Chapter 21 – On the Bus

Finally Meeting Carlos

He dreams that he meets Carlos Castaneda. He’s surprised that Carlos is so small, less than four feet tall. Carlos has been quite elusive, but he has finally managed to connect with him.

In a short while, Carlos will be leaving by private plane to return to the high deserts of Mexico. Several other people are here too, all of them waiting to see Carlos off, all of them patiently waiting for their turn with him.

When everyone else has said goodby to Carlos and it is his turn, he approaches Carlos and tells him that he has wanted to work with him but he’s not ready to do so now. Although he still wants to study with Carlos and his teacher Don Juan someday, he decides he should wait until his life is more settled.

Carlos’ plane is ready to leave now. Carlos’ mother is here too. She’s going with Carlos. He introduces himself to her and says, “The deserts of Mexico are so beautiful, how beautiful then must be the mountains.”

She answers him, saying, “if you think the deserts beautiful, you will love the islands.” He thinks of Huxley’s book, Island. He also thinks of islands as being holes in the ocean of reality.
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In his dream, Castaneda is small, less than four feet tall. One thing that he’s seeing from this dream is that he has made Carlos too big, that he really isn’t as big, as important as he made him out to be. He has been ignoring Carlos’ coldness and elusiveness, his fears and his one-sidedness – and all because he has been projecting his own magical relationship with Wanderer upon Carlos and his tale.

What Carlos symbolizes here is very important for him, but, as a real person, Carlos just isn’t big enough to carry it. Only he can carry and bring to life the relationship between Wanderer and himself, and only he can actually become Wanderer – as he continues to let go of more and more old patterns and ways that have long kept him from finding his own courage and wisdom. He knows now that he has to become his own teacher. He has to find his own holes in reality.
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Good Medicine

He dreams that he is in an ancient tomb that is being reopened by archeologists. They are working their way south, sifting through the earth as they remove it. They are uncovering entire buildings. They’re also cleaning and polishing the rediscovered floor beneath them as they go. They’re looking for patterns. The floor is dark marble, and the ceiling above it has many beautiful arches.

Now Karen is here. She wants to check something out. She has read that acid is not at all like heroin, which is addictive and works like a tranquilizer. He takes her inside to see the tomb.

In his dream, he is in an ancient, holy place, being reopened for the first time since being sealed ages ago. His dream is telling him that he has found and is in the process of reopening an ancient and holy place of consciousness within himself.

Karen comes into his dream now, bringing up the issue of what is a drug and what is addictive. Heroin is definitely addictive. It brings you down, unless you can see the initial rush as an up. It’s more like a tranquilizer really. In his dream, he and Karen are figuring out what acid is about by comparing and contrasting it with heroin.

Heroin would never have led him into this ancient and holy realm of consciousness, yet acid leads him here all the time, taking him always to places of magic and wonder.

His dream is telling him that acid is actually spiritually good for him and that, with it, he can find and become his true self. He can continue to reopen and restore all those old and venerable realms of spiritual power and worth within himself.

Understanding this, the last of his old fears, inherited from his parents, begin to calm out and let go of their erroneous and fearful ideas about acid, especially that it’s addictive and anything like heroin. Acid’s definitely not addictive. You can’t do it that often. It’s not like heroin at all.

It’s good medicine, although most folks out there certainly aren’t ready for it, not yet even close to being ready to try on their own true selves.
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The LSD Bus

He dreams that he and his woman are standing on a street corner, waiting for a bus. They are near a school, in the middle of a city. They are finally leaving the city, going home. They see a billboard across the street advertising the League for Spiritual Discovery Bus. They go into the nearby drugstore to see when it will be coming by. The next one is actually coming by quite soon – and it turns out to be the only bus that they can take that will get them home.

The bus comes by now, with the letters LSD painted on its sides. Getting on, they see that one other passenger, a young girl, is already on board. The driver, a young guy with long hair, starts them off again, still heading south. The bus stops often now, taking on more and more passengers. He gets into talking with some of the folks, with the driver especially. The driver reminds him of one of his young friends, except he seems more together.

He’s wondering who’s supporting all this, who’s behind it. No one’s sure, but most think it’s probably Leary. They get into a discussion about the revolution – about their spiritual work of waking up the world by turning folks on. They’re all positive about how it’s going.

The driver says he’s given up on living in cities, says he likes it best in North Dakota. The driver asks him if he has ever been to Jessica, Oregon. When he says no, he tells him that he should stop there next time he’s that way. He writes the name down in his mountain book as a place to check out someday.

Throughout the dream, he is feeling that things have changed and that they are finally winning. They can put up billboards and run buses openly with LSD written large upon them. He remembers Kesey saying, “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.” He’s definitely on the bus.

Obviously though, his dream is not commenting upon the outer world. There, acid is illegal, and the acidheads are all scattered and alone and in hiding like the Jews and the Gypsies were in Nazi Germany.

His dream is talking rather about his inner state of being. In it, he’s with his inner woman again. They’re heading home together, back to their common center – and he’s finding out that acid is the only way for them to get there. If he wants to be centered and whole and at home with himself, he needs to continue with acid. He needs to be on that LSD bus.

His dream is telling him that, for him at least, acid is legal, openly condoned, and the only way home. His dream is definitely encouraging him to continue using it wisely for personal and spiritual growth.
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Chapter 22 – Getting Things Straight

His Brain Operations

Lately, his dreams have been encouraging him to relive the time of his two brain operations. They’ve been telling him that he needs to relive that time of fear and fever again – but this time with full consciousness. He needs to remember and relive everything he went through those days – everything he felt too. It scares him to go back into it, but he knows that he has to do so.

He’s going through a time of death and rebirth in his life now, and he is very vulnerable. He has been in retreat lately, almost in hiding really. He has been protecting the new, as it has been slowly coming to birth within himself. It’s almost time for the new to manifest, but first he has to deal with those early brain operations and their effect upon him.
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He goes inside and begins to relive those days: He’s that scared and feverish boy again. He doesn’t feel good. His head hurts a lot, and he is burning up. His dad’s driving them up this long driveway to this large, white building, with lots of trees all around it. He’s really scared. He has never felt this bad.

They park now, and his dad gently picks him up and carries him inside. His dad and his mom look scared and sad. His mom tries to reassure him, telling him that he won’t be alone. She’s going to stay with him, no matter what. Inside the hospital, they stop at a desk, where the nurse, a blond lady with short, curly hair, is nice to him.

Realizing just how sick he is, they quickly take him into his own room. His mom can stay here with him, even overnight. They’ll even bring in a cot for her to sleep upon. Ned will stay at Granny’s. Lucky him! He is so tired. They lay him onto a big bed with an iron headboard, bars really.

Soon afterwards, they wheel him down this long, long corridor. People are walking by, looking at him out of the corners of their eyes as they pass. Everybody seems so sad. They finally wheel him into this really scary room with all sorts of gleaming metal torture machines.

They put him on this hard table now, strapping him to it, and, before he can do anything about it, they have placed this mask over his face, and are forcing him to breathe in something bad. He tries to resist, but he feels like he’s on a swing, going higher and higher. Finally he goes so high that he falls from the swing, falling into the darkness.
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He wakes up sometime later feeling terrible. He’s holding onto the bars of the bed’s headboard so he won’t keep falling. For the first time, he hears the voices in his head and knows what everyone around him is thinking. He doesn’t want this at all. He wants them out of his head!

As soon as he can, he asks for a radio and plays it loudly so he won’t have to listen to what people are thinking. He decides that he won’t ever tell anyone about this.
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Looking back at all this, he’s amazed that he is still alive and still sane. He’s amazed that he survived such a traumatic shock to his body and soul. He wonders about those voices sometimes. He finally stopped hearing them long ago. Recently though, it has sometimes seemed as if he were almost hearing them again. It has felt as if he were getting his inner hearing back. He knows he wouldn’t be afraid of the voices now.
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Boys Together

He’s backpacking up at Willow Creek again, this time with Jonathan. Karen is back down several miles of trail and road, in nearby Idyllwild, at a classical music festival. She’s singing in the choir.
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He’s tripping now. He’s trying to write too. This acid’s so fucking strong though! For some reason, he’s scared today.

He left Jon back at camp alone. He’s not very far away from camp though. He’s hoping Jon can take care of himself for awhile. He can’t go back yet. He’s too high. The weather is turning nasty though. It might even rain. Just his luck – the last time he was here, a major snowstorm drove him out.
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The rain’s here, a hard rain, and he’s running back to camp. He has to make sure Jon’s all right. That’s what dads are for.

When he gets there, he sees that Jon is safe and snug in the cave that he found yesterday, the one where he slept last night. He gets all of his stuff covered then and puts up the tube tent. And now that he has their camp more together, he makes Jon a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sits under a tree with him while he eats. He’s seriously tripping now.

He begins to cry while sitting there, as he remembers how his folks turned him onto the mountains once, when he was Jon’s age, then never brought him back again. Somehow though, through all the years, he has managed to keep alive his love for the mountains. Today with Jon, he has finally come to realize that, although his life has always waited patiently for him here in these mountains, he has never really lived it until today.

He is feeling really together now, really proud of himself as a man and father. He tells Jon how hard it is for him to be a grownup all the time, how money and car hassles, that sort of thing, scare him, and how he sometimes takes it out on him. He’s being the little boy with Jon that till now he has only been when he has been alone in the mountains.
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He and Jon were going to hike down to Idyllwild tonight to hear Karen sing in the choir. But it’s still raining hard, and Jon’s already had several nosebleeds today. He needs to take it easy, and he would find it difficult to relate to people now anyway, even in Idylwild. He guesses he needs the woods now more than he needs to hear Karen sing.
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Betrayal?

The Universe is trying to tell him something, but he is not ready to hear it – not yet anyway. He just got back from Berkeley, working up there with several of his new patients. He stopped off in Venice long enough to get stoned and showered, unpacked and then repacked, and now he’s on the road again, this time in his car, on his way back to Idyllwild, where Karen is still singing at the music festival. The trip has been hectic but fun too.
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When he sees Karen, she tells him that one of the women in the choir has cheated on her husband, sleeping with one of the musicians here. She even says that it could have happened with them. What is she trying to say? He gets freaked, remembering all the old hurts of his life. He’s back to being unsure of himself, even of Karen’s love now.

The next morning, when Karen leaves early for rehearsal, he lies there quietly in their camp in the woods just outside the music festival area. Still in shock from what she seemed to have implied yesterday, he’s not wanting to be around her or any of her friends.

Later in the day though, he and Karen try to connect by doing some psilocybin mushrooms together, but he continues on his bummer of feeling unloved by her. Eventually, with the help of the mushrooms, he does stand up to his fears and begins to enjoy himself – but something has changed between him and Karen. He can feel it, whatever it is.
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Several days later, back in Venice, he and Karen try doing some mushrooms together again. He has fallen back into that same thing that he had been into with her up in Idyllwild, feeling she doesn’t love him.

He knows she’s having trouble being back in the city, especially after having camped out in the woods at the music festival for the past two weeks. She’s also having trouble with school, with getting back into it. She’s been really into herself lately, not very open at all. She is trying to be open today though, doing mushrooms with him.

He just can’t shake this profound feeling that something basic has changed between them, that maybe she has actually been with someone else. He knows he may be projecting his relationship with his inner woman onto Karen’s and his relationship. He may be creating something completely out of his own inner drama. Then again, he may not be.