I had some time ago made a resolution to myself that when I was ready I would embark upon the same experiment as Ariel, which was none other than a continuation of my own venture into the realms of the psyche. Yet it was not just a desire to explore new territories which appealed to me, but the intuition that a full blooded and decisive approach would yield more than a handful of disconnected visions and would lead to a sustained and permanent shift in my consciousness. Now that I am in the midst of it I find it hard to hold on, because the disorientation is so intense. Several weeks have now passed since the visit to Canterbury stimulated me into further writing, and the passage back into “normality” has not been made. I am wandering around like a lost man in pain, acting out the automatic responses of the day without savour.

The more I thought about the Serpent and the symbols at Canterbury, the more uncomfortable I became. At moments the door moved ever so lightly to reveal unexpected twists in my interpretation and description of the vision of the serpent. I had felt satisfied with the richness of the symbols and my handling of them, but that was perhaps premature, for it is easy to dissociate oneself from them and look at them almost as a hallucination rather than as a projection of an inner psychic reality. And even when you recognise your own projections you can become complacent and open to further projections which you cannot recognise and which you perceive as external realities.

I was working late at my office and as I thought about these things, I had the distinct feeling that I was not alone in the building: a mood of paranoia, which one recognises and shrugs off. Then the doors and windows began banging. For an hour this continued, until I became so irritated by it that I had to get up and close all the windows to prevent the draught from playing any further tricks upon me, for a storm was raging outside. As I sat down again at my typewriter I listened to the rattling of the windows in their frames and the mind blowing against them from outside.