Ego Death.

The Ceiling Fan.

I don't remember most of the trip. I was in a different universe for about 12 hours. During that time I lived several different lives, some where I wasn't even what I would consider "living" but rather "experiencing". I was a feather on a bird while the bird was in flight. I was running water in a stream. I was closer to nature than I had ever felt before and I had absolutely not idea who I was or where I had come from.

This is a hard concept to grasp if you've never experienced it, but I had no recollection of myself in the slightest. I just felt like raw energy.

I finally came to at about 11am the next morning. I woke up and was confused to be myself again. I honestly thought that I had died. My brother was asleep in bed beside me, completely unaware that I had just traveled to another dimension and experienced multiple lives right beside him.

I felt different. I felt more awake and more aware. I felt a lot more alive. It didn't take me long to realize that I woke up in a slightly different universe than I had left. We'll get to that later.

My brother woke up and told me about a calming and introspective trip that he had. He said I had been simply asleep the entire time. I really looked like I was asleep during that entire event? That was so hard to imagine. I felt like my soul had left my body. We ordered Panera on DoorDash and before I knew it, I had to go to work night shift.

At this time in my life, I was working as a home care nurse for a patient overnight. The patient naturally slept a lot overnight so it was mostly just me and his dog in between my well checks on the patient. I got to the house and got report from the prior nurse before preparing the patient's night time medication and letting him sleep. Shit started to get weird then.

I heard knocking at the patient's front door. It was about 11pm and he lived in a really nice neighborhood, so it surprised me. I went to check the front door and no one was there. The knocking continued for hours. The patient's dog never responded to the knocking so after awhile, I realized this must be all in my head and the acid is still in my system. I wished I had called out of work that night.

I tried to keep my cool but throughout the night I saw shadows and heard things that weren't there consistently. I was terrified. I was so glad when the morning came around and I could go home.

I walked into my front door and noticed a change right away. There was a ceiling fan in my living room. I had never had a ceiling fan before, I was a renter but my landlord was a slumlord and certainly not the type to install a ceiling fan without telling me about it, especially over night. I inspected the ceiling fan. It looked new in an old house. There was no dust on it. I remembered that feeling I had initially when I woke up from the trip, that I had woken up somewhere slightly different and I began to feel paranoid.

I called everyone that had ever been in my house and asked them if I had a ceiling fan in my living room. No one could confirm or deny it. I went through my entire camera roll on my phone trying to see if it was in the background of any photos, not a single photo showed it. I texted my landlord asking about it, even he could not remember if there was a ceiling fan in the house before he rented it to me. I lowered myself to my knees in the middle of my living room and stared at this ceiling fan for hours, crying, unsure if I came back to a different place. Why did I come back to a different place?