I first encountered these images as dreams. Many years ago, this very setting was a dream I had. I've gotten used to the increasing lack of distinction between Dream and Waking, though, comes with the territory. I guess this is the kind of thing that's going to be happening to a lot of people with the approaching Concrescence.

I'm usually not one to get, shall we say, spooky, even though I do engage in Magick of various sorts. Never bought that horseshit, though, not for a second outside of any working. Sure, I've seen my face dissolve into forms centuries past, sure I've seen reality melt and stepped into the presence of the gods of many a pantheon, sure I've witnessed uncanny collections of synchronicities dancing around a ritual act as currents barely perceptible are stirred, but man, if I ever believed any of this, I'd be chanting barbarous names from a padded room conspicuously lacking in rainbow or even green (my favourite colours), and no, that won't be a monk's robe covering my torso.

So for a moment the thudding techno -- which is rapidly giving me a headache and is enough to tell me the Gravity DJs have by now split, leaving the dazed non-Gravities to wrap things up for us - resonates and calls up a dead dream, long forgotten. Oshit, here it comes, the light show which we have set up to tug at the heads of the ravers now tugs at my head, and combines with the energies of hundreds of brains trying to figure out what to do with an alphabet soup of molecules, never mind our own Ritual earlier and our lingering Presence, and I have to bite my lip - hard - to keep from stepping into the Dreamtime.

It's time for our own wrap up, my pager reads 911 which is our alert, the police are on the way. I make one more pass through the crowd, spotting any straggling Gravities, and finding none, find my way into the cold night.

Breathe in some sharp air, watch my breath float off as I exhale, and I can hear the whien of the siren, still distant, but fast approaching. Head suitably cleared with breath, I sprint across the parking lot to a rather plain-looking van. Feijh stands outside, finishing off a hand-rolled cigarette. He smiles into my bagged eyes and we hug. "Tough night?"

I grin. "Man oh man, you don't even know. I'm gonna lay down in back before we get to the next one. Some stuff started bubbling up in there, freaky dreamshit."

Hop in the back, shut the door, and relax, laying back on blankets and seeing how much equipment we managed to rescue before our curtain call.

Feijh is driving. It'll take about thirty or forty minutes to get to the next site, plenty of time to lay down and trance out for a bit. Let the currents take me where they will.

As we pull away, before my eyes have shut, I see red and blue flashes from outside.

* * * * *

Gravity certainly didn't set out to violate any laws. Just unfortunate happenstance that, in authoritarian culture, any group which understands that the greatest Power comes from exploration of the Self is dangerous. Don't let people think that power lies within them, and not in some sad imitations of Greek architecture which many of them will only see in photographs. So any group, and any tool, for self-discovery must be controlled or, preferably, outlawed. It's always been that way, just part of the Game. We have technologies which can free any person. This is not in the best interests of the Boys In Charge, who cannot rule a group of free humans (it's like herding cats, to paraphrase one of the Wise Elders of Gravity), so any such technologies must be kept out of the hands of groups like us, who will teach any who wish to learn.

Any group in our position must come up with some method of handling Them. Our strategy has one key element -- speed. Acceleration. We are the ones being chased. They have to catch us, and our most effective defense has been to keep moving, faster and faster. You can't stop what you can't find.

I'm laying in some blankets. My eyes are closed. I feel inertia tugging at my physical form, as I ride in this vessel to the next location. I give myself over to the sweet arms of Luna, Lady of the Night, and of Dream, and She guides me back into the Timeless Lands.

Yes, these are all images I dreamt. When we get to the Island, some time tomorrow, where my library awaits, I'll go digging through old dream journals and see the scrawl of one who has never been skilled at waking up, recording these scenes on 8.27.96. Used to weird me out, when this happened, but spookyshit increases tenfold under the influence of Gravity.

The Dreaming figures in heavily for our own mythology. Was it Jung or Joseph Campbell who called a dream a personal myth, and a myth a collective dream? Dream is one of the Bardo, the In-Betweens of Tibetan Buddhism, like Death, Trance, and Tripping Balls. (And while we're on the subject, one of the words proposed in the early days of psychedelics to describe those weird chemicals was oneirogen, which is from the Greek for Dream-Producing.)

It is in the Dreamtime all possibilities and potentialities become realities; wishes are granted, curses are suffered. Magick is, among other things, the intrusion of the Dreaming into the Waking. The shaman is one who can slide between them. Stories and inspirations spill from the Dreaming; gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters are born in Dream, grow in Dream, walk from Dream into temples and Holy Hands, and as their cults diminish, they eventually return to Dream. Walk through Dream and witness every thought, every fear, every hope, every fantasy, every drive you or any other have ever felt -- every signal sent to your brain that never made it to your waking awareness, every sensation ignored, every perception denied.

* * * * *

Feijh is lightly poking me and saying my name. My eyes slide open and focus on a Kit Kat bar hovering above me in Feijh's fingers. How can I not smile? Once again, he's shown his inexhaustible ability to present me with exactly what I need in a given situation. We're a good Family, we are, we have tuned ourselves to each other, and this shared awareness, this Love, is our greatest strength.

I use the time to eat the Kit Kat--relishing every bite, every nibble of chocolate and wafer sculpted from compounds not likely found in terrestrial nature--to return to Waking, and recall the task at hand.

This is the fifth rave of the night we've set up. Part of our Great Farewell to the World. We've become too public, Gravity, and it's grown difficult to maintain our identity yet keep moving, keep hiding. So we're doing on a grand scale what many of us have done at numerous times individually. We're disappearing. Gravity, as a whole, has turned on, tuned in, and is now dropping out. We are throwing 23 raves across the Coast, consecutively. When one gets stale or is ended by the police, the next begins. Anyone who can keep moving, who can keep our pace, can retire with us to the Island. A few of us are going to stay behind, to help seeding of new groups collecting around similar memespaces -- metaprogramming groups.

Okay, time to give the Gravities inside warning. Soon throngs of tripping ravers will be entering the hall. The last one was busted too soon, our plans are going to have to change. The fallback plan -- for in our time, we did learn to devise multiple plans in case one went wrong--is to skip active participation in this one and go straight to the next.

As I step out of the van, I see a crowd has already gathered outside the warehouse. A small crowd, but enough that we'll have to push through them to get in.

We approach, press through. I hear whispers. "Doses, X, shrooms...." Monetary transactions involving such exquisite beauty has never settled easily in my tummy, and I feel a wave of nausea. (I am nauseated. Profiteering is nauseous to me.) This is one of the reasons we must disappear. We've gotten a reputation which is highly inaccurate.

Feijh and I get to the door. We knock, it cracks open. I say, "Mind itself is magic coursing through the flesh," and we are admitted entry.

* * * * *

"Plans have changed," I announce to the brightly lit hall. They don't look pretty with overhead fluorescent glare. Nor is the equipment which will produce the most brilliant visuals this side of Lucasfilms particularly aesthetically pleasing, except perhaps to the techie in me, and that part of me which gets a thrill from being involved in behind-the-scenes work.

My voice carries over to the two Gravities remaining in this hall. Waldo calls that he'll be there in a second. Red steps out immediately, eyeing me from behind safety goggles and holding a smoking soldering iron in one hand and a smoking cigarette in the other, and oh her smile still after all these years makes my heart skip a beat, and my breath catch in a sigh, and for a moment Peter Gabriel sings to me of crimson precipitation.

Feijh and I walk over to embrace her--Gravities use hugs like handshakes -- and Waldo steps out with his quiet but mad grin. So I announce, "Fallback plan. Wrap it up here, there's a crowd outside. We'll take you to the next one. The last one's been busted."

Silence for a moment, and no time is lost on finishing the few remaining preparations.

* * * * *

This is our final blow-out. The Grand Finale of Gravity, pulling us through to the Other Side. No, we haven't left yet, and I think this is going to be my last transmission before we depart. We are unique, but not wholly so. A fortuitous combination of information technology, psychedelics, and the right people with the right (unstable = fluid) emotional and intellectual make-ups happened to come across the right ideas--and each other--at the right time. We've forged bonds of love which have caused the rest of our lives to pale in comparison. We built ourselves a colony at the edge of hyperspace, dancing with merry elves and skipping across the datasphere...ever jacked in to the noosphere. Don't try to find us. Find each other. The memes which built us now proliferate, and contact is much more easily made today than it was so many years ago.

We've hacked the Mothership. Time to board.

"The blankness is almost instantaneous, there is only a minor struggle with a previous notion about communication, a niggling ancestral memory of a once perceived gravity..." - o[rphan] d[rift>]