Experiencer

Writing about Witchduck Lane is difficult for many reasons. The first is that I was on a mind-altering substance at the time; the second is what happened in my mind. If I’m going to be honest here, it feels important to tell exactly what happened without sugarcoating it. Yes, I’ve been a teacher for over twenty years, and yes, I’m no stranger to psychedelics. The two have no overlap. I am a whole human being, and psychedelics, to me, are fascinating tools for exploring the nature of reality.

This wasn’t my first rodeo playing with the edges of my mind. I had explored the frontiers of reality quite a bit in college and had already completed a few Vipassana retreats before this horrible night. I thought I knew my own mind, how it worked and how to bring it back. I knew its rhythms and patterns. But that was about to change, and drastically.

It was 2000, about the time I wrote Yellow Flowers and Princess Leia Syndrome. I had just returned from nearly a year living in Dominica, coming home nearly penniless. My ever-generous mom offered for me to stay with her in her new town, Virginia Beach, so I could work, save some money, and begin figuring out how and where I was going to do a teaching program.

At the time, I had two jobs: one was nannying a really sweet baby nearby, and the other was working at the grocery and deli at the Heritage Store, which sold all of the products Edgar Cayce had dreamt up through his channelling.

A hippie friend of mine from the deli took me out to some jam band thing, and afterward we were going to crash at my mom’s place.

We were chatting in my room when, all of a sudden, she transformed into a witch. A hag. Hunched over, eyes blackened, dull, warts and all. This was a really cute girl who somehow became the full embodiment of a witch. I knew my eyes were playing tricks on me. She was still the hippie girl, but it was unsettling. Coincidence that we were on Witchduck Lane? I don’t think so.

Then I made the ultimate mistake of suggesting we go to sleep. In retrospect, we probably should have put on some Pink Floyd, but no, I got into bed and she got into her sleeping bag, each of us alone with our own thoughts. Usually I love that. I love how my mind works and I usually have fun in there. Not tonight.

I remember that even though the room was dark, a glow from the desktop computer tower cast an eerie green light.

Soon, the images came. One after another, they entered my mind violently. Vivid images. I didn’t want to see what was broadcasting in my head. The images came quickly and forcefully and felt completely foreign, completely alien. I couldn’t stop them. I tried every tool I had. None of them worked. My brain was hijacked.

The pictures in my mind were the stuff of nightmares, things I would never consciously imagine. Shapes that didn’t belong in this world. Eyes that seemed to see through me. A flash of scaled skin, a strange intelligence. Only later did I realize what I was seeing. Reptilian beings.

I know that makes me sound a little crazy to “normal” people out there, but it is the goddamned truth. Image after image of reptilian beings appeared in my mind, as if they were introducing themselves. I tried to shut it out, but it was impossible to distract myself or change the focus.

They wanted me. I knew that in my bones. Do not fall asleep or I will be theirs. They wanted my body. The predatory energy was visceral. I was being hunted. I could not fall asleep. But being awake was torture. How was I going to survive this night?

With that question came the answer: love. Think about love. Love love love love. It wasn’t working. Their images kept breaking through.

And then every sound in the house syncopated into a clear message, crystal clear.

Do not think love. You must feel love.

In my heart, I conjured up the little innocent baby I was nannying, the purest love I could find. The rest were complicated. I kept this baby in mind, my love for her melting away the images, finally. Reprieve.

Feel love, don’t think it. The image of that baby saved my life that night, and perhaps even saved me from creating alien hybrid children, or from a darker lesson about human sexuality. I wish i was joking. I know it sounds crazy.

Either way, the message was clear and simple: feel love.

This is still my medicine, twenty-five years later. Heart resonance continues to be one of my favorite practices, especially with my cats. It was a beautiful truth that sprouted out of the darkness of abject, primal fear.

Feel love.

That night brought both: the understanding of interdimensional beings who wanted to harm me, and the knowledge that I have power within me. My love energy can protect me. I don’t know if the reptilians gave me both lessons, or if another intelligence stepped in to help.

I wonder if I will ever know.

For a long time, I just cataloged this night as a bad trip. Nothing more. I’d never had a bad trip before, and I didn’t think it was worth investigating further. Later, I heard someone say that psychedelics don’t nullify the experience of entities. They can actually draw them in. Many people see entities when they’re altered. Sure, so do psychopaths, but does that make them less real?

What happened that night was unlike anything else in my life. A few years later when I felt the presence of Bigfoot, that was an echo of this moment. Maybe Oak Drive was too. In each of those experiences, I felt like the prey, the hunted. Each was visceral. Each time, the energy masked itself in my mind as something different — a shadow being, a Bigfoot, a reptilian. So many faces of the shadowy unknown.

Witchduck Lane was named for a grim reason. In colonial times, women accused of witchcraft were tied up and thrown into the water. If they floated, like a duck, they were killed for being witches. If they sank, they were innocent. That history lingered in the air there, a haunting that never really left.

And maybe it mattered that this happened near my mom. I’ve realized that many of my darker experiences happened close to her. She was a lighthouse for the weird. Things found her. Or maybe they found me through her.

Now, when I think about Witchduck Lane, I don’t feel fear anymore. I feel respect. Something ancient was speaking through that night, maybe history, maybe energy, maybe my own subconscious knocking on the walls of itself. I don’t know. What I do know is that it showed me how thin the veil can be, how easily the ordinary world gives way to the unseen.

I no longer call it a bad trip. It was a crossing, a teaching in disguise. It taught me that love is the only force that can meet darkness without becoming it. And it reminded me that places hold memory, that water and land remember what happened there, and that some of us are more tuned to those frequencies than others. Witchduck Lane will always be one of those places for me, a reminder of how close the edge of mystery really is.

I only discovered this song last year, seems to me that maybe Bowie and I had similar experiences.