Last night I went to bed really late. Part of my brain was already engaged in the dreaming process -- becoming pliant, malleable-on-command -- so that when I turned out the light I could conjure images into my mind's eye and set them to motion. I could actually "see" what I was imagining, and knowing it for what it was made it no less interesting.

I spent a few minutes "looking" at what appeared to be a simian hand (although I'm pretty sure it only had four fingers), commanding it to flex and curl and rotate. It reacted at the speed of thought, showing texture and detail that I hadn't (consciously) imagined. And that was what made the exercise so fun; every second offered new discoveries. My brain was creating this thing partly of its own volition, triggered by the breakdown of workaday consciousness. (I'm not sure why my brain elected to see an ape-like hand, but it might have had something to do with the fez-wearing chimpanzee I'd seen on Chapel Perilous not too long before.)

I got bored with the ape-hand and tried modeling what I thought the hand of a "Gray" alien might look like: thin, bloodless, with tapering chitinous points on the ends of the four fingers. This effort wasn't as successful as the previous because it was forced; I wanted it to look a certain way, and my mind was having none of that. So I had to reconcile myself to the fact that my control over the experience was confined to offering cues. I had to relax or else the experiment would dissolve utterly under the familiar scrutiny of wakefulness.

I never achieved a satisfactory "alien" hand. I had too many preconceptions. I tried too hard when I should have let my subconscious continue with its own inscrutable flow.





This semi-lucid state reminded me of Whitley Strieber's account of discovering a compliant, bug-eyed woman fixed in his mind. By consciously directing it, he could examine the entity's anatomy. He had a professional artist draw the being as he "watched" it in his mind and the result is the archetypal alien featured on the cover of "Communion," which became a number-one bestseller. Strieber's "vision" occurred during a state of otherwise normal wakefulness, whereas mine was decidedly dream-like and tenuous.

I wonder: If there are nonhuman intelligences hovering at the periphery of human consciousness, could waking thought form a perceptual shell around us, rendering them invisible? Maybe the cessation of ego that accompanies dreaming and related processes helps to "melt" the shell, turning it into something like a selectively permeable membrane . . .