Yesterday — I don’t know how to say this without appearing totally insane, but I have to try — yesterday, I made contact with a being of a kind I never imagined. Maybe I am insane.

I was on holiday, wandering through the Pescheria — the old fish market in Venice — on a Monday, when it was closed. Normally a crowded loud tangle of people, today it was almost deserted. Just rows of empty wooden tables. It was dark under the wooden canopy that covered the market, but looking to the east, across the glittering canal, I could see brilliant thunderclouds piled over the colorful, sun soaked buildings.

I leaned my shoulder against a wooden pillar, and looked out past the tables, at sparkling points of light reflecting from the water. A loose handbill shifted in the breeze, and a shifting hypnotic pattern of reflected sun flickered on the underside of the canopy. The totality of the scene washed over me, and then there was a sudden shift in perspective, like an optical illusion that suddenly changes from one image to another.

But the illusion was my entire field of view. Foreground and background suddenly lost meaning; everything dissolved into a complex multi-dimensional pattern of shifting light and dark and color. My visual system no longer parsed raw sensation into the world I knew.

I felt the post against my shoulder, and the floor at my feet, but those sensations were floating in a space that was no longer limited to three dimensions. A wave of panic flooded over me as the sensation of my arm grabbing the post faded into synesthesia. The boundaries of my body were no longer there. Was I still standing? I didn’t know, but I was not losing consciousness — I was aware of everything.

How to describe it? "Distance" had vanished. Everything was superimposed on everything else. I was an awareness floating in a complex multidimensional continuum. Most important, what was inside my mind and what was the external world had somehow fused into a coherent new many dimensioned reality, and in that reality was a conscious thinking being, frozen like me, looking across a vast dimensional gulf at a scene that also contained a conscious thinking being — me. Somehow I knew that it had also been caught in the same strange, alluring interdimensional coherence that I was in.

We regarded each other, two multidimensional ghosts floating in flickering space, and somehow drew closer, until our indistinct boundaries began to merge. At that point I became aware of other thoughts than my own, indescribable thoughts, cold and analytical, but vibrant and friendly at the same time. It was as if they were my thoughts, but they were in a language I didn’t understand, and they flowed according to rules I didn’t know. At the same time I became aware of thoughts authentically my own, flowing according rules I knew, but could now see from the outside. The same meta awareness was growing in my compatriot; and I could see this reflected in the pattern of both its thoughts and my own. Our joint understanding of our growing joint awareness grew very quickly — it was like pouring two miscible liquids into a cup — the mixing was happening very quickly. But the mixing of consciousness was not chaotic, it was mediated by feedback loops of growing understanding, and both our individual perspectives remained, as far as I could tell, completely operative.

Time was different — things were changing, but it wasn’t a uniform constant front. Instead, the rate that things changed was different in different places, and waves of changing rate moved by in directions I couldn’t follow.

TBC…​