The perfectly smooth shroud of snow stretched into the horizon marked by two stripes, one red and the other white. The latter shined brighter as the light came from under the snow, filling it with volume and a deceptive feeling of life. The surface, evenly covered in frozen ripples, glistened with myriads of fish scales, blinding everyone who gazed upon them. Snowflakes burst like sparks from within the frosted expanse.
They fell up.
Snow, but not quite snow.
It bent beneath my invisible legs as if I was wading through jelly. The incubus got the worst of it; it was ankle-deep in the snow, sometimes even deeper, and\ made sure everyone knew its struggles by swearing every second of the way, mainly in Italian. I even unwillingly memorized some of its favourite phrases.
My invisible legs were freezing and my toes twitched with painful cramps, but the snowflakes burned hot.
Snowflakes, but not quite snowflakes.
At about the height of my chest, the air started to waver with warm haze, and a few meters above our heads flaming twisters whizzed past. We walked for hours against this wind that pushed us against our goal like a sturdy wall.
The goal that the incubus simply summarized as "We go where the wind blows from."
The snowflakes did not obey the wind. They slowly flowed upwards, dissolving into the fiery sky.
I could no longer see my body, despite feeling the cold, the painful numbness in my feet and the Incubus' grip, tightly holding my arms; or the space where my arms were supposed to be. Just when I thought this couldn't get any weirder.
Following the rules of insanity, the wish to wake up from a nightmare like Alice in Wonderland shifted my hallucinations into another phase. Except the rabbit hole was a fiery pit, and now I was following the white and fluffy Elm, not resembling the rabbit in the slightest. Alice's rabbit was an adorable helper, but this...
I remember how for a while I even believed that the incubus was my ally and I could eventually stop hating it, but boy was I wrong. To deal with the sheer irritation that this creature caused in me was impossible! I swear, I even started to understand Clara, especially the moments where she wanted to crack its head open with an axe, which I wish she did... Even the fact that I broke its leg was enough to make me give a single fuck.
I was exhausted... impossibly so! Although the lack of strength was still sort of bearable; it was my brain that felt like it was wrung out. Then you also had the constant sarcasm coming from the Incubus, who hasn't thought once about cheering me up or saying something positive for a change!
On the previous layer, or 'level' as he calls it, my body began to get more and more transparent, but I didn't notice it at first and got really frightened when orange light started to shine through my tightly shut eyes. The light grew with every passing moment until it drowned everything around me and I couldn't see farther than the tip of my nose, although even that was getting harder to make out.
Remembering the Incubus' warning that I shouldn't open my eyes, which now was quite troubling considering my eyelids seemed to have evaporated, I started to panic and quickly explained to him what was going on and it... It just indifferently explained that my eyes leaking out was just a joke and suggested that I climb down until the next crossing.
And then added, as if mocking me:
"Quite an interesting effect of incorporated levels. Just marvel at the iridescent fibers... they emanate from just the harmonic game of delta-waves and the soft flexibility of infrared radiation, but still so magnificent.
At the end of his monologue, after "if only lice could appreciate the beauty of Rapunzel's hair", it calmly threw me off its back, only holding me by my hand. I became suspended in the orange nothingness, completely losing my sense of direction.
Don't know about lice, but I almost had a heart attack there; if my astral form even has one, that is. Can you blame me? I found myself in a sheer mass of golden fibers; a space without direction or ability to see something other than shining spaghetti that slowly twisted and turned... An aesthete's dream no doubt, but I just couldn't see anything to marvel at.
"Are we there yet?" I asked impatiently. The threads freely passed through me as if I was a ghost, and that felt incredibly irritating. Not to mention I was starting to feel something akin to claustrophobia.
"No, we're waiting."
"For what?"
"For it."
"What's 'it'?"
"It."
I fell into an offended silence. However the silence only intensified my fear and I, barely registering what I did, asked the Incubus to hug me. I had to regain some sort of stability, even if that meant I had to lean against the Incubus' rough skin.
Elm snickered and moments later its hands locked me inside a safe ring.
My fear curled into itself and hid in the very depths of my consciousness. Now, the silent drifting of the golden disarray filled me with a drowsy sensation that almost made me fall asleep, but a hard slap on my backside made me regain my senses.
"Stop screaming!" The Incubus yelled in my ear. "And don't sleep! Do whatever you can to stop yourself from resonating with the delta-waves, got it?"
"What happens if I fall asleep?"
"Ignoramus... I mean, even I don't know, and that is the scary part. One possibility is your material body could fall into a coma and you will lie there next to the pretty girl, or maybe it could be something much worse."
Distressed by the new perspective, I shook my head. I still wanted to pass out so I decided to chat with the Incubus to somewhat hold onto my consciousness. To my question if its kind even sleep, it said that no, and the sensation was a new experience for it in a human body. Then it trailed off into philosophy and I almost passed out again. The only part I remember is that it claimed that sleep is not that necessary for human rebooting and that the entire meaning of human life lies in those exact moments, but who knows who could use that. And it didn't exactly want to find out using his own dear self, so it's done with sleep.
"Humans are but small fry mingling around the shallow waters of the ocean of Creation, for whom even a drifting plastic bag is seen as a messenger from a higher power, bringing a prophecy to the rulers of shallow waters. But most of the time the bag is just a bag and it's better if they don't swim into it... are you even listening?"
"Yeah, yeah... a bag is a bag... listen, you... Elm! So everything around us is the astral plane? So how real is everything that is happening to us?"
Elm answered as he always does:
"As real as how unreal is everything that doesn't happen to us."
"Did you even understand what you just said?" I asked.
"Of course! Self-understanding, just as self-knowledge, are the base components for the self-satisfaction of oneself. This only applies to humans on a very minimal level, that's where all your anxiety and psychoses come from. The fate of humanity is Via dolorosa; a path of thorns."
I had to make myself count to fifteen to mask my annoyance.
"Elm! For once could you please keep it short and simple; do you see and feel the same as I do?"
"Nah, it's you who is seeing and feeling what I do."
"How?"
"Just like that. You're an astral projection; you don't have eyes, nerves or a brain... how could you possibly feel anything? You're leeching off of me now."
"Thanks for the 'leech' part... So we're basically inside a virtual reality that Sophie's brain created? Inside what she imagined?"
"Not exactly, but close." What you people call 'imagination' is just a fraction of their unconscious that is always updating... like an endless flow of soap bubbles.
"Wait, where am I? My body? My head? I've got to be thinking with something right now, aren't I?"
"Oh, you can think? Haven't noticed, hehe... Kidding... So, you're using me to connect to those pitiful remains of that which remained there, and there is far away from here, because it's far away, ok?"
"I'm starting to doubt you have brains, yourself!" I complained, breaking free from the embrace of this cocky asshole. "What do you think with?"
"Well, everything, hehe... colour, sound, smell... although smell is a tricky one, don't usually need that. I can also think using you."
"Let's keep me out of this!"
"I'd be glad to, but it's not quite time yet. Oh, there he is! Hold tight, dear, we're gonna enter the sphincter now."
The feeling of motion surrounded me.
"Where are you dragging me? Oi!"
Moments later I saw it: The space not far in front of us was occupied by a blinding white sphere; the golden threads twisted and tangled into a ball and melted together into a pulsating ring. The incubus cheerfully called it 'the sphincter' and I was ready to once again shut my eyes tight; just in case.
Suddenly, all the light went out, literally before my very eyes.
"Eh-h-h." The incubus' voice was full of frustration. "Got caught. Well, guess we have to wait some more. So, where was I? Oh, right... even humans realise that sleep is not a natural state, let me bring up a few quotes: 'Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness - natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.' or 'Sleep, those little slices of death...' Have I convinced you yet?"
"Yeah, totally, you're so smart and convincing!" I said with the utmost sarcasm.
"You can't even imagine how smart I truly am! For that is precisely the feature required for proper change. Change is the basis of survival; change is acquiring new information. I learn and change using all possible resources. At this moment I'm practically the same as an average human for this period of time in relation to thinking, socialising and self-expression, right?"
Why did I even bother... The incubus did not get the irony so I just had to confirm that he was the most average of the average.
"So that's how it is." It concluded with somewhat childish complacency and dragged me towards the 'sphincter.'
I don't even know how much time has passed and how many 'sphincters' collapsed in front of us before we finally crawled through one of them at the very last moment. The transition from blinding light to claustrophobic darkness was one of the most unpleasant experiences of our 'fun' adventure, and for some reason, a stupid phrase was stuck in my mind; 'even tapeworms shed tears.' I cried alongside them no less than a hundred times before we were spat out onto the surface of the fake snow, where my body became completely transparent.
We were now dragging ourselves against the wind. The incubus' hair flowed romantically behind it like a golden cape, barely covering its bony behind. It was using Johan's form again, despite me begging it not to. Its left leg was still bent backwards from earlier and a broken collarbone was now jutting out through its skin; the incubus turned out to be quite fragile in the astral plane. Wholly deserved, if you ask me!
The white expanse did not seem to have any boundary, and if not for the wind I would've thought we were going in circles.
Maybe the kind nurses brought me very potent pills and the calm period has extended into infinity.
I am a tripping Alice, taking a trip inside myself.
Delirium remains delirious.