5. Entities Encountered: The Greater Beings
The Cosmic Horrors
These are some of the scariest things I've ever encountered, deserving of their own category. I'm not sure if this was more misdirection, but I got the impression that their role in the greater hierarchy was something analogous to "black ops," with special powers and authority over the lesser beings, something parallel to the normal chain of command. Initially, the lesser beings disavowed any association with them, and even pretended to offer me protection from them. Following my confrontation with them, though, they hesitantly admitted that they work for the same cause.
The lesser beings seemed not exactly fond of these things, even resentful of the way they flaunted and abused their power. They were utterly and devastatingly powerful and terrifying, with near-complete control over me. In three encounters I remember, they had me in their thrall and kept me in a weakened state while they made me do their bidding. I know there were at least two more possibly worse encounters that I have thankfully forgotten, and one that was too intensely gruesome for me to feel comfortable writing about right now.
The Bride of the Devil
This one presented herself as a tall, beautiful woman, with fantastically elaborate hair and an even more elaborate flowing red dress. She was incredibly vain and pompous, and her words were snarky and condescending, completely assured of her own superiority. Her voice was sweet and coy but with very dark undertones. In later encounters with the lesser beings, I got the distinct impression that they *really* hated this thing despite their eventually apparent association with it. In this encounter she made me implant something inside myself, like a little metal hook or piece of shrapnel inside my heart, connected to a long, weightless, glistening thread that she controlled. I think it might still be inside me (or inside whatever parallel existence this represented), but I can't be sure.
During my encounter I experienced what seemed like a flood of memories, indicating that we had had many previous encounters, that I had been her slave for a very long time, perhaps across multiple lifetimes and parallel timelines. These "memories" also indicated that I would continue to belong to her for the indefinite future until my ultimate demise, at which point I would enter an inescapable existence of unimaginable eternal torment. Given how much control she appeared to have over the situation, I choose to interpret these as false memories designed to (rather successfully!) instill fear and dread... I would rather not begin to consider the alternative.
We had a long conversation, but I forget most of what was said. A few fragments and phrases stand out, including "Bride of the Devil." This carried some symbolic meaning I can't remember. This could have just as easily applied to her (being a powerful demonic figure threatening me with eternal torment) as it could to me (being "married" to the dark forces that were taking over my existence). As I departed, a painful screaming whisper filled my mind:
"YOU. ARE. MINE." I think I caught a glimpse at something closer to her true form, a hideous hyperdimensional mass of writhing, purplish-black tentacles resembling thorny vines. It was shrouded in an aura of vile, shadowy energy, like that of my Tormentor but orders of magnitude greater.
Very Lovecraftian.
The Triad
The next one was weirder, and I think even more powerful. It visited me the night directly following my confrontation with my guide and the other lesser beings. It was a triad of beings, who I think was some sort of collective intelligence. They followed me around everywhere, hovering behind me, mostly slipping just beyond the periphery of my perception. The only visible form I can vaguely remember was in the form of three smallish floating sprites (each subjectively about a meter tall by about 20cm wide), but they were difficult to look at in a way I can't quite describe. Their bodies were something like an inverted teardrop shape, with faces resembling
something like this. They had some kind of odd aura surrounding them, as if they were poking through a portal into three-dimensional dream-space from "somewhere else," and I could just barely make out some indescribable hyperspace imagery behind them.
The state they induced in me was utter confusion and terrifying out-of-control dementia, the closest thing I've experienced to full possession. A completely horrifying experience that I hope to never witness again. My mental faculties were a shattered mess, and trying to pick up the pieces just led to more terror and confusion. I would briefly grasp a thread of memory illuminating how I got there and what was happening, but it would just as quickly slip away.
The environment I was in was a hyperreal and incredibly detailed copy of my apartment blended with other familiar environments, but in a demonic parallel existence where everything was twisted and sinister, every corner and shadow implicitly harboring a host of claws and tendrils that would drag me into oblivion if I ventured too close. I eventually managed to lock myself in a bathroom, but looking into the mirror revealed a grotesque, gnarled, hideously twisted and contorted corruption of my face (which I think was gradually growing to resemble theirs) that only increased my level of panic and despair.
The beings emitted a symphony of humming, cooing, hypnotic noises that occasionally coalesced into a chorus of intelligible speech, disturbingly child-like in tone and completely otherworldly. The only thing I remember were the words
"WE ARE THREE," which somehow carried with it a very sinister and intimidating meaning that I can't quite remember. They also presented me with an arcane tome full of unreadable text that radiated an aura of dread and insanity. There were some pages of complex symbological imagery and other mystifying diagrams, but they just mocked the futility of my efforts as I tried to discern their dark meaning. The only thing I vaguely remember was something resembling a stylized corruption of Metatron's Cube, although it could've been something entirely different. They repeated with cruel emphasis,
"WE ARE THREE." I'm not certain, but I think this encounter lasted over two hours in "real time," but subjectively
much longer. During this time I had no memory of anything before this, and for all I knew I had been there for an eternity and would remain there for a thousand more.
The Legion
This encounter occurred toward the end of the beings' initial salvo of punishments. It took the form of many entities, seemingly part of a collective intelligence, possibly mere puppets of a single entity controlling it all. Anyway, this was an encounter with something that represented itself as a massively intimidating military force, like an intergalactic Roman Empire or Third Reich, conquerors of civilizations and destroyers of worlds.
The visual component was in the form of being surrounded by a legion of domineering, faceless soldiers that looked like something from a fantasy or sci-fi film, accompanied by a "warlord-general" wearing something like a cybernetic
plague doctor mask, towering, bipedal mecha-like constructs, bio-mechanical monstrosities, and other colossal warmachines. The weaponry was difficult to identify but their overwhelming destructive force was somehow immediately obvious. I caught glimpses of a vast, smoldering, grimly industrial landscape in the background, an eerie ever-burning fire in the sky, with signs of nuclear holocaust or other cataclysmic events that they were implicitly responsible for. It all felt intensely apocalyptic and "prophetic." I'm not certain, but for a brief moment I felt like I sensed my Tormentor somewhere in the background, smugly pleased with his reinforcements, but jealously disappointed that he couldn't join in on the fun, perhaps even resentfully submissive to the greater power before me.
Beyond the visual component of the experience was a lot more information, most memorable of which was the music. It was very dark, foreboding, and militaristic, reminiscent of martial-industrial and neoclassical music like
Triarii or
In Slaughter Natives, with a bit of a "trippy" edge. I think there were even "lyrics," although not in a language I could recognize. This was also accompanied by some kind of rhythmic chanting, along with a seething, crackling beam of energy being channeled toward me which I think was something along the lines of "weaponized fear." There was a lot going on at once, and there's so much to this that I (thankfully) have forgotten, but the two intelligible words I remember were
"WE WIN." It was delivered in a booming, growling voice, again carrying with it so much more weight and significance than the mere words themselves, with distinct connotations of military victory.
Other Hyperspace Beings
Here I will describe some of the other inhabitants of hyperspace that I only encountered briefly, or otherwise am unsure how to classify.
???
I have no idea what this entity was, but in at least one experience I encountered something of a rather vast, incomprehensible, and seemingly alien intelligence. I felt like I was so beneath it that it didn't even attempt to show me an illusory form that I could communicate with. But then again, maybe this impression is just what it wanted me to believe. Its visible form from my perspective was what I clearly recognized as a 3-dimensional projection of a 4-dimensional (or higher) structure. It almost hurt to look at given the overwhelming amount of visual information there was to absorb.
Its coloring ranged from pale translucent yellow to brilliant gold, plus some other subsets of spectra that I have no frame of reference for. Lots of fractal geometric substructures shifting across a larger ever-changing superstructure, complex but highly ordered, and strangely composed of what appeared to be mostly right angles. When I tried to "touch" it, it wasn't as solid as expected, but somehow soft and malleable, nearly gelatinous as it shifted around me. In the same experience I also saw what I am fairly certain was a 2D projection of the same entity, which took on the appearance of a translucent yellowish standing wave pattern, undulating with slowly shifting pulsations while simultaneously vibrating at a rate nearly exceeding my perceptual limitations.
The one truly unique thing about this was that I experienced it in a lucid dream/vision,
not in the typical hyperspace environment I would have expected... But then again the distinction had become much less clear by this point. When meeting this kind of entity in hyperspace, it's very easy to mistake them for non-sentient hyperspace scaffolding (if there even is such a distinction!) if you don't pay close attention. It looked completely different from, but mathematically analogous to
something like this, which I'm sure will be immediately familiar to most if not all of you.
Based on an eerie sense of familiarity combined with a flood of ineffable abstract information I experienced, one brief and mostly unsubstantiated hunch I had during this encounter was that this represented the greater intelligence behind much of what I had experienced. It occurred to me that perhaps this was the grand puppetmaster controlling either my Dream Teacher/Director/Tormentor, or most if not all of the lesser entities that appeared to be separate but were really just different parts of the same thing. A cool idea, but again, just speculation.
The High Priestess
Part mythological figure, part sci-fi space wizard. I only encountered this character on a few rare and unique occasions, but she took the form of a tall female figure with elaborate white robes, long flowing white hair, and jewelry containing some symbology that I couldn't quite identify. On most occasions she looked like a relatively normal human, but in one particularly intense experience she was much more "DMT-ified," composed of many shifting geometric structures and patterns, her facial features not so much part of a solid organism as they were "grown" out of the surrounding geometry, not unlike
Android Jones' artwork. This encounter, like many others, was in my sleep and not under the influence of any exogenous substance. She had an air of great cosmic importance about her, but I think this was more a reflection of her own opinion of herself than anything else. She seemed mostly kind and gentle, even loving, but still made me feel like I wasn't quite worthy to be in her presence.
My encounters with her consistently seemed to be in a bizarre, vaguely apocalyptic, totally surreal Dr. Seuss-esque environment, always at the culmination of a long and dramatic visionary saga. She had all kinds of magical abilities: protection, healing, some kind of "cleansing ritual," teleportation, alchemy (literal and symbolic), manipulation of the environment (this usually took the form of "growing" things out of the world around her; I got the impression that she had created all of it, or even
was the environment), "prophecy" (which I think really just amounted to predicting things in visions that she was already planning to show me), and some sort of time dilation or manipulation (which again I think was mostly illusory). I am unsure of how exactly to classify her in relation to the lesser beings I was in regular contact with, but they were closely related, and she was even referred to by my Dream Teacher a couple times (indicating that her "cleansing ritual" was something I was supposed to learn?).
The Botanical Nightmare Creature
I once briefly encountered a semi-sentient hyperspace forest full of nightmarish plant-creatures, like a
Little Shop of Horrors spanning an entire biome drifting in the void. It contained lots of twisted, gnarled, woody masses, thorny tendrils, rotten and repulsive-looking "flower" parts, and carnivorous-looking snares and mouthparts. It appeared "solid" at first glance, but upon close inspection it was composed of a multitude of shifting, vibrating fractal structures (especially around the edges of the various plant parts). I sensed some sort of intelligence behind it, but it was either not self-aware enough or too alien and incomprehensible for me to communicate with. Another possibility I could imagine (based on some ideas from my "lesson in cosmic macroevolution" ) is that it was indeed intelligent and self-aware, but with underlying cognitive mechanisms that operate on a much larger timescale.
For some reason I felt like this was the "soul" of a physical, biological plant-like organism living in this material plane, somewhere out there in the cosmos. It seemed to be part of one massive entity, but with many specialized, independently-acting parts. Maybe it was more like a hyper-symbiotic ecosystem collectively acting as a single superorganism, an incredible but hideous result of aeons of evolution on some brutal alien world. If that were the case, I could only speculate about the environment (or unnatural forces!) that shaped it and what its sources of nourishment must be... Anyway, after some initial hesitant curiosity, my reaction became an emphatic
"NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE" and I thankfully managed to shift away to something more pleasant. I'm very curious, though, if anyone else has experienced similar plant-creatures and what their thoughts about them are.
Mythological Creatures and Demigods
On various occasions, mostly in hyperspace, I have encountered a number of beings very closely resembling figures from an eclectic blend of world mythology, down to an incredible level of detail. They ranged in theme from Mesoamerican (these were the most common for me, especially when psilocybin was involved) to Egyptian to Hindu, as well as some others that seemed familiar or more generally archetypal but difficult to identify (cosmic serpents, dragons, chimeras, etc.).
Their reaction to me was usually dismissive; not hostile, more like "There is no reason for you to be here right now; we have nothing to say to you," which was puzzling to me because during these encounters I felt like I had been "led" there intentionally. The one exception was a positive (I think?) encounter with something resembling the face of Ganesha, who wordlessly indicated that I was permitted to "pass through" something that I can't quite remember. I clearly felt like these forms that they allowed me to see were illusory, at best symbolic and at worst intentionally deceptive. I also felt like at least some of them were strongly associated with the other beings I was in contact with (particularly the serpents and other vaguely reptilian beings), but I'm not entirely sure about that.
Just to entertain a bit of fun speculation, I can think of three possible (equally fanciful and unsubstantiated) explanations for these beings: 1) The forms of these beings were created by the collective unconscious of the civilizations who believed in them; 2) Aware of these pre-existing beliefs, the beings adopted these forms to imitate something that was already deified, essentially being opportunists who replaced manufactured beings with "real" ones; or 3) These beings existed in this form long before we achieved anything approximating sentience, were accidentally discovered by (or intentionally contacted) early civilizations, and subsequently shaped their beliefs and culture over the millenia.
The Talking Heads
This is more of a loose category of encounter with a consistent format, probably with different entities, and not necessarily in the same category as the other "greater beings." These encounters always took the form of a conversation with a disembodied face, while traveling at high speeds through... something. There was always the intense sensation of fast movement accompanied by something resembling the physical gut feeling of inertia or g-force, similar to the "warp tunnel" preceding most breakthroughs, yet distinctively different. There was always clearly an environment that we were passing through, although I never got a good look at it since it was always at the periphery of my perception, my attention completely fixed on the face in front of me. The environments usually appeared less hyperspatial and more solid and 3-dimensional, ranging in appearance from caves/tunnels to geographic landscapes to surreal "highways" and other vaguely urban settings.
The faces themselves, like the environments, usually looked less fractal and geometric and more solid, like an ultra-high-def holographic image of a physical face, usually human in appearance. These encounters almost always involved long, provocative conversations, often either "prophetic" in nature, or pertaining to the dynamics and phenomenology of higher planes of existence. The content of these conversations was often so profoundly far-out as to make some of my other "revelations" seem tame and mundane by comparison. I don't think I'll bother elaborating on this much to avoid sounding like a raving madman and discrediting everything else I've said. I'm not sure I believe most of it myself, actually; a lot of it very well could have been misdirection, and I suspect at least some of these beings may have been related to the others I was in regular contact with.
The Soul Surgeons
I only had one brief encounter with these entities, but it stuck with me for a long time, and I'm still not sure what it all meant. During one of my hyperspace encounters with my guide, my awareness suddenly flashed to something very different, which was apparently happening simultaneously. I can't remember most of it, but I had the impression of lying down on a surface in some sort of medical facility, staring up at some blindingly bright lights. I quickly realized that these lights (about 5 of them) were beings that appeared to be standing over me. Their forms were very indistinct, and I could just make out their outlines. Possibly humanoid, but I really can't remember.
I looked down and caught a glimpse of something like my "spirit body," or some other parallel existence or metaphorical representation of myself. What I saw was horrifying. It looked like my guts were spilling out everywhere, weightlessly drifting outward, and some hazy, shadowy, writhing mass was buried deep in a gristly cavity in my chest and torso (possibly related to the "Bride of the Devil" entity I described above). I don't know why, but for some reason I felt like the other beings were "operating" on me, struggling to get this thing out of me. They briefly tried to tell me something, but I couldn't understand them, as if their voices were muffled or underwater. All I could make out was that I was severely "damaged," (somehow this seemed to carry more "mechanical" than biological or spiritual connotations??) and that I had forgotten something incredibly important (possibly from a previous lifetime?).
On the surface, from what little I could make out, their appearance looked very much like how my guide and his associates had occasionally presented themselves, but the essence I could sense from these entities was completely different in ways I can't fully describe. What I sensed from them was pure love, empathy, and compassionate concern, followed by an intense sorrow (as if mourning my "death"??) as my awareness drifted away from them and was forcibly "ejected" out of hyperspace.
The experience was intensely unpleasant, and I immediately vomited my guts out upon folding back into this reality and jumping back into my temporarily unfamiliar physical body. I was overwhelmed by intense, otherworldly fear and disorientation for hours afterward. I now believe there's a reason that there's a "warp tunnel loading screen" or interstitial period before breakthroughs and a gentle comedown afterward; to rush through these transitions means risking the "hyperspatial
bends". Anyway, I can think of a thousand different interpretations of this experience, all of them disturbing. I really don't want to dwell on the implications of this too much.
The Source (???)
I am very conflicted about this one. On two rare and incredible occasions, I encountered something unthinkably vast and blindingly brilliant, pulsating with life-giving energy, consistent with others' description of The Source. My first impression and immediate "intuition" was that this somehow represented the end of the line of all cosmic macroevolution, the beginning and end of everything, a paradoxical representation of both terminating points on some great universal axis, where all things come from and to which all things return, the totality of all consciousness and energy across the entire multiverse, and in itself a conscious, omniscient, and omnipotent being, forever unchanging and existing in the Eternal Now. "God," in other words.
I am now very skeptical that this is what it really was, though. In an ever-so-brief but overwhelmingly clear glimpse of something I can't begin to describe, while pulling away from it after my second encounter, I somehow knew that it was an impostor, that it was not the totality of the universe but a distinct subset of it. This is further corroborated by the first encounter in which I was "introduced" to this thing by my guide, the ambassador from the entities that deceived me, and some subsequent references to it. Following this experience, they used my awe and reverence of this Source to demand my trust and allegiance and insist that I "open myself up to them." I'm certainly not making the assertion that a real version of The Source or God does not exist, but I am fairly sure that whatever it was that I experienced was not it. I have many more thoughts and questions on the subject, but this is venturing into some potentially dangerous and contentious religious territory, so I think I'll stop there in the interest of avoiding argument.
The World Eaters
I didn't encounter these guys directly (thank goodness), but was given a vision of them by my guide. Keep this in mind, since it very well could have been a work of fiction. One of my friends has learned of them in a similar way, though, so even if it was fiction it wasn't uniquely directed toward me. Maybe it was even allegorical, who knows.
I couldn't exactly tell what plane of existence they inhabited, possibly multiple at once, but they weren't natives to hyperspace. They seemed to be part of some colossal insectoid hive-mind. They seemed not entirely self-aware, like drones being controlled by something else. They were very Zerg-like (or Tyranid-like, if you prefer) in that respect, but less theatrical and more utilitarian, and maybe not quite as ugly. Physically resembled one of the subspecies of Mantid (of which there are many, by the way).
It was a highly militarized, invasive race, somehow advanced enough to accomplish their goals but driven by a seemingly blind and mindlessly insatiable drive to conquer and consume. I witnessed them devouring an entire world, not only stripping its physical (and/or astral?) form bare and leaving nothing but an empty husk, but erasing it entirely from existence. They somehow destroyed the entire timeline branch of which this world was a part. Now this part is mostly unfounded speculation, but I later got the impression that at some level, they served the same or similar goal as the entities I was in contact with, although part of a different "faction" that was as concerned with their own interests as they were the greater hierarchy of which they were a part. Similar in nature but still somehow not nearly as terrifying as The Legion, but maybe that's just because I didn't meet them face-to-face.
Et Cetera
I also encountered a plethora of other commonly reported hyperspace beings (many of which may or may not have been different forms of the same thing), other "non-native" beings that could be interpreted advanced alien races (mainly the Mantids and their underlings), and other phenomena. These were mostly brief encounters that didn't offer me much insight into what they were, and this is mostly redundant with all of the reports already out there that are written in more eloquent detail than I need to attempt right now.
As a side note, I have a bit of speculation about how these beings relate to their "visible" forms. You know how many of these creatures, particularly the "elfin" ones, seem to "crawl out of the woodwork," shifting and morphing in and out of the surrounding neon scaffolding and fractal geometry? I strongly suspect that this "surrounding environment" is just as much a part of the entity as the creatures that appear to come out of it, perhaps more so. Pay close attention to the process of "morphing," and you might notice that this feels like a consciously directed act of creation, or even that the fundamental unit or "material" that comprises all of this fractal geometry is
consciousness itself. I'm probably exceeding my intellectual grasp here, though, so I'm curious about others' interpretations that might complement or contradict this idea.
