How to Change Your Mind

a depopulated futuristic city, with each note forming another soft black
stalagmite or stalactite that together resembled the high-relief
soundproofing material used to line recording studios. (The black foam
forming this high-relief landscape, I realized later, was the same material
lining my eyeshades.) I moved effortlessly through this digital nightscape
as if within the confines of a video-game dystopia. Though the place
wasn’t particularly frightening, and it had a certain sleek beauty, I hated
being in it and wished to be somewhere else, but it went on seemingly
forever and for hours, with no way out. I told Mary I didn’t like the
electronic music and asked her to put on something else, but though the
feeling tone changed with the new music, I was still stuck in this sunless
computer world. Why, oh, why couldn’t I be outside! In nature? Because I
had never much enjoyed video games, this seemed cruel, an expulsion
from the garden: no plants, no people, no sunlight.
Not that the computer world wasn’t an interesting place to explore. I
watched in awe as, one by one, musical notes turned into palpable forms
before my eyes. Annoying music was the presiding deity of the place, the
generative force. Even the most spa-appropriate New Age composition
had the power to spawn fractal patterns in space that grew and branched
and multiplied to infinity. Weirdly, everything in my visual field was
black, but in so many different shades that it was easy to see. I was
traversing a world generated by mathematical algorithms, and this gave it
a certain alienated, lifeless beauty. But whose world was it? Not mine,
and I began to wonder, whose brain am I in? (Please, not Thierry
David’s!)
“This could easily take a terrifying turn,” it occurred to me, and with
that a dim tide of anxiety began to build. Recalling the flight instructions,
I told myself there was nothing to do but let go and surrender to the
experience. Relax and float downstream. This was not at all like previous
trips, which had left me more or less the captain of my attention, able to
direct it this way or that and change the mental channel at will. No, this
was more like being strapped into the front car of a cosmic roller coaster,
its heedless headlong trajectory determining moment by moment what
would appear in my field of consciousness.
Actually, this is not completely accurate: all I had to do was to remove
my eyeshades and reality, or at least something loosely based on it, would