I was smoking my special pipe, puffing away on it as hard as I could. “Smoke the special pipe, smoke the special pipe”, my mind told me urgently. I was puffing away, puffing for all I was worth – my face was going purple with all the puffing. Smoking the special stuff in my special pipe.
And all of this was occurring within a hallucination, of course; smoking the special stuff that was in the bowl of my special pipe caused me to hallucinate like crazy and the outcome of this feverish hallucinatory process was the situation that I now find myself in. Which is the situation that I have just described to you, in fact.
I was puffing away madly on my special pipe, drawing the rich fragrant smoke deep into my lungs and then releasing it again, expelling the dense hallucinatory vapours through my nostrils, creating thereby the hallucinatory world within which I lived. The hallucinatory realm within which I am indeed obliged to live, there being – as I could say – no actual alternative to this particular arrangement. Given the lack of any viable alternatives, this was the arrangement that I had settled upon.
“Smoke the special pipe!” my mind told me sternly, but my mind was just another of the hallucinations that were billowing madly out of the glowing bowl of my special pipe. “Smoke the special pipe, smoke the special pipe, smoke the special pipe…” came back all the echoes, in a sudden confused tumble of words. My ego was fragmenting fast, which is a thing that often happens to me when I get carried away by my smoking obsession and start smoking my own smoking. That’s when you know you’re really in trouble – when that happens.
“Smoke your own smoking,” my mind advised me with great authority, taking the reassuring form of an elderly, angular psychotherapist from one of the older analytic schools. My mind – disguised, as I have said, as old-style Freudian analyst – regarded me shrewdly over the top of a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. “You have regressed back to the oral stage, it informed me, “you have an incest fixation and you think everyone else is sick when really it’s just you.”
My mind was a liar, however – it was a liar, as well as being a hallucination. I smoked faster, more determinedly, realising that I urgently needed to integrate the contents of my latest psychosis. The faster I smoked the faster I regressed however. I had become Chicken Man, an ungainly chimeric entity with the head and scrawny neck of a chicken, the dumpy body of a squat and unlovely toad, and the legs of a snake. “Just call me Snake Legs”, I said with a wink, spinning around and around on the spot like a giant hallucinatory spinning top.
I was hallucinating like crazy at this stage of course, I had gone too far and yet not far enough. I had lost the run of myself. I had become Horus – Father to my Father, Prince of the Emerald Stone. It wouldn’t be very long before the Dream Police turned up, I realised then with sudden alarm. Any minute now they would be knocking loudly on my door, shouting at me through a loudspeaker to let them in. They would tell me that they were investigating a very serious charge and that I was the main suspect. They would say that I was guilty as charged. They would accuse me of many crimes and sentence me accordingly. They are the Mind Cops, they are the Thought Police, and it was only a matter of minutes before they finally caught up with me.
