Against the warnings of my legal counsel and safety advisory board, we have successfully released our first complete audio collection, the 5AM prophecy, which was split into three acts: Revelation, Ascension, and Afterlife. So far we are aware of only one new case of psychiatric turbulence as a result of exposure, a middle aged woman in Cape Town with no prior exposure to the multi-media artifacts generated by the Dream Machine™. In her medical intake form she explained she would try to “explain what I experienced without sounding kookoocachoo” [sic]. She went on to describe she heard “a genre I have never heard before,” had a vision of a “puppet being controlled by the music” and concluded with the observation that “this is how I would imagine music visually looks like.” She is currently in an outpatient program and appears to have stabilized, though she refuses to abstain from continued voluntary exposure to the audio, against the advice of her physician.
Despite the legal risks that these dissociative and psychotic episodes expose the Corporation to, in my view it is a modest cost compared to the importance of our continued research and revolutionary discoveries.
The Synesthesia School™ was launched to recruit and train advanced lucid dreamers, hypnotists, meditators, and psychonauts. Regardless of their specific skillset, we refer to these skilled individuals as Astral Manipulators (AM). The School™ program has led to the discovery of several promising young astral manipulators who have the potential to advance our research. Our star pupil is a a teenage boy whose parents have legally released him into our custody. We cannot release his government identity for legal reasons, so we have code-named the subject Skeleton Shoulder.
Skeleton Shoulder has the unique ability to enter into a half-sleep hypnogogic state and freely astral travel outside of his body. In an experimental setting, images were randomly selected and securely shown in a separate room of the facility, he has reliably shown the ability, from a separate room far from the image, to describe the images, showing the inexplicable ability to observe visual data far away from his body, without the use of his eyes.
To do his astral traveling, he sits alone in a dark room near his circadian bed time, lights a candle, enters a meditative trance, crosses his arms and lies back. Under observation he appears to simply be asleep, but after repeated clinical testing in an air-tight research environment, he clearly has the ability to move his consciousness outside of his body. In addition to seeing images in another room in the facility, Skeleton Shoulder says he can travel arbitrarily far, even outside of the earth’s atmosphere and our solar system. In a future experiment we hope to see if he can observe details about one of Saturn’s moons that are known only by an astronomical research group we have contacted. If he can give reliable information about the moon, information that could not be ascertained by any other means than astral travel, we will be able to prove the extent of his traveling capabilities.
Skeleton Shoulder developed his skills not through practice, but through a touch with death. As a young teenager he was biking alongside the road when a semi truck going over 40 km/hr drove past and the side mirror struck him on the back of the head. He described immediately being yanked out of his body, violently pulled upwards as if gravity strengthened and reversed, and clutched onto the shoulder of his physical body which lay motionless on the side of the road. Finally he was torn away and flew into the sky, away from the earth and past the edge of our solar system. He says he traversed the cosmos for what felt like many months, exploring different suns, planets, moons, and huge swaths of nothingness in the depths of space. In this flight he nearly forgot about his life and memories on earth.
But in a flash of intuition, he remembered his life and what had happened. He flew as fast as he could back to earth and to his body, and made the conscious decision to recombine with his body lying on the side of the road. He opened his eyes surrounded by a small group of people attending to his injuries, and apparently had been unconscious and possibly without a pulse. (This detail is unclear because no reliable medical professional was at the scene). He had been unconscious for a total of eight minutes. Ever since this incident he has had the ability to astral travel every night.
His life has been massively disrupted since this incident, not because he didn’t recover from the injuries sustained by the accident, when ended up being relatively minor, but because he has had trouble feeling connected to the real day-to-day life of a teenage boy: school, friends, girls, church, sports, and the other typical activities that accompany adolescence. He describes it as a type of derealization; a feeling of insignificance and a lack of fear of his own mortality. Notably the psychologists he’s worked with describe no symptoms of schizophrenia or psychosis. Rather a feeling of unending solipsistic dissociation from reality. He has a large tattoo of a skeleton hand holding onto his shoulder, the final grip he held onto his body vehicle before being torn away into the cosmos.
We are excited to continue our experimentation with this subject and see what he is capable of. He has already started creating new types of Raw Awareness Waveform™ (RAW) that our existing Qualia Compression™ (QC) software is unable to interpret…