The Sync Serpent

Excerpt from my chapter in The Sync Book 2:

"I closed my eyes and relaxed.  After several minutes the fatigue began to subside and I was about to open my eyes when something changed.  My attention was drawn to the lower half of my body which felt as if it were being slowly stretched like a length of elastic.  It was as if everything from the waist down had been snagged on an invisible fish hook and was being gently pulled towards some unknown destination.  Despite feeling bewildered by this unexpected turn of events, at no point did the 'stretching' become uncomfortable.

While trying to locate the source of the unusual sensation a spot of light materialized in the center of my vision.  The light was faint at first, as though it were reaching me from across a great distance, but like the sun piercing it's way through a dense cloud, the light gradually grew brighter and more vivid.  Different colors began to flood the periphery of my vision, hues of blue and green, and I intuitively knew that the ball of light was somehow responsible for the stretching in my legs.  It was like I was being sucked towards it, caught in a gravitational pull that I had absolutely no control over.

I knew that I could end the experience by opening my eyes but managed to resist the temptation and simply observed.  When I think about what happened next I'm reminded of the way in which our sun releases a solar flare into outer space.  I watched as a tendril of light curled outwards from the point of origin and continued to expand in a clockwise direction, spiraling towards me in slow motion.

As the light flowed along its corkscrew trajectory, the spiral path becoming wider with each rotation, I was hit with the realization that I was in the presence of a serpent.  A serpent made of light.

As the worm-shaped body approached I became conscious of the fact that if it didn't stop soon it was going to collide with my head, which is exactly what happened next.   As the light moved into and through my skull I felt an overwhelming tingling or vibrating throughout my entire body. There was a momentary feeling of ecstasy as the serpent merged with me.  The tail then passed beyond the realm of my perception, out the back of my head I suppose, and disappeared.  The spiraling light faded away, the stretching in my lower body came to an abrupt stop, and my vision returned to the grey black smudge that one would usually see while lying in bed with their eyes closed.

I thought that the experience had reached it's conclusion, however it turned out that this was a two-parter.

I kept my eyes shut while trying to digest everything that had just transpired.  I'd never seen or felt anything like this before so my mind was reeling with questions.  This inner monologue was cut short when two parallel rows of zigzags suddenly appeared at the top and bottom of my peripheral vision.  As the zigzag patterns took on sharp definition I could see that they were being created by rows of small triangles, each aligned horizontally, and seemed to consist of the same greyish light that the serpent had been made of.

My mind tried to put these new visuals into a context that it could understand, so it occurred to me that the two rows of triangles represented teeth.  Several minutes earlier a snake had corkscrewed its way through my head so it seemed natural to associate the triangles with the teeth of a serpent.  In my minds eye I zoomed out, looked down at myself lying horizontal on the bed, and almost burst out laughing at the mental imagery I'd concocted.  There I was, completely swallowed, my face peering out the open mouth of a giant snake."