Sometime you should feel the fur on the water. It's the red upness of the wind.
This is a "trip report" from The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert. (author of Dune)
Some of the themes are very familiar, but I found something refreshing about this piece of writing.
Slowly, he sank back onto the bad, leaning against the pillow, gazing up at the ceiling. The wood grain in a beam wavered like the lifting and falling of the sea. It filled him with awe, undiluted and terrifying. He felt his own consciousness stood as a barrier opposing the external world, and that the external world was a stupid mechanism without feeling or compassion.
His own identity became a narrowing beam of light, and he sensed a massive, streaming unconsciousness growing larger, larger…larger…building up an intolerable weight.
It's a psychedelic, he told himself. Don't let go.
But there was no stopping the movement now. His awareness exploded up and out, riding a geyser of sense revelation, lifting him into a state of floating consciousness.
There was no inwardness now, only a timeless sense of being that existed without anxiety. He found himself reveling in the sensation. Death- that was an oddly non-frightening thought. He felt he has risen through a consciousness decompression into a zone beyond all power struggles. The valley had become a condition of his being. The room was full of probing sunlight, the leaves of the oak outside his window - all was beauty, innocent, uncluttered. The external universe had become translated into a part of himself, wise, compassionate.
He marveled at the feeling. The universe out there - it was as though he had created that universe. Nama-Rupa, he thought. I am Nama-Rupa - name and form, creator of the universe in which I live.
The pain of his shoulder occupied his drifting attention momentarily. Pain, a brief crisis, something against which to project memories of pleasure. The pain faded.
He found himself believing there were demons around him, cunning, seeking his blood and being, hungry for his soul. They gibbered beyond the charmed circle of his lonely awareness. The sensation, primitive as a witch dance, refused to leave. They were robots, automata with grimacing malleable faces and headlight eyes.
He began to tremble, knew he was perspiring heavily, but it was a distant sensation, something happening to a foreign person.
Head whirling, he heaved himself off the bed, lurching to his feet, stumbling across the room. At the wall, he turned, stumbled back, forth and back…back and forth. No hiding place existed for him. Sunlight streaming in the window took on grotesque forms - lizards with human faces, silvery gnomes, insects with clock face wings…
He slumped to the floor, clawed at the rug. A red braided pattern extruded claws that reached for him. He retreated to the bed, fell across it. The ceiling undulated with inverted waves.
Somewhere, someone was playing piano - Chopin.
He felt abruptly that he was the piano. The sounds struck a crystal brilliance through him, plucking out his anguish. Glaring white clarity began to seep over him. He sensed he has come a long distance through a dangerous passage. The journey had leeched all the strength from him.
But he saw the room now with an uncluttered innocence. The ceiling beams were objects to be understood, their grain receding back into trees…to seedlings…to seeds…to trees. Every artifact that met his vision extended into past and future for him. Nothing remained static.
All was motion and he was part of that motion.
Waves of sleep began creeping from the back of his mind - higher…higher…higher.
Sleep enveloped him.