F Trope: illegal
drugs open gate to wonder
It’s a search
Humanity has been on for a zazillion years – a magic drug that would give us
INSTANT sight into the future or the past or the present or the neighbors
closet…
Science has
given a patina of respectability to this search for the mystic by telling us
(somewhere or other) that we only use 10% of our brain and that we really need
to get on to the discovery that would lead us to be able to use the other 90%
to perform all sorts of wonderful “stuff”.
Signe Bengtsson
grew up in a home with parents who are no-nonsense psychiatrists, feet firmly
rooted in reality and brain chemistry. For them, there is nothing outside of
the material world of wet electrical circuits and chemical reactions. For them
everything mind is explainable.
Dad has a heart
attack because of stress (which is, Signe notes during an anger jag,
invisible). Clot-dissolving drugs and blood thinners combine in him to send him
into an hallucinogenic state that she witnesses as her dad dreams and talks
about a strangely realistic-seeming world in which he has an adventure that
ultimately ends in him running off with a circlet of metal forged in that world.
Signe falls
asleep and wakes up the next morning; the nurse says that her dad is out of the
dark but will be sleeping a lot for the next few weeks. She stands up and a
heavy wire circle slides from her lap and falls to the floor, ringing like a
bell, deeply. The sound seems to penetrate, ringing the bones in her head then
fades slowly.
With the circlet
in one hand and the arrival of her mother, she hurries off to school; exhausted
and shaken…
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