[ WP ] All my life I had been fascinated with the memories I can recall that were n't my own .

All my life I have been fascinated by a series of memories that do not belong to me, nor should belong to any sane man. This leads me, through the linear process of applied logic, to conclude that I am no longer a sane man. For when I recount details and specifics to friends, colleagues or those who purport scholarly expertise in the intricacies of the human mind, the response has been universally one of revulsion. Revulsion of spirit, I should add. Not the kind of repugnance associated with the presence of some fetid feature of rot and decay or the noisome odour of drains in dire need of clearing. Their reaction is a metaphysical flinch from that which the mortal brain does not and will not comprehend. 
 
 The situation developed in my early 20s during a period of belated post-teenage exuberance and experimentation with intoxicants. What began as simple fumblings among friends with ethanol and amphetamines soon escalated to encompass more potent fungoid excesses. Morphine diacetate, injected intravenously, morphine and similar opiates and then Psilocybin mushrooms. This latter triggered the awakening of those memories which, in turn, unnerved, terrified then gradually fascinated me. 
 
 The memories emerged at first as dark dreams, sweeping but simple dioramas where I, as some bird of other-worldly origin, would soar over endless vistas of geodesic lattice-work scattered with cyclopean architecture, tumbled mega-cities of obsidien and granite blocks against a white-spattered backdrop of stars, galaxies and expanding gas forms, amorphous dying stars and nebulae. I would wake from these phantasmagorical flights drenched in sweat and breathing hard, craving light so that my fingers would fumble for the nearest switch. 
 
 As the dreams continued, night after night, it seemed to me that the imagery gained dimension. The landscapes, shallow and surreal in previous visits, became firm and detailed. I would swoop low across meadows of strange luminous grey grass, wheel through eye-shaped hollows in Brobdingnagian stone formations and rise vertically to ascend the faces of gargantuan black cliffs. I was a winged Gulliver exploring the land of giants and so lucid and alluring were the dreams of this time that even though I awoke with a sinking dread clawing at the socket walls of my soul, there was also present a crushing disappointment. I feared that I had returned to the mundanity of the everyday for once and for all. A horror unequaled and incomparable to any emotion I had thus far experienced worried at my every thought. That I might close my eyes and dream only of the prosaic and routine impressions of terrestrial life and never more inhabit that Kafkaesque wonderland of my dreams; that I might be tethered forever to the Earth and the sack-like mass of my own flightless body, such fears wrought within me an angst I would spare even the foulest and lowest of human life. 
 
 But my fears were unnecessary. The dreams did not abate but instead intensified further and morphed in strange quasi-perceptual ways so that the threshold between the memory of the dream and the memory of waking events was smeared and I could no longer discern between recollection of the real and recollection of the surreal. 
 
 I would prepare to bed, many hours from waking after a night of mystical dreaming, only to feel that mere minutes before I had been cruising in unknown heights above that matrix mesh of intertwined dimensional landscapes, flying between glistening fangs of fused stone or windowless basalt towers, buttressed by angles of cosmic design. Friends and family would inform me of my trance-like condition during these phases and spoke of their fears for the stability of my mind. But I cared not. A point was fast approaching where the ties of unexotic life were growing wearisome compared with the free spirited flight of my alter-ego; the Escher bird of outlandish skies, boundless in a quest to explore and only to explore. 
 
 The dreams, the memories, the desire to cross forever into that nether realm so removed from all that humanity holds dear, culminated in one final memory. A landing of the bird on strange feet and strange legs whose rubbery countenance I could feel as surely as I feel my own human limbs. I landed upon the steps of a prodigious temple formed of many multi-layered slabs of colossal size and climbed to the pinnacle. There I encountered an open shrine of equally numbing enormity, lined with columns so immense that each was a tower fashioned with doors and scribed about their girth with cuneiform text and pictographs I shudder now to recall. 
 
 At the heart of the shrine stood a thing whose image is embedded in my mind as afterburn hovers upon the retina after the flash of some painful light. A fungoid growth, vast as a skyscraper, capped with bulbous, pulsating helmet of such enormity that, to begin with, my human senses mistook the thing for the roof of the shrine. Ribbed it was and alive. Vibrant with thoughts that pulsed like shockwaves from the heart of the mighty trunk and filled the air with the noxious stench of algae and mould. 
 
 I bowed on stork-like legs and spread my wings. The fungoid acknowledged my presence and congratulated me on securing the soul of another of Earth's dreamers. It was then that my mind and the thinking machination of my flying host merged and I could access truths of such frightening magnitude that I fear my sanity snapped and I became like a spectator in a crowd. I marveled and wondered as the fungoid spoke of envoys flung from galactic profundities so distant and strange that man should travel the stars forever and yet stumble upon even the fringe of mushroom domains. Spores as craft, spreading the hivemind consciousness of the horror beyond eternity, embedding themselves in the roots and soil of alien worlds to grow as that terrene flora so commonly known to the peoples of the Earth as the poppy and the Psilocybin mushroom. 
 
 A gulf of essence and distance spans the chasm between the life forms of Earth and the creatures of my dream memories, and yet we are ever connected. For in the shadow of the great fungoid I shook with terror, even as an angel enthrall to my daemon master. For here is evil unmitigated, unfiltered and abroad. No master of the universe stands between us and them, only the choices men make and the weakness of the soul. I learned on the altar before the great shroom of Pluteus, as the towering shaft of a cyclopean nightmare beyond imagination addressed me in mind and in thought, that daemonic evil besets us all and from all corners, but none is worse than that which falls from the bletcherous quadrants of the fungal gods. 

