Consciousness

Epoxy clay, steel wire, rope, string, mirror, dirt.
36″h 24″w 26″d
2025

After a particularly drunken birthday night a few years back, I looked at myself in the mirror before going to bed. While staring at my face, looking over the beginnings of wrinkles, and observing tangentially, in the peripheries around my face, an aura like blur of warped space, my face slowly morphed and transformed into the face of my dead friend and past “mentor” Jay. He smiled at me and spoke through my mouth, “I’m proud of you.” It kinda freaked me out so I shook my face to shake his off and go back to my own. 

It’s rare for me to experience things like this, but it happens often enough for me to raise questions about consciousness and the nature of reality. Long before I ever took alcohol, LSD, psilocybin, salvinorin A, ketamine, cannabis, opium, cocaine, nitris, or other various pharmaceuticals, I had different kinds of visions and hallucinations. Like when I was a little kid, the little blotches of color on my parents’ bedroom wallpaper became animated tiny men that were pick-axing into little tufts of grass and ground. 

I also saw colorful auras around people when I was little, and even into my late 20s. I still see a bit of something around people’s heads sometimes, but as a kid people had varied color palettes that would emanate out or press tightly against their entire body. 

One morning when I was about 6, I woke up from a dream into a confusing reality where I had no body. I was floating along what appeared to be a giant tree trunk, as tiny as an ant on a redwood, flying along its base, starting from the bottom and moving up, though up and down seemed to have no place there. 

As I was flying along the trunk, branches started to appear. On each branch were lights and ornaments— it was a Christmas tree, and every light and ornament seemed to contain some sort of event. Each one held a different moment, different people doing different things in different places. There were too many to make any sense of it. As soon as I’d look at one another moved in front while the last one went away into the distance. 

I started going faster and faster, so fast that all of the lights and ornaments, the moments, were flying past me as a blur of light while I was careening over the Christmas tree trunk. Now, completely filled with terror, I started screaming. Over and over I screamed, until I heard my mom yelling at me to open my eyes, to wake up. I could feel her shaking me, yelling and shaking, and it finally pulled me out of my warp speed journey across that infinite Christmas tree. 

At the age of 23, after my grandpa’s funeral, while walking from the funeral home to my grandma’s house, it was snowing heavy on the streets. I was holding my dad’s hand for the first time in many years, and I started to feel myself shaking. I wondered if I was shaking from the cold but then I realized it was my dad that was shaking, and I was feeling it in my bones. 

When we got to the house everyone started to make themselves busy, to distract themselves with something to do. I sat in the kitchen feeling the overwhelming rise of a panic start to come over me. There were so many people moving around and talking and my body was still shaking from outside. The feeling reached a height and I closed my eyes in an attempt to slow myself down. 

Then suddenly everything went completely silent. I opened my eyes and looked around, everyone was frozen in time, completely still and silent. I looked left and right, confused, and then time started up again. Like nothing had happened, time started up, except I was not completely calm. In that moment of frozen time my body and mind had somehow done a complete 180, going from full panic to the most serene calm there is. 

I don’t know why any of these things happen, but I tend to think that there’s a heck of a lot going on in other realms of reality that we can’t perceive with our sensory organs. I think we can connect to those places more if we really want to, but I also think that things like having to pay the bills, or trying to not get blown up can shift our focus into places that don’t prioritize these kinds of things, until we need them perhaps. 

I hear more and more talk about the brain being more of an antenna for consciousness than the creator of it. I tend to think this is true, just from the weird shit I’ve seen and experienced. Instead of trying to nail any of it down, to try to give it a name, I’d rather just believe in everything. It’s all happening.