All of this started for me back in high school. I had a couple crazy, wannabe satanist friends who liked to listen to Morbid Angel and pretend to summon demons and dark spirits, which obviously they knew how to do because they read Crowley and Lovecraft. The kid who was into this stuff the most, Armand, hosted a sleepover party for his birthday. I dunno where his parents were but they were out for the weekend or something. We rented the Evil Dead movies and The Gate. We were freshman in high school. My friend, Dave, and I went to a different school than the rest of the guys there, Armand, Jimbo, and some guy whose name I don’t remember.

The movies and pizza were the hors d’oeuvres, then his ‘rents took off. His family was Hispanic, and like a lot of latino families, were devout Roman Catholics. Pictures of Christ with blood dripping down his face from his thorn crown and gruesome crucifixes littered the walls. But you could tell this kid was into some nasty shit because despite the heat of summer, walking into that house sent a chill through your body that you couldn’t shake. It was a chill that worked to your skin from the inside, like your blood turned to ice. Every time I walked into that house, I shuddered as I crossed the threshold.

After the folks had left, Armand pulled out some dot matrixed paper that he passed around. It was a walkthrough for hypnosis, but the source, apparently, was heavy into the Necronomicon and Crowley’s more esoteric stuff. There was some theory that there might be some curse or something on the method? Paper? It wasn’t clear. I’m sure our high school brains blew it out of proportion, but also ignored any warning signs we might’ve gotten as well. I read over the pages, having done some research and experimentation myself in self-hypnosis, and having been into drama and I probably had the calmest most relaxing voice of the group. Also, I wasn’t as excited to go under as the other guys, although I was interested in what the difference might be if someone else was doing it.

We started off trying to get everyone to go under at the same time, with mixed results. Usually one person would go under deeper than the rest, who would ultimately wake up. That was fine for a while, but then we started getting crazy. See, the point of hypnosis is that the person on the outside has control over the situation. They guide you through different imagined environments, the appearance of which are determined by the hypnotee, but the scenario and the method for accessing buried information in the subconscious is all determined by the hypnotist. I was not a hypnotist, I just had a sheet of paper which gave the method for putting them under. So after the first couple attempts, we focussed on one subject and started changing the rules.

At this point, getting them under was easy, and I had it memorized. Armand was the most eager subject, so when we decided to try something new, he volunteered first. “Ok. You’re walking down a dark hallway. The hall is lit by candles on the wall that flicker as you walk by. You see a staircase going down and you start to go down the steps. The staircase spirals down. With each step you feel your body become relaxed and become deeper asleep. When I count down from 10, you will reach the bottom of the spiral stairs and be fully asleep. 10. 9. 8.” His eyes start darting as if he is entering REM sleep. “7. 6. 5.” I could see a very visible change in the way he was holding his limbs, like all the tension in them drained out. “4. 3. 2. 1.” He was under. Receptive. His breathing was regular and rhythmic. Deeper and slower than waking.

The kid whose name I forget (let’s call him “Ted”) said, “Dude, ask him what he sees.”

“Uh, did you hear that?”

“No,” came the slow reply from Armand.

“Uh, what do you see?”

“I see a hallway. It’s dark. Wet. It’s cold.” We all looked at each other, shocked and excited.

“Go down the hallway. Is there any light at the end?”

“No. There’s no light. There are doors on both sides.” This was freaky. He was offering up information without provocation that was not planned and not in the script. But he was obviously not faking it. You can’t fake the theta wave pattern your brain enters during deep sleep, trance, or meditation, nor can a high school kid convincingly fake the appearance of theta sleep versus regular sleep. It’s different than sleeping, or even fake sleeping; if he was faking it, he’d be moving more. You can’t hold still for as long as these guys were staying under.

“Have him go into one of the doors,” they were telling me.

“Open the door on your left. What do you see?”

“It’s outside. Night. I’m standing on grass. I see the moon.”

“Ok, go back into the hall. Open the next door. What do you see?”

“It’s a small room. It’s totally dark. I can’t see anything.” At this point he started twitching violently.

“What’s going on?”

“I…I don’t want to be here. The room is small. I can’t breathe. I think…I think there might be something here with me.” His breathing was erratic and his hands started holding his arms just slightly, like you would if you were cold, except it was just the suggestion of that gesture.

My heart started racing and my head was pounding. “Go back into the hallway.” His breathing became more regular again. Then, “I just saw something.” I stopped breathing.

“What did you see?”

“I don’t know. A person or…something. There it is again. Oh shit, I don’t think that’s a person.”

“Holy shit! Okay, when I count to ten and snap my fingers you will be completely awake. 1. You are walking back up the hallway. 2. You are walking up the steps. 3. 4. You can see the light from the candles and start to feel your body again. 5. 6. You are near the top of the stairs –”

“It’s behind me.”

“7. 8. Don’t look behind you. You can see the light at the top of the stairs. 9. You back in the hallway and see a light. Move toward the light. 10.” *snap* His eyes fluttered and then he was awake.

“Holy crap, dude! That was so scary!” His face lit up with a huge grin. “That was awesome! Dudes, you totally gotta try this.”

We did this a couple more times. “Ted” seemed to go under much deeper than the others, and Jimbo wouldn’t go under at all. Each successive time we tried, we took more risks, and each time, some phantom shape or presence would show up and we’d pull the subject out of it.

In the end, my voice got tired and we stopped for the night and started watching The Gate. I fell asleep shortly after the opening credits.

_______________________________

The next day was Sunday and Armand’s parents went to church. “Ted” wanted to go under again. I wasn’t so thrilled about the idea, but after Dave tried (and failed) a couple times, I relented. This time, though, as I walked him through the hallway and down the stairs, I started seeing images in my head. At first I thought I was just visualizing what he was seeing, but when we turned it around and asked him what he saw, I began to see the things he was describing before he described them. It went something like this:

I am in a cave. It’s very bright and hot. The light is orange-tinted. The cave only goes in two directions, in front of me and back the way I came, so I keep going. There’s bones and bodies on the ground. I think something is following me, but every time I turn to look, it’s gone. It’s always just outside my peripheral vision. I definitely hear footsteps behind me, crunching on the human ribcages and wrist bones on the ground.

My heart is pounding. I hear a growling from ahead of me but I know there’s something I can’t see behind me. One of the corpses on the ground has a large shield and a sword, so I pick those up. I have no idea if I know how to use these, but it makes me feel sort of better to hold them. I keep going, looking over my shoulder every few steps.

There’s gold on the ground. And it starts to get brighter. As I’m walking, I can see more and more gold, until I reach a large room…Holy SHIT! There’s a fucking DRAGON! It looks like it’s sleeping. It’s really hot in here. There’s a huge pile of gold and this motherfucking red DRAGON sleeping on top of it all. It has its’ back to me. I gonna get closer.

Wait…I thought I saw that thing that was following me…It went…somewhere. It’s bright enough in here that I think I can see what it is if I can find it. Where did it go? There’s a sound…the dragon’s moving! Oh shit! It saw me! I run underneath its’ belly — it can’t get me here — and shove my sword into its’ chest. It’s screaming. Ha! I did it! I killed a dragon! So all this shit is mi–it’s not dead! It’s angry. It’s spitting fire at me!

At this point, I snap out of it, but “Ted” does not. His whole body seizures and he falls out of the LA-Z-Boy he was lying in. He continues to convulse spasmodically on the floor. The blood drains out of my face and dimly I hear the others freaking out. He sucks in air, gasping for breath like he’s drowning and his stomach looks for a second like those freakish starving children in Ethiopia. Then he’s still, he stops gasping, he stops…everything. I put my hand over his mouth and feel…nothing. No breath. I put my fingers on his neck, frantically looking for a pulse and find nothing again. I try several more places, above his collarbone, his wrists, I feel nothing.

“Ohshitoshitohshitohshitwhathefuckdidwedoohshitohshitohshit…” I can’t stop the mindless babbling coming out of my mouth as it hits me he could be dead. I put a hand on his chest, feel a sudden surge of heat flow through my hand, then step away, turning so I don’t have to look at the evidence of how stupid we are. Images of headlines flash through my head…”Kids dabbling in the occult kill friend at birthday party.” Or better yet: “Teenagers suspected in death of schoolmate — mystery looms.” I turned back to the body, still not moving. I try to make out whether his chest is moving at all, but it really doesn’t look like it is. Defeated and hopeless I slump onto the couch. Shame, guilt, and despair washed over me like ice water. My eyes kept flitting back to the body. The body — the words ring in my head like a gong. Body. Corpse. Cadaver.  Is this really happening?

Then — a harsh, throaty gasp for air.  “Ted”’s chest heaves, and he coughs.  His eyes snap open and he stares sightlessly at the ceiling for a few minutes.  We all circled around him, staring dumbfounded.  Then he blinked several times rapidly and then looked around at us.

“Holy shit, dude, are you okay?” Armand asks him, helping him into a sitting position.

“Uh, yeah.  That was…intense…”

Not much later, Armand’s parents return from church and we all filter off to our respective homes.  None of us ever really talked about what happened after that, and I never said “we thought you were dead, dude” even though I was thinking it.  I never saw “Ted” again — I never knew how much of what happened he remembered or knew about.  And I’ve never had an opportunity to ask.

So, okay, I know that the dragon thing was the product of his overactive imagination and way too many fantasy novels.  I don’t know how much I believe the environment — the black magick crap Armand and the guy who gave him this  hypnotizing thing was into — affected what went down, and that’s not the important thing anyway.  What blew me away, besides all that, and what changed how I perceive the world around me, was that I was in his motherfucking head, seeing and feeling what he saw.  And then I touched him, felt something, and a few minutes later he woke up — I don’t really think he died but he was definitely unresponsive — we fucking yelled in his ear, shook his body and got nothing.  At that point, I didn’t know the full extent of what I could do, but it did make me shy away from all the dark occult stuff and swear off all of that crap.  After that night, when I listened to Morbid Angel growling some Sumerian incantation, it gave me chills — and so I went a different direction.