Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [100]
Maybe it helped that I went into it prepared for the worst, because the first experiment in our series wasn’t so bad. I don’t know if the images this time were actually less scary than they’d been before, but I followed Cary’s advice and just let them happen without reacting. For example, I felt myself growing roots from my arms and legs that penetrated brown, rich earth that was warm and moist, almost like chocolate pudding. I saw faces in the unlit fireplace. One of them lingered for a while, abiding there with a benign and reassuring smile. I stayed focused on it—I felt safe with the smiling face. After four or five hours, I started feeling squeezy and Cary gave me a Valium. When Cary took a Valium, he just mellowed out and relaxed. But Valium hit me like chloroform. It was only half past five in the afternoon when I took it, but I slept until late morning.
So we had several trips through successive Saturdays. The hallucinations were sort of like snowflakes: each one unique, all of it snow. I would close my eyes and see a child’s finger-painted flowers on the inside of my eyelids. When I blinked, the colors would change. I would hear things: something unseen going boing, boing, boing or dry leaves rattling in the wind. I would look at Cary and his face would turn into the sun, or the moon—or, once, a broccoli crown. But what did any of it amount to? That big light I was waiting for did not come on. Midway through those weeks, I stopped believing in their existence.
“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be getting out of this,” I told him.
“Dyan, don’t try to interpret it. Just experience it!” Cary steered me to a chair, took my hand, and actually got on his knees. He was acting more like he was proposing marriage than when he actually did propose marriage. “Please trust me,” he whispered. He was smiling very serenely, very reassuringly. “We’re all trapped in one tiny little identity or another, and that goes for me at least as much as anyone. It’s an identity that was imposed on us, Dyan, and the only way to find freedom is to be free of it. If you just go with it, I promise you that you’ll feel that false identity peel away like old paint. You’ll expand into a place where there are no fences, no limitations, nothing to close you in. You can call it ‘God,’ or you can call it ‘the universe,’ but you’ll realize that you are one with all of creation.”
“Cary, this is really powerful stuff and it scares me. I’m worried about the long-term effects.”
“But, dear girl, that’s what I’m talking about. That fear. Nothing will shut you off from the universe like fear,” he said. “I’ve taken at least a hundred trips by now. It can take quite a few before you really have the breakthrough.”
“But what am I supposed to be looking for?”
“If you decide what you’re looking for, you’ll just be creating a false expectation. But when you do break through that barrier, you’ll find an inner peace that you never even have dreamed about. Finally, you’ll understand what I’ve been saying. And everything that stands between the two of us, you and me, will fall away like an old fence. That, I promise.”
I did not know what to do. I was taking acid trips to find what I had always been looking for. The problem was, nobody would let me in on the secret of what I had always been looking for. Everyone else knew, but not me. Everyone—well, Cary and Dr. Martin—seemed to think I needed to change, to discover some cosmic truth, and that it was right there in front of me. It was like a package in the mailbox, already delivered, and I was just too stubborn to reach in and take it.
So far the trips had not been particularly terrifying, but they definitely were affecting my nerves. They killed what little appetite I had, disrupted my sleep even