‘I knew I had to be relaxed. Extremely relaxed. Especially my muscles. So I took relaxants when I could get them. My mother had medication for anxiety attacks, and those tablets helped. In combination with medication I used yoga and meditation. I studied those for the years when I was at my mother’s. I had to get everything right, the body, the mind, the environment, the situation, otherwise it was hopeless. The room had to be warm too. And I would begin my breathing exercises. I would put my whole body to sleep, one part at a time.’
Seb writhed at the idea of the selfish prick taking his old mum’s medication, but Ewan remained enraptured by his own recall. ‘I would begin the process with the little toe of my right foot. Have you any idea how long it can take to make one toe go to sleep? I mastered it. Eventually I could turn my body into a dead weight and that mass would then dissolve. The facial muscles were the hardest parts to get right. But I would become so deeply relaxed, my body so limp, that I wasn’t awake or asleep. I was between. That’s crucial, to get between states of consciousness. I learned that, once I had reached my eyes, the final part of myself, I needed to imagine a void, a hole, a great emptiness between my eyes.
‘Eventually, in my mother’s house, in the room I kept there, this blank, white room, where nothing could distract me, I found myself near the ceiling, looking down upon myself again. And forty-three times thereafter across two years. I kept a journal. I made it happen forty-three times. Imagine it!’
Ewan slumped back and released an exasperated sigh. ‘Our minds are the key, or what is held inside our minds is the key. But our minds are also the jailors. Anxiety, or surprise, or shock, or any conscious activity can disrupt the experience. I could not linger, as so many others had done before me, in that state. There was instinctive panic. A primal anxiety, the dread of not being able to return. The survival instinct, it’s in the body. And nothing that I could do about it. Unless I stopped taking my medication. Then, I would leave my body so dramatically during a fit, and the experience would last for longer, and more intensely, while my body was in shock. Only while my body was close to death could the soul-body better escape.’
‘You’re not taking the meds now, are you?’
‘I don’t have any,’ Ewan said in a voice as piteous as Seb had heard yet.
So that he could terrorize Seb, Ewan had put his health in the gravest danger. ‘Jesus Christ.’
‘There was no way it was all a daydream, or a hallucination, a delusion. Where I ended up is hyper-real. My acuity was incredible. I could even see dust motes. Every colour was beautiful. I put a print in my room, a Van Gogh, and I saw what he had seen, but barely managed to transcribe into a great painting.
‘Everything around me was living, emitting, transporting. Twice, when I was drawn upwards and suspended, I even managed to touch the ceiling. Where the paint was rough, the sensation in my fingertips was so exaggerated that I could have been touching broken glass. Where the paintwork was smooth, I could have been touching sandpaper. And I was willing myself to move. Don’t you see? I was moving on the ceiling of that room. You can’t imagine it.
‘So where else could I go? What else was possible? And the light! My God, the light. If you saw a glimpse of it right now, in here, you would weep. You would dream of it every day for the rest of your life. You would crave it. That is how moonlight should be, enchanted. It was my spirit that was generating that light. Me. The inmost light.
‘Soon, I was beginning to notice myself too, as a form. My ability was evolving. It was adding limbs that weren’t really there. I even put a mirror in my room and angled it so that I would see myself if I separated. And I managed to see myself once, in the air while my body lay beneath me on the bed. I could see part of myself, just adrift, floating. I’d wanted to see myself, so I had focused on seeing myself, and I did. There were two of me in that room.
‘I could think too. And remember things more clearly than at any other time in my life. But it’s not like reasoning. Everything just came to me at once, in a flash. I could see, hear, feel everything more acutely. It’s not a dream. I was more conscious. I was more intelligent. I’d never been so wide awake and never experienced such a wonderful feeling. The weightlessness as you ascend . . . The vitality you feel. The delight in seeing the world so bright and alive in a way it never was before. There’s no pain, only joy.
‘And in that form, I could also see three hundred and sixty degrees without turning my head. I only had to want to see behind myself and I could. It was subtle. A nuance of the experience. So I knew that I could also look beyond a wall, or a ceiling, or anything solid if I so desired. Sometimes, I would be looking down at myself in the bed, with everything below me appearing small, while behind me was infinity, a vast blackness.
‘What if I could also move further away from where my physical self lay, and I could travel beyond the room? That was my thinking. I sensed that movement to other places could be instantaneous. And in time it was.’
Ewan grinned his yellow grin. ‘As you can attest.’
‘Someone else taught you how to go further.’