I arrived in Glastonbury late on the afternoon of the 5th. Denny was there, along with Howie, Quinn, and some of the other gang. We had a nice walk, and a chat, and then I settled down for the night.
The next day (May 6th I think) I got up, and decided to make breakfast for everybody. I made french toast, with lots of cinnamon, although Tomy had to run down to the supermarket (across the street) to get some syrup.
A few hours later, I was involved in a long and detailed conversation with Howie about the Roman Empire, when I began to feel very sleepy. I said that I was going to go upstairs and lie down for a while. While I lay there, I started to experience a very intense, and extrordinarily coherent series of hypnogogic images. (Hypnogogic imagery is what people experience just as they are about to fall asleep; I often hear beautiful orchestral music, or sometimes smells or sounds.) However, unlike my usual bedtime images, which are usually quite random, these seemed to be telling a definate message, one that had a lot of mythical symbolism. About half an hour later, I began to feel quite giddy and slightly feverish, so I went down and told Denny that I was "not in my right mind." She told me to go lie down on her bed. This is a comfortable double bed with lots of quilts, in a cozily-decorated room, with two large windows that face towards the garden.
It was at this point that I had what I can only describe as a quasi-religious experience. It lasted for about 5 hours. At no point did I actually hallucinate - that is, I never saw fairies or pink elephants or colors. Rather, it was as if everything that I was seeing around me was taking on striking new connotations, nuances, impressions. I felt as if I were hallucinating ideas. It was extremely sensual, even sexual. I felt as if the entire universe were caressing my body, that the photons striking my body were a warm and comforting envelope. I felt a presence - a motherly presence - who was embodied in the green light that was coming through the window. At one point, I believe I said "She's...pushing all these photons at me...and I'm cutting them, wth the blade of my mind, dividing them into true and false, light and dark..."
During this period I became aware of at least a dozen different new concepts. Now, when I dream, I often have the feeling that I have an important, earth-shattering realization, and then later when I wake up I think "now, what a minute, what was the big deal about that?" Not so here - I can remember each of the concepts that I recieved (I wrote them down afterwards) and I can still look at each one of them and think "Gee, that's really smart..."
For example, at one point I asked the presence "So, what about all this magic, astrology stuff?", and the answer was utter silence. The meaning that I got was this: "This is not about your relationship to the extrordinary, this is about your relationship to the ordinary."
Anyway, I'm not going to tell you all about everything I experienced, because some of it was very private, and had a lot to do with a rewriting of my essential self-image.
Some of my more skeptical friends may be wondering at this point whether or not I had been drugged. I don't see how that could be, especially given that I was the one who made breakfast that morning. Also, the fact that I was sick at all was curious in itself - I seldom ever get sick, and when I do the symptoms are usually so slight as to be almost unnoticeable.
Now, how seriously shall we take all this? The only answer is, "I don't know". The presense (Goddess if you prefer) said that she knew that I would never entirely believe in her, and this would be our private joke between us. Neither would I ever have certainty, because certainty would destroy my usefulness, my magic.
Anyway, I hung around Glastonbuy for another day, and then Denny and I drove to Wendy De Vine's house, which was about 2/3 of the way towards London. We stayed there for three days, took walks around the nearby lake, and had a number of long conversations about game design with Wendy's boys Simon and Alex (who are both big fans of Pokemon - Alex is working on designing a Pokemon game using the FUDGE rules that I told him about.)
For some reason I didn't take pictures of all this, though I can't figure out why it never occured to me to do so.
Later, we drove back to Glastonbury. Since I had never managed to get pictures of the Tor, I decided to go up there...Denny went with me, she sort of felt the need for closure (she wanted to leave me at the same place she originally found me, although it didn't quite work out that way.) Later, she gave me some gifts...a crystal, a bottle of "blue moon" water from the spring near the Tor, and a few other odds and ends which are quite dear to me.
About 4:00 am on the 11th, I got up, drove to Heathrow airport,
disposed of the car, and flew back to San Francisco. I decided to come
home early, and visit France some other year...I was weary of travelling,
and anything that came after Glastonbury would be simply anticlimactic.