started writing a philosophy book, Dimensions of Contact: a Nomad Guide to Intensification, a project which I finished three years later. I feel that that this is a valuable work (I feel it would be good for it to be published), but despite this, it remains the case that at this time new directions had opened up - as a result in particular of experiences between 1996 and 1998 - which were setting me up to work at the very least along parallel lines (lines of philosophy and of stories), and it remains the case that I was ignoring this direction in a way that - initially, at least - was a failure to stay immanent with my inspirations (which is not at all to say that I should not have written Dimensions of Contact).
In relation to the people around me the situation would culminate in the point, in 2003, when I realised that I simply had to walk away from zones of my life where no creative or Futural alliance was possible (Section 34). By this time I had learned, in part through working on londonunderlondon with Mark Fisher, that in a genuine friendship when you brought up the ideas that had a cutting-edge aspect these ideas would take flight, or at the very least would be met with openness and enthusiasm (whereas in other circumstances there would be a dampening process of everything being fendingly turned away toward apparently relevant issues which at depth ignored or mis-heard the point of what had been said). During these years I learned about creative friendship-alliances from Mark, from Yildiz, and from other friends, including the friends - most of whom were women - who I made in the years after 2003.
In connection to London the task was that of temporarily departing from it in ways that moved me forward (I went to several different places on the holidays that I could afford, and settled quite rapidly on journeys into wildernesses; and whereas initially I went with other people, at a certain point I shifted toward a long phase of travelling on my own), and was that of finding a way of living within it which was minimally impeded by it (by 2003 I had found a life within London - working at a college, and working on projects - which was effective as a temporary strategy, but it was necessary to find a way of making this life an entering into composition with the planetary world beyond the human domain, so that it was as little affected by the interiority of the mega-urban as possible).
The strategy I took up with drugs was to take them only under rare circumstances, ideally somewhere in the countryside or outdoors, and to take either drugs that I had found or grown (psilocybe mushrooms, datura) or other powerful halucinogens available by mail-order, such as yopo (psychotropics which, like datura, were so intense in their effects that no-one has bothered to make them illegal).
Lastly, it is clear that in terms of what I was reading I had fallen into a river. I had fallen into this river in reading A Thousand Plateaus, it had picked up speed where I started to read Castaneda's books in 1998, and now - unknown to me - I was being swept toward four books by two women writers, Florinda Donner and Taisha Abelar. However, it was simultaneously the case that I was being recurrently moved forward, and that on a deep level I was clinging on, though often these ways of clinging on were disguised. Instead of burrowing into abstractions and embodying an off-in-my-head combination of scepticism and agreement in relation to Castaneda I should have got on to a greater extent with becoming-perception, and with processes of entering into composition with the planet, quietly getting on with embodying the path of deterritorialisation which both Deleuze and Castaneda were pointing out. And in doing this I might have realised a little sooner that I was ignoring sources of inspiration that in fact had nothing to do with Castaneda, in that almost all of them - and certainly the most intense of them - were from the two years before I embarked on reading his books.
The problems were therefore about perception and dreaming, as fully active processes. And the crucial issue in this context is the second of these faculties. In terms of creating dreamings, in the first years after 1998 I was ignoring the inspiration that I was now carrying with me (and it should be pointed out that Castaneda and Deleuze do not tell you how to embark on a line of flight of writing stories, any more than they tell you about the pragmatics of taking part in setting up an escape-group - perhaps, with both issues, because of lack of knowledge, but perhaps also because of the subtle and serendipitous nature of these forms of emergence).
In terms of the process of writing narratives I was not following the lines pointed out by the dreams and story-ideas of the phase from 1996 to the point when I left for London, in the October of 1999. But, in contrast, the river was definitely in effect in terms of reading. And this was true not just in relation to the main line of abstraction that continued from A Thousand Plateaus: it was also true in terms of fiction. The exceptionally intense dream in February of 1998 (Section 24) took place after starting to read The Drowned World, a few hours after finishing reading Cities of the Red Night, and from the outset I had a feeling that an 'oneiric-abstract adjustment' had been made at this point, an adjustment that I would now describe as a shift from transcendental west to transcendental east. And this inspiration - which of course involved reading rather than writing, and in comparative terms was a minimal issue - was something which from the very beginning I did not ignore, even though this was not really a deliberate strategy in any way. What happened was that over the next few years I read quite a lot of works by Ballard, and shifted away from reading Burroughs. I have not returned to Burroughs, and although it is not the case that Ballard has gone on to be a major inspiration, it is definitely true that in the years after 1998 my processes of writing fiction are describable in part as departures from Ballard's worlds, where the departures carried a little of these worlds with them.
*
In July of 2000 I decided to cycle from London to Leamington, to visit friends, and for the pleasure of the long cycle rides (if I had not been extremely short of money I would probably have succumbed to laziness and taken a train or bus, but I think my description of my motivation is correct). It was good weather for the whole trip: I cycled from Stoke Newington to Leamington on the first day (arriving at about 9.30 in the evening). I stayed with my friends for two nights, and then the next day I decided I would stay in the town for a while, and then cycle the four miles southeast to Harbury Lake, so that I would spend the night there, before doing the ninety mile ride to London the next day.
The visit had gone well: I had enjoyed meeting up with my friends, and the ride from London had been exhilarating. I also liked the idea of spending the night at the lake (I had not done this before), because it was a place I liked, but also because of the sense of freedom that the plan gave me.
At some point on that ride the idea of the story "Ktarizon: Deep Water" came back to me (see Section 18). I remember clearly that I was looking at the blue-white sky to the south, and the story was unfolding in my mind. New aspects of the story started to emerge, and - overall - I had on overwhelming impression that the process of dreaming up this story was in some sense at the outer, most positive edge of my experiences of joy and lucidity. The midsummer Warwickshire sky was somehow fused or melded with the story, and the feeling was of having arrived at a new place, a new level of the sublime. In fact, the place was somewhere I had been the year before when the idea of the story arrived, only I had gone round a turn of a spiral, and the joy was more intense than it had been the first time. And the feeling in relation to the story was that in some way it had all the necessary dimensions, whether explicitly or implicitly. Intermittently I had been working on other stories over the preceding year but the feeling given to me by these other virtual-real worlds was not quite the same: they had not been taken over some oneiric threshold, and they felt attenuated in comparison. It seemed that in comparison to "Ktarizon: Deep Water" these other stories did not quite catch the light.
Not long after returning to London I took three weeks out from writing Dimensions of Contact, and I wrote the story. I wrote the end first, and then worked my way toward it from the beginning. Suffusing this process - as its primary tonality - there was the same feeling of a kind of lucid, solar bliss that had been there on the way to Harbury Lake.
The compass in the story has been brought across from The Drowned World, although there has been a transformation in the process. But the ocean is not the ocean of Ballard's novel, despite there being something in common in relation to there being a 'natural-world' quality of energy being the transcendental.
It is clear that in writing Ktarizon I was writing about groups, about planetary terrains, and about the use of psychotropic substances; and if the story is read carefully it will be seen that its line of flight - along with the escape group - is the sky, sunlight and a place somewhere in an an area of hills, as opposed to this line of flight being the ocean. And yet of course the ocean is fundamental in the story.
What is this ocean?
*
At this point there is another event that needs to be recounted, one that in a complex way is barely part of this current series of faculty-of-dreaming experiences. In fact, an additional reason for recounting it is that it will give a faint hint of the need for these experiences to be divided into two separate series, both beginning around 1996.
In August of 1999 I hitchhiked across Europe to Romania, and I did a walk across the Carpathian mountains. This was the first time I had been in a large deciduous forest: across the southern areas of the mountains there was an immense terrain of beech trees, which further down became an area with a very large diversity of both trees and smaller plants. I was blown away by the beauty of this forest.
The friend with which I was doing this walk was taking a different, more numerics-oriented direction within philosophy ('schizonumerics' was of course a central element of the thought-world of the CCRU, and my friend was a part of the CCRU), and our intellectual rapport on the walk was fractionally disjointed. But the 'fraction' in some sense perhaps related to a larger gap, at another level. The impression I have now is that I was there in that forest, and so was my friend, and yet somehow the two of us were not in the same place: as if - sometimes at least - we were in two different versions of the same forest.
On the fourth day of walking we found a northeast-facing alpine meadow which had psilocybe mushrooms growing in it (liberty caps, psilocybe semilanceata). We picked around 150 them, and two days later we ingested some of these mushrooms in a narrow, semi-glade in the forest, at around 10am, on a sunny day. (for reasons that are now a little unclear this semi-glade - which was the place where we were during the height of the trip, around midday - was very near to the path: no-one came along, but it is an enigmatic detail, in terms of it being a bit disfunctional).
We were sitting down, on rocks, facing toward the light. And at a certain point I closed my eyes, and found myself looking at something which I experienced as a kind of 'haunted ocean.' (although the word 'haunted' does not all capture what I saw, and only very minimally evokes what I felt). I was seeing a kind of underwater space of nexuses of narrow tube-tentacles, which were transparent, looked in some way organic, and had tiny coloured points of light moving slowly though them (I think the main colours were violet, green and pink). The perspective was skewed, in the sense that there seemed to be a nexus out of sight to my right, alongside me, and there was one that was visible ahead of me in the middle distance, but to the left. In front of me a transparent filament or tube-tentacle went diagonally from the cluster-point to the left, becoming larger as it became nearer, because of perspective, and then disappearing toward the nexus that was an implicit presence on my right. The three-dimensional meeting points consisted of eight or nine filaments in a kind of small organic-looking bulb that was a faintly anemone-like spheroid-with-projections, where the projections faintly tapered - over a short distance - into the slightly narrower width of the filaments that went between the nexuses. Scale was not discernible, and had a quality of being irrelevant: I could have been looking at a city or the nervous system of a sea-creature, but the feeling was that what was extraordinary about what I was seeing was on another level. And a last point is that the impression was of looking through a window, rather than of being within the space I was seeing. I was viewing the ocean through a window (so that I could not have looked around me), although the idea was that in the place where there was the 'window' there was no structure in the world at which I was looking, only ocean.
The light was half-light, as it would be under the ocean, and although there were no features in the far distance the light was brighter higher up. The feeling was that the points of light were travelling under circumstances of maximal protection, and that in any case the whole world of these nexuses was hidden away, deep in some oceanic zone that was itself protected (as if there was some barrier that I could not see, that went around everything, but let in some light).
There was a quality of the natural world about what I was seeing (its organic aspect was a fundamental feature of it), and yet it was an eerie place - though in a slightly dark, or 'penumbral' sense, not in the sense of the eerie-sublime (for instance there was none of the 'solar trance' affect that is evoked so powerfully in Picnic at Hanging Rock). It was serene, unearthly, faintly lit, and it was both a natural world and a domain of the eerie.
This was my fourth full trip on mushrooms. At the time I don't think I noticed that the 'linearity' of the experience was totally different from what had happened before. On the previous three occasions I had had very fast-moving, coloured geometrical visuals, which had sometimes taken the form of intricate metal-like lines that passed above and underneath each other, weaving intricate curved and coloured patterns across a two dimensional plane, but these had remained at the level of intricate, fluidly geometrical, shifting arrays, so that the linearity had a quality of being a primary aspect of a geometrical phantasmagoria, with it, generally speaking, not looking at all organic, and generally also with it not having much depth. It was 9 years since I had first seen visuals, while on marijuana, and 7 years since I had seen them at very high intensity on LSD (see Section 35, and Section 10), but now, under circumstances where I would have expected to see them there was a linearity which was very different, and which had a much calmer quality. The lines themselves were serenely motionless, and the only movement and colour was that of the tiny points of light that were moving through the filaments.
I was struck by the consistency and unusual, atmospheric aspects of the experience, but I did not give it much thought (it had not lasted long, and although in the course of the trip I kept getting similar 'views' nothing new was added, so far as I remember). Given
that it had a slightly 'dark' or penumbral-eerie quality - and given the 'brightness' and joy I associated with experiences on psilocybe mushrooms - it had not been at all what I had been expecting from a trip in an exceptionally beautiful forest, on a sunny day in midsummer: initially I put the thought of what had happened to one side.
The ocean in "Ktarizon: Deep Water" is the world as it is encountered during certain kinds of drug experience, but it is also very much a planetary ocean in an ordinary sense (as opposed to it having the quality of it being a hidden-away dimension of the planetary). And when something anomalous occurs it is experienced as entirely positive: the indications are that if a channel of contact has been opened up (if the moment of the anomalous is not the functioning of Kerry's unconscious) it is with a futural dimension, a zone of the present consisting of multiplicities which have crossed a threshold of awareness. This ocean is a very bright place - a place, that is, which is fundamentally about contact with the outside, and, in particular, the South of the outside.
When I started working on londonunderlondon with Mark Fisher (toward the end of 2000) the energy and the areas of thought-and-dreaming which I brought to the new project were very much those of the line-of-escape within Ktarizon: Deep Water. And the escape-group appears within londonunderlondon, though this time more implicitly, and seen from a distance (it is more faintly encountered, but you could be left with the impression that this group could have traveled further into the Future than the one in Ktarizon). However, the ocean which appears in the last part of this work is a brightened, more externally-connected version of the ocean that I saw when I was in the forest in Romania.
londonunderlondon is about "London fictions" which in some sense involve the city being inundated by its outside, but where the emphasis is on fictional worlds where for individuals there is also a specific further process of being suffused or swept away by an exteriority, whether this is directly or indirectly connected to the one affecting the city (in The Drowned World London is flooded with the ocean and overgrown with jungle vegetation, and in his dream Kerans feels "the barriers between his own cells and the surrounding medium dissolving" and his experience is of spreading out across the lagoon).
The space of londonunderlondon is broken open by The Drowned World, and by John Foxx's story The Quiet Man (discovered by Mark), which is included in its entirety at the beginning (these two fictions appear at the start and end of the 1962-1982 - pop-rock modernism - phase of western-world high intensity, and it should be noted that Foxx has departed from music in producing this story, and that The Quiet Man in vital ways is a deepening of the world of Ballard's novel). The other crucial fiction is Nigel Kneale's 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit, a film in which the gothic is fundamentally naturalised, but remains just as horrific, in that within this story all human beings have been pre-suffused - as a result of genetic tampering by another species - with something monstrous at the level of their intent. And this contrasts with The Quiet Man where the suffusing of the individual with the outside is of a very different kind: London has been taken over by vegetation and animals, and the lone individual has himself been taken over by the perception of this parallel-world London which in fact we have no reason to believe exists in the future.
The role of the fiction which concludes londonunderlondon (the story about events at a three-day warehouse party) is in particular to communicate with these last two fictions, The Quiet Man and Quatermass and the Pit. (there was not enough time to realise this fiction at a full level of effectiveness, so despite some aspects of the realisation being strong it is best to focus on the writing). And there are two primary points here. The first is that the escape-group is included (in contrast with the lone individual), and, inseparably, the future is explicitly set out, not chronologically, but as existence at higher and higher levels of intensity, one world after another, so that the journey of the escape is a movement into wider and deeper levels of reality ("when space breaks open, time turns sideways"). The second point is that a connection is made leading from Nigel Kneale's dark-transcendental to another direction which is brighter, and which should be seen as a means of understanding what is anomalous about human beings, and merely as a waystation - a transcendental southwest (which as such in a deep sense is a cul de sac) leading to transcendental south. Instead of the Martian insects there are the 'moth-creatures' which come through interfaces between two co-existing or superimposed worlds (I chose my friend Samia Iredale to communicate the bightness of this venturing into another world), and instead of an interaction in the distant past between the Earth and Mars there is the idea of an ongoing connection between two superimposed dimensions of one world.
"it was like it was all deep in an ocean, an ocean filled with coloured lights, and ... nexuses, and London was somehow stretched through it"
*
It was at some point in 2001 or 2002 that I had the following dream. I don't remember anything specific about the circumstances at the time of the dream, but my impression is that the lens involved owes something to Ballard's stories, and simultaneously owes something to Tarkovsky's Stalker, which I had watched (for the second or third time) in the months before the dream.
I dreamed that I was in a very large derelict structure which was partly underground and partly above ground. The part that was above the ground seemed to be a large metal framework the height of a five story building, and the part that was subterranean seemed to be a system of basements and tunnels that went the same distance below the surface. The whole structure was derelict, with a quality of being post-industrial, but at the same time there was an aspect of the building which was 'in operation,' although the feeling within the dream was that this was in some way accidental, as if a machine had been left running, or had been turned on by someone who was exploring the building. The part of the structure which was functioning was an oval shaped conveyor belt that went on a shallow diagonal (perhaps thirty degrees) from the highest point of the building to the lowest, and back again, in a very long oval-shaped loop (it can be seen that the whole structure would have been much longer that it was high, and the space of basements and tunnels through which the conveyor passed was not directly underneath the above-ground structure but was displaced from it, sideways).
In the dream I had been trapped on this conveyor belt for a long time. In some way there were no places where it was possible to get off it, because of height in the upper part of the structure, and because it was in some way closed off in the lower part. However, there was a point when I was coming up from the subterranean section when I saw a - very dangerous - opportunity to jump onto the ground. As I jumped there was a sharp, projecting piece of metal which I had to avoid by throwing my head to one side, the second after I jumped, but I succeeded in doing this, and landed unscathed on the ground, which was some kind of metal walkway (I had not had to jump far, or from any significant height: the main problem had been what I had to avoid, together with the fact that I was jumping from a moving and tilted surface).
But almost immediately I landed on the ground I was somewhere else. For a moment the new terrain was in front of me, and the structure I had escaped was behind me, and then the structure was gone, although the feeling of relief at having got off the conveyor belt was still informing the new experience. I was in a suburban street of a city, in bright sunlight, in early morning. It was the kind of suburban area that would generally be a long way from the centre: the houses might have been semi-detached or detached, and there were gardens with smallish trees in front of them (it felt relatively new; it seemed to be an area where there was wealth: and it had a nondescript quality).
There was a serenity about how I felt which was in part about the escape I had achieved, but which primarily arrived from a serene quality I was experiencing in what was around me. The light was serene, and so was the place and the early morning sky; and everything had a visionary quality.
The quality of a visionary perception was associated with the fact that everywhere on the ground and in the garden there were sheets of newspapers - lying flat, or moving a little in a breeze. What I was perceiving was that at that moment I was free of the words that were the content of these sheets of printed paper, and more deeply what I was seeing was that a terrible ongoing disaster was taking place within the human world, and that this disaster was very deeply connected with words.
A newspaper boy went past me on a bicycle with a nonchalant quality, cycling away out of sight - the feeling I have is that he might have been whistling (and this now reminds me of a conversation I had many years later with Mark, when he said that an unknown individual who is confidently whistling can be an eerie figure).
However, what was most fundamental about this whole phase of the dream was that in becoming serenely aware of the human disaster around me something new arrived - something that suffused the serene feeling of the dream and turned it into a perturbed feeling unlike any I have ever known. I dreamed that I was smelling burning lives. The experience within the dream was that the smell was of peoples' lives burning - not their bodies, although the horror was the same as this, but their lives.
I was jolted by the feeling, and I started to wake: and at the last moment, just before I woke, I was in a quiet side-street in somewhere that might have been Covent Garden or Holborn, an area that at this time I had visited on only a few occasions (I think it was still early morning), and I was looking at a street sign. I don't remember what it said for certain, but I experienced the name as having no obvious interest - I think the sign said "Mabel Lane."
This dream gives a very clear view toward the third and fourth aspects of the empirical-transcendental (see Section 34), and it also gives a minimal - and somewhat occluded - view toward another of these aspects - the second sphere of action. Which is to say that primarily, in relation to the empirical-transcendental, it breaks open a perception, firstly, of the ongoing human disaster, and, secondly, of the inseparable fact that human beings are travellers who have been trapped, so that they go round and round in circles. And the dream does this in a way which points toward the fundamental problem of language as a primary element of the trap (an issue which - when understood in relation to the freeing of perception in a process of leaving behind the fixation on words - relates directly to the second sphere of action). It simultaneously draws on awareness of death as a jolting force, that concentrates attention. The dream is an abstract-oneiric machine of quite a powerful kind.
It can be seen, nonetheless, that this dream gives an emphasis to critique, and that it in fact it has a curious feature of not going very far into the outside. It is 'a component of passage' but to function well it needs to be connected up to other outsights. It gives only a blocked view of the second sphere of action, and the current of Love-and-Freedom is barely visible through it at all.
However, this entire section directly concerns the sixth - and most important - feature of the empirical-transcendental: the current of Love-and-Freedom (Section 34; Section 1). And the dream when swept up into this context becomes a component of passage in the fundamental sense, rather than in a relative sense (a relative sense involving a cul de sac direction of the outside).
Everything here concerns an intensificatory - and deeply intermeshed - connection between the faculty of dreaming and a process of entering into becoming with the planet. And as we have seen (Section 36) the dynamic of entering into composition along these lines does not just involve movements from predominantly human-created 'insides' into more obviously planetary 'outsides' (from Coventry to Leamington; from Leamington to Harbury Lake; from Britain to a mountain forest in Tuva; from a building to the street) but also involves becoming capable of unbroken, spheroambient perception, where the perception is unbroken by words.
The dream is very radically about an escape into the outside, but it is very timid about where it goes when it reaches the outside (a suburb, and then a moment later the very centre of a large city). However, it is working simultaneously along two, very closely related lines. In relation to perception and language it could scarecly be more effective - the point is made at a shocking level of intensity, an intensity which of course is all the greater in that it has a cosmic-serene, desubjectified aspect. It is just that - again - this needs to be taken further: it needs to be connected up to the fact that we do not just need to wake perception, but need to wake a perception which is in the horizon of the planet, through a planetary envisaging that exists along with it, as a - non-cognitive - additional element coming from the faculty of dreaming. The multi-sense sphere of perception with its Immense, envisaged correlate, the sphere of the planet.
The dream therefore conducts toward an entering into composition with the planet in a much deeper sense than is involved in connection with its leafy suburb. The movement toward the outside that is a waking of perception is in itself already a movement toward the planet, although an oneiric attunement then needs to be made so that the perception occurs within a planetary perspective.
*
There was a year between the arrival of the idea of Ktarizon: Deep Water (at Harbury Lake, in 1999) and the point where I started to write the story. With the dreams about escape-groups in the years between 1996 and 1998 (culminating in the dream in February 1998) there was an even longer delay before what had taken place started to impact on me as something to be taken up as a dreaming - as virtual-worlds to inhabit and communicate. However, it needs to be seen that the initial events were very different, and that the length of the hiatus is only a minor indicator of this difference. Although Ktarizon: Deep Water was initially a kind of reverie (in the moments when, looking at rocks just below the surface of the lake, the world of the story appeared) it very rapidly - as part of the same initial process - became something that I saw as an idea for a story. In contrast, with the dreams and waking oneiric 'flashes' of 96 to 98 I never viewed any of these as the basis for a fiction It was more that they were anomalies which seemed to point to a direction within the human world - the direction of the group escape - and which in different ways had an extraordinary feeling of joy associated with them. With the dream in February of 1998 (see Section 24) the experience had in fact been so overwhelmingly intense that it had left me with a persistent feeling of it somehow having involved a wider and deeper level of reality. So even though this dream had a sequence of events that was in fact a basis for a story, it did not at all occur to me turn it into a fiction: it seemed to need to be recounted rather than transposed (for instance, if an explorer had discovered a system of geoglyphs across the surface of an area of jungle, would their response be to turn the experience into a novel, rather than tell people about the geoglyphs?).
In writing Dimensions of Contact the idea came to me, that given the virtual-real is no less real than the actual, a dream which has a higher, more encompassing level of joy and exhilaration than anything experienced in waking reality in fact pertains in some way to a higher level of existence, and should be treated as a guide in finding a way forward in your life. This thought arrived through thinking about the dream in 1998 - and there was no other experience which could have had this impact (the joy involved was encompassing because it involved perception, sensation, friendship, love, and the outer-edge joy of a journey across a dimensional boundary to a more intense level of awareness). (a point that should be re-iterated about the sheer, ultra-bright intensity of the dream is that in its crucial group-escape phase it had people and an action which was taking place - a process of attunement - but it had no images, so that everything was a kind of seeing or understanding - involving space, individuals and an event - that in some way, as seeing, was inseparably feeling/sensation, and that was not visual in form).
The above idea stemmed from thinking about the dream, but evidently this thought-and-argument is something very different from a story (it would be four more years before a story started to arrive, and the process - which became an element of The Corridor, and also became the story The Far Glade - was only 'completed' in the years between 2010 and 2015 (Section 27; Section 7). However, with the earlier dreams - about a group living in the countryside, somewhere near Malton, in North Yorkshire - something did begin to happen which was a functioning of the faculty of dreaming. It was a recurring, prepossessing 'reverie' that seemed to have a life of its own, while at the same time having the quality of simply being a thought experiment. It was the thought of a group of people whose existence was about travelling into the unknown, and who were living in an area of countryside. They had been living in this place (a place specifically chosen by them for the purpose) for about two years, and over the time during which I was experiencing this reverie the characters and names of the different individuals began to appear, in a process that was like dreaming up a story, but with no plot. But what made the reverie a powerful process was a sublime feeling of sunlit intensity that came from the thought of the place and the circumstances, and a specific surge of feeling that came from taking up the perspective of one of the individuals as they contemplated the situation - a joyful wonder that condensed into the phrase "I can't believe we've actually managed to do this."
There were two main versions of this recurring reverie. In one of them the place was somewhere in an implacably indeterminate area of countryside which was perhaps somewhere in the southwest of England, or in Sussex, but which also had a quality of being in a more southern terrain, as if it was in France or Spain. In the other it was the place from one of the dreams in 96-97 - a house about five miles southwest of Malton in an area of forest that was a creation of the dream. In the second form of the reverie the terrain was very clear, and the atmosphere was extremely positive, but it was in the locationally indeterminate form that the feeling of sublime joy from the dream in February 98 broke through (in this dream there had been no images: no specific awareness of a house, and no awareness of any terrain, or any location). At the time I knew that most importantly I was re-connecting with what had broken through - in some sense - in the 1998 dream, and I feel certain I knew that the indeterminacy in the first form of the experience was not something I should resolve: there were the people living in a house in an area of countryside, and there was their intent to travel into wider realities, and that was what I needed for the lens to work. This all continued for several months, and initially intensified, but after a while the most intense form began to fade, leaving - in relation to the two original forms - only the reverie about the house in the forest in Yorkshire. Towards the end of this phase the first form was 'replaced' - or was transformed into - an image of a semi-derelict house in a hot, quite arid country (that felt a bit more like southern Spain than anywhere else, but which again was indeterminate), where this house had just been discovered by - or was about to be discovered by - two or three people who were on the edge of becoming part of an escape-group, and for whom the house was fundamental. It can be seen that I had brought the story back by two years, and that in the process - for no apparent reason - the latitude had gone closer to the equator. Simultaneously the place had come into the foreground: in a main form of this third reverie I was simply seeing the house from inside, but without there being any presence of any of the protagonists. It was always bright sunlight, and heat, and silence, but where the silence was broken by the breeze, in that an external door of the house would be gently banging, swept open and then shut again by the wind.
There can be no doubt about the planetary aspect of these experiences, an aspect which only on a first level concerns the fact that all of the locations of the reveries are outside the urban worlds of towns and cities. Beyond this nonurbanism there was also the fact that the groups were not connected to any nation, and insofar as there was any specificity they were fundamentally in an encounter with the planet, as opposed to an encounter with the human world (travelling into wider and deeper realities has nothing to do with nations, and it is evidently barely a beginning, in characterising it, to call it transnational). It was also the case that the locations on one 'side' of the experiences were either indeterminate or had settled - as they did at the end - on a place that was a closer to the equator than Britain, and which had become determinate only in latitudinal terms (it was never fixed that the place I was envisaging was in Spain, and after a few months some versions of the third form of the reverie were on the same latitude relative to the equator, but in Australia). And the fourth planetary aspect consists of the breeze, and the silent, sunlit atmosphere of the terrain around the house in the concluding form of the series of reveries - the only recurring, well-defined action of any kind across all of the experiences was the action of the wind opening and closing a door of an empty, semi-derelict house (something that was emphasised by the fact that when this was happening none of the protagonists of the reverie were present).
These reveries were the view from the dream in 1998 asserting itself within me - and my faculty of feeling told me very clearly that this was a view toward the Future. In going back over my relatively recent experiences I had brought into focus the event from four years earlier, and this event had swept me away into the sequence of reveries. However, although my faculty of feeling could see that this view was the direction of Love-and-Freedom, my faculty of lucidity did not succeed in bringing into focus the details of the form of existence of the group, or the details of how such a group could come together. And my faculty of dreaming also did not get far, and for whatever reason did not even begin to cross over from the 'perceiving-potentials-of-existence' modality of the question 'what would it be like?', to the modality of exploratory story-creation (unlike with Ktarizon: Deep Water this view was so sharply in focus as a view toward a wider reality that I did not even think about exploring through the invention of stories). However, the faculty of dreaming did nonetheless go increasingly into effect over the course of the experiences: and what appeared through the work of this faculty was the finding of a house somewhere in a semi-wilderness with a warmer, brighter climate than that of Britain, and was a faint but insistent foregrounding of the planet through the terrain around the house, and through the door being opened and closed by the wind. As if there was now a calm, but emphatic knocking taking place, somewhere in a dreamy, sunlit part of my mind.
*
During these years there was a subtle movement in which my attention was turning toward the 'sky' of the planet, as opposed to the ground or the oceans (to be specific, it was turning toward the atmosphere). The subtlety lay in the fact that new or modified channels of envisaging and dreaming were in effect, and also in the facts that the process was gradual, and made up in part of occurrences in sleep (which did not belong to any deliberate, unified exploration).It would be right to say that the faculty of dreaming was coming into the foreground, and with it the sky, and it would also be right to say that a process of stopping thinking and of becoming perception was associated with the overall shift, but, as will be seen, although there was a movement away from language (from the 'internal dialogue') this did not mean that language had disappeared - instead it seemed to mean that although it was slipping back from the foreground, language was also shifting toward different modalities.
At some point in the spring of 2002 I was listening to the album Geogaddi by Boards of Canada, I was on my own in my room, and the music, together with the allusive - and elusive - title of the album, somehow assisted me toward a semi-trance process of envisaging the atmosphere through the perspective of a tactile sensation field (envisaging the atmosphere in relation to its contact). I don't have an impression about what prompted me to go in the direction of the sky. For instance, one of the most striking 'planetary' references on the album is the sample 'when lava flows underwater it behaves differently'. But this is what happened, and it rapidly became a very striking experience. And one of the reasons it was striking was of course that the process was taking up a spheroambient sense - the tactile - and pushing the non-spheroambient sense of sight towards a kind of tactile-as-sight synesthesia, so that there was an experience of spherical vision, with which it is possible to see the entire sphere of a surrounding world of stars.
Dream you are a hollow spherical body with great thickness and laminar complexity, and with a vast body inside that is wider than your thickness.
Dream you are a white spherical world of flows, influxes, vortices, layers, seethings, incandescences.
Dream you are an immense world of different temperatures - of zones, bodies, layers, clouds and fugitive track-networks all with different degrees of heat.
Dream you are vastly and intricately touched and boiled into by a world of oceans.
Dream you are vastly touched by the multi-level contours and temperatures of worlds of land masses.
Dream you are always spread out under stars in vast, slow moving masses of night air.
Dream you have a world of clouds of water vapour within you, and you are always filled with birds and insects.
Dream you are always threaded with lightning.
Dream you are always suffused with deep-level expanding worlds of sound waves, spreading faster laterally than upwards - sound worlds of storms, volcanoes, the wind, fires, animal cries, music, insects, machines.
Dream that on one side each of your zones on every scale is being suffused pre-eminently by a stupendously vast world of light-contact with stars and galaxies, and that this contact is suffusing you across the entirety of your surface.
Dream that each of these encounters with a star or galaxy is its own intricate, incandescent motion-world of colours and intensities - of light at different levels of activity.
Dream there is a huge, very near spherical zone of searingly powerful light combustion seething into you vastly and continuously - searing, glorious, primarily white-yellow, blasting out light and photons into you and a continual intricate wind of plasma.
Dream you are spinning, and your shifting zones are continually encountering the light-worlds of the encompassing spherical world of stars and galaxies.
Dream you are a world of sudden tracks of acutely hot air created by small solid masses coming from outside.
Dream you are a spherical world of zones and levels of white motions - foldings, laminar flows, fusions, vortices, standing waves of spiral updrafts, gusts, winged fronts, areas of different density, hurricanes, tornadoes, drifts, zephyrs, curving low level winds, ripples, pulses, slow drifts, and breathings.
Dream the area around one end of your axis of spin is bright and cool-warm, and the opposite area is a star-filled world of extreme cold.
Dream you are intricately riddled with tiny hexagonal plates, either suspended in shifting masses, or moving rapidly to your lower surface.
Dream your upper layers are serene, starlight-filled expanses, and are shifting worlds of plasma.
Dream you are touched endlessly across your inner surface by the zones of motion of trees, waves, fires, lava flows, animals, machines, plants and rivers.
Dream you are a vast world of colours, sounds and flows.
Dream you are a vast world of contact.
My dreams in sleep at this time had a double quality of turmoil and serenity, whether these two aspects were in some way sequential (as with the dream about escaping from the conveyor belt) or were in some way simultaneous. A good example of the simultaneity-form was a dream in which a phrase appeared at the end, where this phrase had an impersonal quality of a 'tutelary' energy-formation leaning in and expressing something valuable, where this formation could evidently have been a normally non-accessible part of myself (it was the third of three dreams of this kind that I had between 1999 and 2002). And here again it was the sky that was central to the experience.
I dreamed it was a sunny day, and that I was on hill a few miles from a city. A very strong wind was blowing, and in looking up into the sky I could see intense, bright points within the air - points which were sublimely beautiful. The points were quite a long way apart from each other, and I knew withing the dream that I was seeing formations of intent, and that these formations of intent in some cases were human beings (it would be right to say therefore that the sky had been taken up as a lens to look toward the second aspect of the transcendental, the body without organs). There was a quality of serene brightness and of exhilarating lucid energy. And although there was a very strong and gusting wind it seemed that the intense points could both stay in place in the sky, apparently unmoved by the wind (although still in motion), or could, on occasion, be swept away by it. And as I looked (just before the dream ended) these words arrived:
a jeweled gale
*
The impression I have is that during the five years after 1998 my life was indeed a kind of 'gale' or quiet storm - a kind of bright tumult within which I was scanning and searching, on different levels, for ways of moving forward. And it seems important to recount that there were two other dreams around 2001 - 2002 where phrases arrived at the end, and also to give an account of the nature of these dream experiences. The feeling given at these moments was of seeing or understanding a situation (with or without images), and of the words coming, not in any sense straightforwardly from beyond me, but from an anomalous, perhaps more lucid and concise form of myself who expressed what was being perceived. The idea here is that I was perceiving a situation or set of circumstances where this perception suggested words for expression by a different form of myself.And yet - at the same time there was a quality of an impersonal, 'alien' lucidity leaning into me, as if I had for a moment found a channel in the body without organs which gave me something that conducted toward understanding.
The first of the other dreams was one where I have been left with no memory of images, but only of a phrase:
the way is forged
The meaning of forged was 'made' (made as opposite of found), and inevitably involved the idea of an intense process of construction. The bringing together of the quietly abstract (and recurrently 'non-constructive') idea of 'path' with something being forged out of fire was powerful: the idea being suggested was that on some crucial level there was no path that could simply be found, waiting for you (as it were), but that you would have to create the path yourself. On top of this, there was also the unsettling (and very indeterminate) presence of the other sense of forged, as if, for instance, the phrase was a simultaneous warning that counterfeit forms of the way also exist. The four words together had a quality of being exceptionally positive and challenging (they affirmed the existence of 'the way,' but indicated a very high degree of activity would be needed, as opposed to passive path-following), and - inseparably - they had another aspect which was more perturbing than reassuring.
In the second dream the concluding phase (I don't remember anything other than this part), was me seeing down a long valley which had a river running along it, and of me seeing the sea in the distance. Only it was not experienced as the sea, and the river was something other than water: the phrase that came with this dream was not fully focused, in that it had a gap where a word was in some sense 'under erasure:'
a river of leads to eternity
The word under erasure was 'tears' (it was actually seen as
*
It can be asked at this point - in what direction were these dreams looking? Or, to put it another way, from what direction did these dreams arrive? Asking these question (without setting out to answer them) is helpful for disturbing any sense of a fundamental distinction between journeys into the outside and dreams. But it is also helpful in relation to what all along is the most vital (and widest) perspective for the description of the oneiric experiences and journeys that took place after 2003. The main thread of this account will initially be the immanent inter-relationship of these two processes, but what will be most important will be the issue of places, and - specifically - the issue of the place or complex terrain around which everything during these years was to a great event 'revolving.'
*
(Clearly it is being stated that during the years in question dreams - of different kinds - were deepening my attention in relation to the planet, and that journeys toward terrains which were more 'planetary' than my point of departure (less inflected by the human world), were generating dreams. But it can be asked, were all journeys into countryside and semi-wilderness spaces equally generative of dreams? (the answer is straightforwardly no - it depends on the where and the when, and equally it depends on those individuals with whom you travel, if any, and on the state of mind which you take with you on the journey). And it can also be asked did dreams generate journeys, as well as journeys generating dreams? And to this the answer is yes, although it will be a while before this second side of a reciprocal influence can be clearly delineated.)
*
It was the afternoon of the 22nd September, 2000. I had taken my bicycle with me on a train from London to Banbury, and I was now cycling through a hilly area of southern Warwickshire (afterwards I would find out that the area is called the Burton Dassett Hills). It was a warm sunny day, with a slightly diffuse quality to the sunlight. I was going to stay for the weekend with friends who lived in Leamington (twenty miles further along the train-line), and my plan was to look for liberty cap mushrooms. I arrived at a promising-looking field that was not overlooked by farmhouses and, leaving my bicycle by the fence, I started to search. My past experience of looking for liberty caps was only from the previous three years, but I had been fairly successful, without a huge amount of effort, so I was not particularly surprised when the field (which I had never been in before) turned out to have to have a large number of the mushrooms growing in it. It was the right time of year, there had been rain, and the field had the kind of deep green grass that there had been in other fields in which I had found them. But the number of mushrooms I found was probably more than twice as much as I had found on any previous occasion. In a relatively short amount of time I found enough for four or five people.
I returned to my bike, and cycled the remaining ten miles, through country lanes with ripe blackberries in the hedgerows, and with the sun beginning to set on my left.
The feeling was of being swept smoothly forward - a feeling of having chosen the right direction at the right time. I was hoping that my friends would be on for tripping that evening. And slightly to my surprise all three of the people at the house thought it was a good idea. All of them were people with whom I had taken psychotropics before (primarily grass, although with one of my friends I had taken mushrooms on a previous occasion) , and everyone was in a good, start-of-the-weekend mood, without any alcohol being involved, and without any prior commitments.
If you are taking halucinogens with friends it is best for the relationships to be strong friendship-alliances, or at least for the relationships to be without tension. There was an ease to my own lines of friendship on this occasion, perhaps in part because of different areas in which we were primarily engaged, and perhaps also because we had only known each other for two or three years, so that there had not been time for tense or jaggedly critical responses to become natural. My friends were all musicians who were interested in philosophy, and I was working in philosophy and had a love of music: this gave strong connections, but without much tendency to impinge of specialised areas. And yet what also should be said is that the friendship that evening were exactly as they should be, from any perspective (a friendship-alliance was virtual within the friendships, and in fact at that point was completely actualised). There was the sense of humour and courage and fascination with the anomalous that were needed for what we were doing.
And we did not take the mushrooms in the modality of an indulgent binge in a living room. Not long after they started to have an effect (it was now dark) we went into the street and set out to walk across Leamington to an area of parkland (called Newbold Comyn) where there was a hill on which you could sit and look back across the town.
The liberty caps had affected me in the form of a feeling of joy, and in the form of a slight, but sustained feeling of insubstantiality or 'hypersubstantially' on the part the surrounding world (as if the surrounding world was the same kind of sensory substance as my own form). There is no doubt that the joy had affected everyone, and as we walked through the streets the impression was very much that all of us were primarily in the modality of perception, despite the fact that conversations were continually taking place, and that we were primarily in this modality because perception of the visual world had become like music, producing joy in the same way.
I discovered that through taking off my glasses the out-of-focus 'globes' of the street-lights became striking: the amorphous spaces of slightly 'fibrous' luminosity in these distortion-globes had an intensity and precision which felt as if it was beyond what I would normally have experienced, and as we continued walking theses spaces of light started to be slightly augmented by a 'jeweled' patterns. I feel that seeing patterns during psychotropically-induced states is probably far less important than other aspects of these experiences, but, although this was not deliberate, taking off my glasses and looking at the lights was a way of remaining focused on perception, and of not becoming too caught up in conversation.
We were on the edge of the town, and were starting to climb up the small, grass-covered hill which looked out over the southern part of Leamington. What was about to happen was something so minimal that it is likely I would simply have forgotten it, if it had not been associated with a further event, a few hours later (and even then the conjunction of the two events would be nothing more than a tiny fissure in a field of certainty, a kind of faint but indelible question mark).
A conversation started about the drone music tradition that had begun in the 60s with the music of La Monte Young, and about drone music in general.
We sat down at the top of the hill, looking out at the lights of the town. We had been swept forward: there was a light-hearted but ultra-intense quality to everything, and a feeling that escaping permanently from the distresses and miseries of ordinary reality was as easy as walking out of your house into a summer night. The conversation about drone music was continuing, and bringing to mind the subtle intensity of this form of music made me think about electrical fields, which led me to think about the electro-magnetic field of the planet. At this point I had an experience of envisaging the interior of the planet beneath me not as solid but as a kind of gold-yellow space of energy that produced an impression of feeling rather than matter, and which had a faintly crackling, vibratory quality.
"What if drone music" I said, "is all along an expression into music of the planet's electro-magnetic field...." The next phrase seemed to arrive as something tightly-formed (adjectivally excessive in relation to ordinary uses of language, but correct under these circumstances) and it seemed to be as necessary as the completion of a melody, with the last word being the resolving note.
"....an expression of the planet's ceaseless, vibratory, electrical hum..."
As I said this this I was looking - slightly downward - at a horizontal line of street-light globes (I was still not wearing my glasses) which was probably around five or six lights in length, and which would have been around a mile away. And as the word hum enacted itself in the form of the emphasised sound (taking me back to perception through the auditory channel) I had an experience that the lights looked back at me, or, to be precise, that something looked back at me through the lights. It was just for a split-second, and the look had a neutrality - it was neither friendly and affirmative, nor curious, nor hostile and predatory. And nor did it have any quality of hiding an intent, nor any quality of not being capable of an intent. It was just a look. And then it was gone.
I don't think I said anything about this very fleeting experience. The conversation continued, and after around an hour we returned to the house, returning through Jephson Gardens. In this park when I looked into areas of shadow I could see small intricate 'whorls' on my visual field (slightly crystalline, like frost flowers, but in roughly circular, radiating arrays) which had many different coloured, prismatic modalities, as if the tones were varying from suggesting oil-sheen colours to being reminiscent of a crystal in sunlight). Back at the house we talked and listened to music for several hours - a lot of the tracks to which we listened were drone tracks or phase-music minimalism (I remember we listened to Reich's Music for 18 Musicians).
Towards the end of the evening one of my friends became emotional, as a result of remembering an incident a few years earlier (before I had met him) when one of his friends had experienced a bad trip on LSD, and at the thought that his friend, who had decided not to take halucinogens again, would not be able to experience what had just taken place through taking the mushrooms. I tried to respond with helpful perspectives in relation to what was a kind of onrush of sadness, while trying to avoid any valorising of what had just happened as in any sense the way forward, and while also being aware that the whole question of bad trips was not an ideal terrain for the conversation given that the wave of sadness was in itself a kind of distant relative of a bad trip (the emotion being sadness as opposed to fear). Eventually my friend started to feel better, and at around 5 in the morning the night came to an end, and I was left on my own in the living room.
My bed was a sofa and a blanket. When I lay down I set out to clear my head and perceive. I think I was aware that there had just been a large amount of talking and that it would be good to return to perception. But whether or not I was giving any thought to the previous few hours, I definitely had a strong feeling that the thing to do now was to become unbroken perception, letting go of all thought processes. I closed my eyes, slowed down my breathing, and almost immediately I felt a shift into a more focused state where I knew it was a little easier for me to fend off internal verbalising. This focused perceptual state - without thoughts - had lasted for around half a minute, and then there was a jolt which felt as if a truck had knocked into a wall outside the house, or as if someone in a neighboring house in the terrace had knocked over a large wardrobe. I didn't give much to to what had happened, and before long I fell asleep.
In the morning I discovered that the jolt had been a 4.2 earthquake. The epicentre had been thirteen kilometres below the surface of the earth, beneath a village called Budbrooke, which was six kilometres away, on the opposite side of Warwick (it should be said both that earthquakes are not at all uncommon in Britain, and that Warwickshire is apparently criss-crossed with small faults, but it can be added that this was the largest UK tremor for nine years). Across the affected region there had been no damage from the earthquake, apart from very minor occurences - there was a report on the radio that some plates had been broken in a house in Coventry.
There was evidently nothing to say, but my memory of what had taken place on the hill the night before would now not be lost. The crack in my unconscious certainty about the planet beyond its life-forms being nothing but inert 'matter' had been opened up, and although tiny, and yielding of no knowledge or even faint opinion, it was both quietly visceral and indelible. And more than this, it felt like a breath of fresh air to have this experience-generated question mark in effect within me.
*
In the space of six years there had been two anomalous events (or sequences of events) in Leamington which stood out very powerfully for me, as very striking singular occurences, whatever their value might prove to be. And the two points that need to be made at this stage are that in both of these events Leamington was in effect as a radically displaced centre - as a place which in pointing beyond itself was fundamentally effaced, or placed to one side -; and, secondly that Leamington had become a place which in multiple direct and indirect ways had become a displaced centre in this way (for instance, by the year 2000, going to Leamington had already become a process of going to a terrain which included Leamington, but which most importantly included a place 6 miles away, Harbury Lake).
In the dreams which culminated in the escape-group dream in February 1998 (Section 24) the location in which I was dreaming was Leamington, but the places about which I was dreaming were Yorkshire (the horizontal beyond) and, in the culminating dream, it was the space beyond the solar system (the upward or outward beyond). In the experience in September of 2000 the place again was Leamington (during part of the experience I was even looking directly at Leamington, in the form of the view of the town from Newbold Common) but the overall event pointed to the zone (that is, the planet) on which the town is constructed, and, most specifically, it pointed toward a point thirteen kilometres below its surface (the downward or inward beyond).
It will now be becoming clear why it is that on one level 'the plane of consistency' of this book can be described using the name Leamington as one primary term, and why it is, simultaneously, that it has almost nothing to do with Leamington. It can be seen that Leamington for me was the place where space arrived, both in the more ordinary sense - although here it should be said the primary issue on this level is the singular and encompassing space that is the planet - and inseparably in the sense of the transcendental-empirical space of intent/energy (in which wider realities exist one beyond another, and in which journeys in intensity take place in the form of threshold-crossings).
On the one hand there is the terrain stretching from Harbury Lake to Leamington. On the other hand, there are the oneiric events and abstract-perception emergences that took place in the town. Together these took a problem of places to the to the point where it was fully effectuated and deliberate, and they posed a problem of expressing, in the form of fiction, the potentials which had been glimpsed through - most powerfully - the series of dreams about escape-groups. (It will be seen that these correspond to the issues of 'journeys into the outside' and 'dreamings').
The problem of places is in fact the multiplicitous problem of intensive nomadism, with its micro and macro aspects: Where can a base be constructed from which journeys can take place? What form should this base take? How can a group come together whose aim is to travel into wider realities? Where, at each moment, to go or explore next? Where to go during the gaps (holidays) within phases of paid work? Where should be an ephemeral or temporary 'base' (for a moment, or for a day, or a week) within an area of wilderness, or semi-wilderness, or countryside? With whom do you travel? At what point, and in what ways, do you travel as part of a group, and when do you travel on your own, or as part of an alliance between two individuals? What form would a group take, and how would it function? If there is a semi-group in the form of a loose nexus of exploratory/creative alliances, what are the best projects for collaborations with individuals or for wider collaborations within the nexus? What relationship of proximity should a base have to towns and cities? Are there advantages to being in mountains, or forests or deserts? There are two reasons why this multiple problem can be said to have become focused in Leamington, and the series of dreams was fundamental in relation to both of these reasons. The first is that the question of groups had come emphatically to the forefront in these dreams, so that the modern, middle-class lockdown into questions of families, individuals, couples and societies had been decisively left behind. The second is that the blocked, ordinary-reality perspective of the empirical had been broken open, and had been replaced by the perspective of the transcendental (the transcendental-empirical). The culminating dream was about a group, and everything concerned a movement across a threshold to a wider level of reality, and the wider level of reality was on one level describable as 'the ocean,' where this term is another way of saying 'the body without organs' (the journey involved, and 'the ocean' relating to the sixth and second aspects of the transcendental-empirical, as set out in Section 34).
And the other problem (that of writing fictions which in some sense provide views of obscured aspects of the world) is in fact a contingent, specific issue within the immensely wider issue of the abstract-perception faculty of dreaming, which has its own movements across thresholds. But here, again, the issues of the group and the transcendental-empirical were in the fullest sense fundamental to the problem.
(It is necessary to point out out that there were in fact three problems that to a great extent emerged in Leamington: the third one being that of the difference between transcendental awareness and empirical awareness (section 2). It could be said therefore that the three problems were those of travelling/exploring; fictions in their function as maps; and the overall problem of maps and compasses in relation to journeys into wider realities.).
Taking the escape-group dreams and psychotropically-induced experiences of the years in Leamington from 1995 to 2000, and then placing these alongside the works which assisted me during this time (A Thousand Plateaus, etc) it is not immediately apparent that in leaving Leamington there would be any subsequent connection to the town, other than the process of working on problems which had emerged there, but which in themselves had no abstract-oneiric connection to the place (for instance, none of the dreams were in any way about Leamington). However, the situation is given a different perspective by the fact that for the next twelve years years after leaving the town I visited Harbury Lake at least once every year, and that for several years I also visited two friends who lived in a small village a few miles to the northwest (this is of course to say that at the level of the actual I was consistently choosing to 'revolve around' Leamington). It is also important to point out that during the last two years in which I lived in the town I had a strong, persistent impression that this was the place in which in some sense I had 'woken up.' The line of thought here leads to the view that Leamington for me is a 'natal terrain,' but it it should immediately be said that it is only a natal terrain, and that the area around Malton and Helmsley (see Hidden Valleys) was also a natal terrain, and not just in the more physical sense of me having first been in this other area when I was a very young child.
Despite my returns to the area, and the events which had taken place there, it is not at all clear that the unfolding of the problems of travelling, groups and maps would be inflected by it (it should be remembered that by the time I left I was 'spread out' across a west and and an east in a way where Central America and the east of Eurasia had become Far more intensely-impacting and Tutelary zones than Britain, and that this has only intensified in the time since ). And in fact there is no doubt a fundamental level of contingency about what has happened. It should also be added that in that there has been a circling around the terrain that stretches from Harbury Lake to Leamington this has really only become clear at the point where a new central terrain has come into focus, as if the movement all along has been a progression in the form of a spiral which only becomes visible as such at the point where the line diverges toward a fundamentally different spiral movement.
Leamington and a long process of circling around it together become a way of looking in a specific, anomalous direction. Leamington is the radically displaced centre which has very little to do with itself, in that it points toward other regions, toward the planet, toward the sky. And starting from Leamington and circling around it there is a movement over many years which takes the form of journeys to other places on the planet (journeys in the actual), and of explorations in the virtual-real - in the form of dreams in sleep, semi-trance-experiences, and the writing of fictions, impersonally personal narratives, and philosophy. What kind of view could this be, a view which is as planetary as it is oneiric? And in looking in this direction what kind of eyes might open?
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