SUPERVALIS MIND-SWEEP

How Sweden and Monsanto are trying to control your brain.

I awoke that morning for the first time, though I had not fallen asleep. Awoke in the enlightened sense of Buddha nature, I guess is what I mean. The sun rose on the first hour, its brightness intensifying not by degrees, but by magnitudes. Then it rose again on the second hour, and upon the third, until it had reach its full lustre for that day. When I had finished reading I went into the kitchen for a cigarette, it was then, as I have told you, I was attacked by the alien creature known as the plasmate.

A storm had arisen in the South East in the morning, and was now blowing line after line of breakers at an eerily precise angle to the beach. The streets were almost empty, which was unusual for this time of the morning. Maybe everyone had given up on the idea of work, I thought. Maybe they had decided that it wasn’t worth it anymore, that the whole ball of wax could go and burn, for all they cared. I spotted one impish-looking woman by a car on the main street, she covered her head with her coat. Hadn’t I seen another woman walking down the street yesterday in the same fashion? It hadn’t even been raining then. Isis Unveiled, I thought.
No, I was wrong, it wasn’t that they had taken the day off work. Rather it was me, I had somehow transported myself into a parallel dimension full of horribly disfigured people who preferred to remain covered up, or indoors. At least until the moment of truth, when they would finally reveal to me who they were, really, and how I was in deep shit.

I went back into my room, and tried to reassure myself. The storm would blow over. The entire population of the country was just an hour late for work, that’s all.

But, I couldn’t still my mind from thinking agitated thoughts. What if the plasmate was trying to drive me insane, I thought? I needed some time to sit and think things over. Conditions in my bedroom were cramped and fetid. I put on my heavy duty Parka jacket and spent perhaps twenty minutes, debating with myself about whether I should go out or not.
 What if I was right and everyone in the world had gone mad, all on the same morning? What if it was just me who was mad and anyone with half a brain would see that and try and lock me up? Hmmm...

The decision was out of my hands. I had already rolled a dice for it, and if it hadn’t been for the dice I might have remained paralysed with fear, for the entire morning. On the beach the waves came in at that same precise angle, one after another, with an unnerving regularity. I was looking forward to sitting down on the beach. The bad weather meant that I would certainly be alone, and the cool breeze and rain guaranteed that I wouldn’t overheat from too much mental activity.


Dream on, I thought.

The nine rung ladder that links the Apheck Planet with our own, is a Jacob’s ladder. You wouldn’t want to be on one of those, I knew. But if you were, how best to deal with it? Don’t go up, because you’ll eventually find yourself on the way back down. Just stay in the middle, it is the safest bet.

I was already in a fragile state of mind, so when the freight train plummeted from out of the station behind me I was not prepared for the shock. Damn that Inception movie, I thought, trying to subliminally persuade people to commit suicide by train. It was that damn plasmate's fault, as well probably. Plant a seed and watch it grow. Although technically, plasmates don’t grow from seeds, dormant or otherwise, they grow from eggs. If I had inadvertently cursed the world by researching the occult, and writing about it on the Internet, I would have to do something about it. I resolved to return home.

On my way back to the apartment I noticed a paper drinks cup with Coke written on the side of it rolling around the ground in the wind. Valis, the shapeshifting change-child, had arrived in the little suburb of Liablath, and it had not arrived quietly, I thought.

Meadowsweet; V. dangerous; avoid.

It is said that a sure way to invite disaster is to touch the leaves of a Meadow Sweet plant. I had been drinking cups of Meadow Sweet tea all summer, having regarded the superstition as nonsense. Looking around my room now, at all of the dessicated Meadow Sweet plants, I wondered if I had not made a grave mistake. Far more dangerous than merely touching an enchanted plant was to bring it into one’s home. These, I thought, had to be disposed of quickly.

Iron, I knew, was a quick an easy way to dispel fairy magic. After disposing of the plants in the park, I went into town to look for something made of iron. The town was busier now, much too busy. Shouldn’t all these people be at work, I thought? The rain had eased but the wind still howled. Hallowe’en was only a day away.

Evidently the whole town was infected by the plasmate. It had started with me, by invading my mind through the senses. From there it had spread to everything I perceived, like a virus. My vision had become like a Midas touch. Valis had assumed the shape of every loose piece of garbage in the street and was evidently having a great time being blown about by the wind.

The virus was now air-born.

For some reason, it had even assumed the shape of a stir fried noodle-dinner and sat itself on a footpath beside passing traffic, taunting me.

In the supermarket, Valis played me unusual songs over the intercom system. The female singer/songwriter assured me that everything was 'OK now' that she could finally 'see the world through my eyes'. That was the plasmate's raison d’etre, I realised. It craved the experience of reality from as many different perspectives as the world would allow. It was obvious (from the tone of this particular song) that what motivated the plasmate to assimilate the whole panoply of human experience was not a spiritual endeavour, or even intellectual curiosity, but rather a kind of desperate sexual urge. It used each sense input to replicate itself back into this world.

There was no doubt about it, wandering around the supermarket with my flatmate, whilst listening to messages from an alien larvae that had lodged itself in my brain was definitely one of the more novel experiences I had ever had.

Looking around at the other people, I noticed that they all shuffled about nervously; heads down, avoiding eye contact. Their nervous shuffle became more pronounced the more nervous I became and I realised that we had all become psychically linked through the plasmate! Worse still, while no-one took any notice of each other, they all responded to me with big open smiles whenever I so much as glanced in their direction! It seemed that I had been assimilated into some kind of worker bee, hive mind. Their courteous smiles appeared to acknowledge me as the newcomer to the new family. My flatmate, the only one who did not appear so affected, remarked that their bumbling about was probably due to the fact that they were all on holidays in the lead up to Hallowe’en. That cleared one thing up anyway; Why everyone was off work.

Philip K. Dick the science fiction writer had claimed to have cross-bonded with the plasmate in 1974, but even he didn’t mention the hive-mind syndrome. He had also considered the possibility that what he had experienced was some kind of Russian psychotronic experiment. Perhaps I was wrong about the alien interloper, I thought, as I was paying for my shopping. Perhaps the Swedish Government, in league with Monsanto, had drugged the town’s water supply to see how their new hallucinogenic weapon would take hold. Monsanto had done something similar before, when they contaminated an entire batch of bread destined for a small town in France with LSD. What was it this time, some new type of drug that created the perfect society? This must be what they meant by the New World Order; a new order to the perceptual reality of things. A more peaceful and controllable society, where everyone knew what everyone else was thinking and nobody had any privacy anymore.

As I carried my shopping down the road, I pondered the logistics of such a drug. Suppose I alone had been effected, could it spread to the rest of the town via my own conscious perception? Was such technology even possible? I would have to know more about its chemical make-up and delivery system, to be sure. If the drug could effect anyone within my sphere of consciousness how could the Swedish scientists even hope to contain it to our small island, to ensure that they themselves did not fall victim to their own weapon? Unless they were already afflicted! That’s it! They were already under the influence of the plasmate, and the plasmate was the drug. So, I realised, the New World Order plot was an alien conspiracy after all. Everyone was now hooked on the little gelatinous egg-baby from Sirius B.

But that was all speculation. All I know is that I had tried to undo the curse I had put on humanity by cleansing my room of bewitched plants and getting my hands on some iron. And by the looks of it, I had failed. Imagine if you were one of those responsible for the collapse of the Global Economy; you would rightly expect to be punished for that. Now imagine that you have broken reality. Who is going to come along and pick up the pieces? Certainly no-one from within reality, as the problem is too fundamental. There would be a lot of angry people looking for answers.

Sure enough, the next day­–Hallowe’en–I got a visit from the local police force, the Garda Siochana. They had obviously tracked down the source of the disturbance to my apartment block. Probably by means of some psychotronic device, or some coordinate system within the mainframe system itself, I thought. When I got to the door of my apartment, a policeman was waiting for me. I ducked inside a shop and pretended to buy a drink, but when I came back out again I saw that the first Garda, who looked like Captain Feeney, had been joined by another younger plainclothes garda, which may have been his son Angus. The older garda flashed his badge and said that they wanted to ask me a few questions.

A still from Stanley Kubrick's 1975 movie Barry Lyndon

in which the eponymous hero is held up by Cpt. Feeney

and his son Angus. Incidentally, this movie was set and

shot, in part, in Co. Wicklow, not far from Liablath itself.

They wanted to know about an ambulance that had been seen outside my apartment during the week. Was that ambulance for me, I wondered? Had I died? Perhaps during that argument I had with my flatmate the other night? Then again it could be a ruse. In fact this was very likely. I told them that “I hadn’t been around much, on and off you understand. So if there was an ambulance,” and at this they laughed, “chances are I wasn’t… here to see it.” They asked me what I did for a living, and what company I worked for. I said I was a writer and that I didn’t work for any company (in this one instance. I lied).

I noticed that the garda who was taking down my details was nearing the end of his notebook. He cursed, and said he would have to get a new one soon. I laughed and said, “I’ll bet.” He glowered at me with his cold steely eyes. Evidently the control system was having a hard time keeping track of the virus spreading throughout the matrix reality. I wasn’t sure which side I was on anymore, the android peace-keepers, who were trying to uphold the reality metrix, or the discordian plasmate who was trying to uproot it. But perhaps they were just symptoms of a greater problem; that I was in fact dead, or would soon be.

How fitting that all this should occur on Hallowe’en night, I thought, when the dead were abroad upon the land, and the entire country had dressed up as ghosts, and ghouls, and spectres? It was like some kind of cosmic joke. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying listed a number of signs that heralded the death of a human being, these included ‘special investigations’ and 'shadows on the sky, during a new moon.' Special investigations, I thought. Had I not just undergone such an investigation at the hands of those two highway men, Captain Feeney and his son Angus? And what about that advertisement for Sky News that I saw last night on the TV that showed members of the Shade Alliance using Dimensional Jump Gates to get home from work?

The Buddhist monks were very clever, I thought; almost too clever. Somehow, they had managed to write and publish a book that existed in two dimensional planes at once; this one and the world that minutely resembles it, called the Hereafter. What kind of technology could do this, I wondered? I concluded it probably had something to do with the way the particles in the paper were spinning. They must have figured out a way to get them spinning in two different directions at the same time. But how? I had always thought that, according to the laws of physics, such a superimposition of spin was impossible. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying appears to have some very important information for departed spirits, and in this way can be said to be very similar to the Handbook for the Recently Deceased that appears in the movie Beetlejuice.

Like anyone who has just died, you quickly come realise what is most important. And that is damage control. Right fine, you have lost your wife, your dog and everything you hold dear. But right now, you have to think about number One, and that means getting yourself as near enough to Heaven, as possible. Thinking about it logically for a moment, it seems to me that the afterlife is probably closer to the Buddhist description, than to any of the other major World Religions. This is because life is like one long inter-dimensional DMT trip, and it would be wise to think that the effects of this last in the region of Infinity hours. Therefor, to escape the trip, and enter the void, we have to exit through the gift shop. Knowing this to be true, I feverishly began reading the scriptures in the hopes that I could dissipate the accumulating damage, as quickly as possible.

When you exit the through the gift shop, make sure you take nothing with you, when you enter the void.
When you exit the through the gift shop, make sure you take nothing with you, when you enter the void.

When you exit the through the gift shop, make sure you take nothing with you, when you enter the void.

When you exit the through the gift shop, make sure you take nothing with you, when you enter the void.
When you...

To be continued…