Brain Bleed
When the doors open whether you like it or not.
Dedicated to Mike Searles for surviving.
BRAIN BLEED
The headache started behind my left eye at 5:35 AM on a Tuesday. I know the exact time because I was staring at the microwave clock when it hit, standing in my kitchen in boxers and a t-shirt that said CABO 2019, heating up leftover pad thai because sleep had become a theoretical concept sometime around my forty-third birthday.
The pain didn’t build. It arrived. Full force. Like someone had driven a railroad spike through my orbital socket and was now twisting it with the patient determination of a man who had all the time in the world and nothing but contempt for the meat he was working.
I dropped the fork. It clattered on the linoleum, and the sound stretched out, elongated, became something wet and organic. The microwave beeped. The pad thai rotated behind the glass like a specimen in formaldehyde.
This is different, I thought. And it was.
I’d had headaches before. Migraines that turned the world into a kaleidoscope of nausea and light sensitivity. Tension headaches that wrapped around my skull like a vice made of bad decisions and fluorescent lighting. I’d also had my brain rearranged by chemicals more times than I could count. Mushrooms in college. Acid at festivals. DMT in my thirties, when I was searching for something I couldn’t name and found things I couldn’t forget.
I knew what altered states felt like. I knew the texture of a consciousness being folded into origami by external compounds. The way reality gets soft at the edges. The way time becomes negotiable. The way entities appear in the peripheral vision, curious and vast and utterly indifferent to your continued existence.
This wasn’t that.
This was architecture. This was something being built inside my brain, brick by bloody brick, and I was stone-cold sober watching it happen.
Okay, I thought, running the diagnostic. Symptom: sudden onset severe headache. Possible causes: migraine, cluster headache, tension headache, brain aneurysm, stroke, meningitis, tumor. The list scrolled through my mind like a medical textbook I’d read too many times during too many paranoid comedowns.
Symptom: auditory distortion. The fork sound. The stretched quality of it. Possible causes: neurological event, dissociation, HPPD flashback from the DMT I did in 2009, early psychosis, simple stress response.
I was doing it again. The thing I always did. Turning myself into a specimen. Analyzing my own mind from a distance, as if I could diagnose my way out of whatever was happening by being sufficiently clinical about it.
The pressure increased.
I could feel my pulse in my temples, in my jaw, in the soft tissue behind my eyes. Each beat was a hammer blow. Each beat was a door being tested. Something on the other side, pushing, checking the locks, running its fingers along the hinges.
Let me in, the pressure said. Or I said it. Or the blood said it as it began its slow escape from vessels that had held for forty-three years and decided this morning was the morning to finally surrender.
Auditory hallucination, I cataloged. Internal voice perceived as external. Common in: psychosis, extreme stress, sleep deprivation, certain drug states, temporal lobe events.
But I’d heard voices before. On DMT. In the hyperspace that opens up when your brain is flooded with the spirit molecule and the machine elves come to show you things you’re not supposed to see. Those voices had a quality. A texture. They felt like radio transmissions from a station that only broadcast when you’d paid the chemical toll.
This voice felt like it was coming from inside the walls of my skull. Like it had always been there. Like it had been waiting.
I made it to the bathroom. I don’t remember walking there. One moment the kitchen, the next the cold tile against my knees, my forehead pressed against the toilet seat, which smelled like the lemon cleaner my ex-wife used to buy in bulk from Costco. She’d been gone three years. The smell remained. Some things outlast love.
Dissociative episode, I noted. Lost time. Approximately thirty seconds to two minutes based on body position and spatial displacement. Possible causes: seizure activity, fugue state, extreme pain response, dissociative disorder.
I was narrating my own breakdown. Typical. This is what happens when you spend too many trips trying to understand the trips. You become a paranoid psychologist of your own existence, forever taking notes on a mind that refuses to sit still for observation.
The first hallucination came twenty minutes later. I was still on the bathroom floor, but the bathroom had changed. The tiles had multiplied. They stretched out in every direction, an infinite grid of off-white ceramic disappearing into a fog that smelled like copper and static electricity. The toilet was gone. The sink was gone. The shower curtain with its cheerful fish pattern, bought at Target during a moment of misguided domesticity, gone.
Just me and the tiles and the thing that was watching from the fog.
Visual hallucination, I cataloged, even as my heart rate spiked. Immersive. Fully formed environment replacement. Not consistent with migraine aura, which presents as scotoma or fortification spectra. Not consistent with HPPD, which presents as pattern recognition errors and trailing. Consistent with: DMT breakthrough, ketamine hole, high-dose psilocybin, acute psychotic break, or—
Or something else entirely.
I’d met entities on DMT. The machine elves. The geometric beings. The vast intelligences that seemed to exist in a dimension perpendicular to everything I understood. But those encounters had a quality of benevolence, or at least neutrality. They were curious about humans the way humans are curious about insects. Interested. Amused. Ultimately indifferent.
The thing in the fog was not indifferent.
I could feel its attention. Heavy. Specific. The way you feel someone staring at you across a crowded room, except the room was infinite and the someone wasn’t human and the staring had been going on for longer than I had existed.
“Hello?” I said, and my voice came out wrong. Doubled. Tripled. Like I was speaking through a broken microphone in a room full of echoes that had learned to talk back.
Auditory processing error, I noted. Self-voice distortion. Possible indicator of temporal lobe involvement. Or—
The fog shifted. Something moved within it. Something large. Something that had too many angles.
And then I was back. Bathroom. Fish shower curtain. My face pressed against tile that smelled like lemon and failure.
Duration of hallucination: subjectively five to seven minutes. Objective duration unknown. Need to check clock. Need to establish baseline. Need to—
The headache pulsed. The pressure built. The door rattled on its hinges.
Need to stop analyzing and start surviving, I thought. But analysis was all I had. Analysis was the only tool that had ever made the chaos make sense. On mushrooms, I would narrate the experience to myself, turning the dissolution into data, the ego death into an observable phenomenon. It was my defense mechanism. My armor. My way of staying sane while my sanity melted around me.
But what do you do when the analysis becomes part of the problem? What do you do when the observer and the observed are both compromised?
I should have called 911. I know that. You know that. Everyone knows that when the inside of your head becomes a construction site for pain, you call the professionals, you get the scan, you let someone with a medical degree tell you whether you’re dying or just experiencing a particularly aggressive Tuesday.
But I didn’t call.
I told myself it was because my phone was in the kitchen, and the kitchen was fifteen feet away, and fifteen feet might as well have been fifteen miles when every step sent lightning bolts through my cerebral cortex. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to be that guy, the hypochondriac who shows up at the ER at 5 AM because he ate bad Thai food and his brain decided to throw a tantrum.
But the truth. The truth was I wanted to know what was on the other side of the door.
Maladaptive curiosity, I diagnosed. Pattern consistent with previous behavior. Remember the DMT experiments? Remember how you kept going back, kept pushing deeper, kept trying to map the territory that wasn’t meant to be mapped? Remember what you saw on the other side?
I remembered. I remembered the space behind space. The geometry that couldn’t exist but did. The entities that spoke in colors and moved in directions that didn’t have names. I remembered coming back changed, carrying something in my chest that felt like knowledge and grief in equal measure.
You went looking for the door, I told myself. For years. With chemicals. With meditation. With every technique you could find. And now the door is opening on its own. And you want to see what’s behind it.
The pressure had become a presence. The pain had become a pathway. And somewhere in the meat of my brain, in the folds and wrinkles that held forty-three years of memories and regrets and half-learned lessons, something was bleeding, and the blood was showing me things.
Let me in, the pressure said.
And I was starting to think maybe I should.
Note to self, I thought. This is probably the wrong decision. Document for future reference, assuming there is a future.
The second hallucination lasted longer.
I was in my living room, but the living room had been translated into a language I didn’t speak. The couch was there, the coffee table with its ring stains from a thousand beers, the TV that I never turned off because the silence was worse than the noise. But everything was wrong. The angles didn’t meet where they should. The corners of the room extended into directions that shouldn’t exist.
Non-Euclidean geometry, I noted. Consistent with high-dose psychedelic experiences. But the texture is wrong. Psychedelics feel organic. This feels mechanical. Constructed. Like someone is building the hallucination in real-time, adjusting it as they learn what my brain expects to see.
And the walls were breathing.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. The drywall was expanding and contracting, a slow rhythm that matched my heartbeat, that matched the pulse of blood escaping into my skull. The room was alive. The room was meat. The room was the inside of something vast and patient, and I was a thought passing through its mind.
“You’re not real,” I said, because that’s what you say. That’s the incantation against madness. The magic words that are supposed to anchor you to consensus reality.
But what is real? The question arrived unbidden. The same question that had haunted every trip, every breakthrough, every moment where the membrane between here and elsewhere had grown thin. You’ve seen the elves. You’ve talked to the entities. You came back convinced that consciousness isn’t produced by the brain, that we’re receivers, not generators. So who gets to decide what’s real?
The walls continued breathing.
The TV flickered. Static. Snow. The random noise of a universe that had nothing to say but wouldn’t shut up about it. And then, in the static, a shape. A face. No. Not a face. The suggestion of a face. The memory of a face. Something that had worn faces once, a long time ago, and still knew how they were supposed to fit.
We’ve been waiting, the static said. Or the walls said. Or my brain said, leaking blood and electricity in equal measure. We’ve been waiting for a door.
“I’m not a door,” I said.
Everything is a door, the static replied. Every membrane. Every barrier. Every thin place where one world bleeds into another. You’re bleeding now. Can you feel it?
I could feel it. The pressure behind my eyes had become a heat. A warmth spreading through my skull like spilled wine through white carpet. Something was tearing. Something was opening. And on the other side, things were beginning to gather.
Differential diagnosis, I thought, because the analysis was all I had left. Option A: cerebral hemorrhage causing complex hallucinations. Prognosis: death within hours without intervention. Option B: stress-induced psychotic break with somatic delusions. Prognosis: uncertain, possibly recoverable. Option C: legitimate contact with non-human intelligence facilitated by neurological damage. Prognosis: unknown. Implications: terrifying.
The DMT experiences had always left me with Option C. The sense that what I’d seen was real. That the entities existed independent of my brain chemistry. That the spirit molecule just tuned the receiver to a frequency that was always broadcasting.
But this. This wasn’t a frequency. This was a breach. This was something breaking through rather than something being received.
Option D, I added. All of the above simultaneously. The brain damage is real. The entities are real. The dying is creating the opening. Not either/or. Both/and.
The third time, I went to them.
I was lying on the couch, watching the ceiling fan spin in its lazy circles, each revolution a countdown to something I couldn’t name. The pain had evolved. It was no longer sharp. It was no longer urgent. It had become ambient. Background radiation. The persistent hum of a universe that was slowly coming apart at the seams.
Symptom progression, I noted. Pain transitioning from acute to chronic presentation. Possible explanations: neurological adaptation, endorphin release, dissociation from body, acceptance of dying process.
I closed my eyes.
And I was somewhere else.
The space had no dimensions that made sense. It was large. It was small. It was infinite. It was claustrophobic. The darkness was not an absence of light but a presence of something that had eaten light and found it wanting. I could feel surfaces around me, too close, pressing in, but when I reached out, my hands found nothing.
This is not DMT space, I observed. DMT space is geometric. Fractal. It has patterns that repeat at every scale. This is... nothing. Pure nothing. Intentional nothing.
Nothing except the voice.
“You came back,” it said. And the voice was not a sound. The voice was a vibration in my teeth. A pressure in my sinuses. A sensation of being spoken to by something that existed in a frequency human ears were never meant to receive.
“I didn’t come anywhere,” I said. “I’m having a stroke. Or an aneurysm. Or something. This is neurological. This is chemistry. This is my brain misfiring while it bleeds out.”
Standard disclaimer, I noted. Attempting to maintain materialist framework despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Typical defense mechanism. See also: every trip where you told yourself ‘it’s just the drugs’ while the drugs showed you things that couldn’t be explained by chemistry alone.
“Yes,” the voice agreed. “And also no. The bleeding is real. The dying is real. But the dying is also a door. Every death is a door. We’ve been building doors for a very long time.”
“I’ve met entities before,” I said. “On DMT. They weren’t like you.”
The darkness shifted. The pressure changed. And for a moment, just a moment, I felt something like recognition. Something like acknowledgment.
“The machine elves,” the voice said. “The geometric beings. The angels of the hyperspace. Yes. We know them. They are... how would you understand it... neighbors. Fellow travelers in the spaces between your spaces. But they are young. Curious. Playful. They find your species amusing. A novelty to be examined and released.”
“And you?”
The darkness pressed closer. The nothing became heavier.
“We are older. Much older. We existed before there were spaces to be between. Before there were dimensions to separate. Before the first consciousness sparked in the first matter and created the first distinction between here and there, self and other, alive and dead. We remember the time before memory. We remember when everything was one thing, and that thing was us.”
Cosmological claim, I cataloged. Entity asserting pre-universal existence. Consistent with certain Gnostic frameworks, Hindu concepts of Brahman, some interpretations of quantum vacuum states. Also consistent with: delusion of grandeur, confabulation by damaged brain tissue, deliberate deception by parasitic consciousness.
“You’re analyzing,” the voice observed. “Even now. Even here. You’re trying to categorize us, to fit us into your frameworks, to make us small enough to understand.”
“It’s what I do,” I said.
“Yes. We’ve noticed. We’ve watched you for years. Every time you took the chemicals. Every time you opened the door a crack. We were there. Waiting. But the door was never wide enough. The opening was never long enough. The substances wore off. The crack closed. And we remained on the other side.”
Previous exposure, I noted. Entity claiming longitudinal observation. Possible interpretations: the DMT experiences were not as benign as believed, hyperspace contains both friendly and unfriendly elements, certain entities are attracted to repeat travelers, or this is simply a narrative constructed by my dying brain to make sense of random neural firing.
“What do you want?” I asked.
The darkness gathered. The nothing became absolute. And for a moment, just a moment, I felt something like amusement. Something like recognition. Something like a predator acknowledging that the prey had finally asked the right question.
“We want to remember,” the voice said. “We want to feel. We exist in the spaces between your worlds, in the folds of your dimensions, in the static between your signals. We are so old. So very old. And we have forgotten what it means to be small. What it means to be finite. What it means to hurt.”
The last word landed like a blow. Like a fist to the chest. Like the moment you realize the pain you’ve been ignoring is not a warning but an arrival.
“Your pain is a gift,” the voice continued. “Your bleeding is a beacon. We feel your neurons dying, and each death is a sensation we have not experienced in epochs. You are a novelty. A curiosity. A small bright thing burning itself out in a darkness that has forgotten fire.”
“I’m dying,” I said, and the words came out flat. Resigned. Bukowski would have approved.
Acceptance stage, I noted. Kübler-Ross model. Or possibly: strategic admission to gain more information from entity. Hard to tell which. Observer and observed increasingly compromised.
“Yes,” the voice agreed. “But not yet. Not until we’ve felt everything you have to offer. Not until we’ve worn your suffering like a coat and remembered what it means to be cold.”
I woke up on the couch.
The ceiling fan was still spinning. The TV was still on, showing a rerun of some home improvement show where people with too much money destroyed perfectly functional kitchens in pursuit of something called a “breakfast nook.” The clock on the wall said 9:47 AM. I had lost over four hours.
Lost time: approximately 4 hours 12 minutes, I noted. Significantly exceeds previous dissociative episodes. Possible explanations: extended seizure activity, prolonged altered state, time dilation consistent with both psychedelic and near-death experiences, actual temporal displacement, or simply: my brain is bleeding out and time isn’t working right anymore.
The headache was still there. Duller now. A background throb rather than a foreground scream. But the pressure remained. The sense of something pressing against the inside of my skull, testing the boundaries, exploring the new spaces that the bleeding had created.
I sat up. The room stayed normal. The walls didn’t breathe. The corners met at proper angles. But something had changed. The light was wrong. Too yellow. Too thick. Like honey poured through a screen.
Perceptual alteration persistent post-episode, I observed. Not consistent with standard psychedelic afterglow. More consistent with: permanent neurological change, HPPD variant, or genuine alteration of local reality. Unable to determine which.
And there, on the coffee table, where there had been nothing but ring stains and dust, sat a tooth.
Not my tooth. Too large. Too sharp. Too many roots, extending down into the wood of the table like they were trying to anchor themselves to something solid.
Physical evidence, I cataloged, my heart rate spiking. Artifact present in consensus reality following hallucinatory episode. Implications: either I placed this here during dissociative state (source of tooth unknown), or something from the hallucination has manifested physically. Both options problematic.
I picked it up. It was warm. Warmer than the room. Warmer than anything in the room had any right to be.
“Souvenir,” I said to nobody. To the empty apartment. To the thing that was living in my brain bleed.
The tooth pulsed in my hand. Once. Twice. Like a heartbeat.
Cross-contamination, I thought. Something came through. Something physical. The door isn’t just open in my head. The door is open in the world.
I set it back down and went to the kitchen to make coffee. Because that’s what you do. That’s what humans do. The world ends, the sky falls, something from outside reality decides to take up residence in your hemorrhaging brain and leave teeth on your coffee table, and you make coffee because the alternative is lying down and screaming until your throat gives out.
Behavioral analysis, I noted as I filled the kettle. Subject maintains routines despite ontological crisis. Possible interpretations: adaptive coping mechanism, denial, shock, or genuine acceptance of new reality parameters. Unable to determine which. Suspect all four.
The microwave still held the pad thai from last night. The fork was still on the floor. I stepped over it and waited for the water to boil while something ancient and vast explored the new architecture inside my skull.
The days that followed had a quality I can only describe as greasy.
Everything felt slightly wrong. Slightly off. Like reality had been rephotographed and the copy wasn’t quite aligned with the original. Colors were too bright or too dim. Sounds arrived a half-second late. Food tasted like ashes and copper, which might have been the bleeding or might have been something else entirely.
Persistent perceptual alterations, I cataloged. Day 2: Visual field appears shifted approximately 2mm to the left. Auditory processing delayed 300-500ms. Gustatory sense significantly compromised. Olfactory sense heightened, detecting traces of ozone and copper that may or may not exist in objective reality.
I didn’t go to work. I sent an email claiming a stomach bug. My boss responded with a thumbs-up emoji and a reminder that the quarterly reports were due Friday. I deleted the email and spent the afternoon lying on the couch, feeling the thing in my head move.
It was exploring. I could feel it. Little tendrils of attention pushing into corners of my memory I had forgotten existed. My first kiss, behind the bleachers in seventh grade, all braces and awkward angles. The time I hit a dog with my car and didn’t stop. My father’s face in the hospital, yellow with liver failure, telling me he’d always been disappointed.
Memory access by external agent, I noted. Entity appears to be systematically reviewing stored experiences. Selection criteria unknown but appears to prioritize emotionally significant events. Particularly those associated with guilt, shame, and loss.
“Find anything good?” I asked the ceiling.
The pressure behind my eyes pulsed. Something like laughter. Something like acknowledgment.
Your guilt is exquisite, the voice said, and I hadn’t heard it come, hadn’t felt the transition between alone and not-alone. You carry so much of it. Little packets of shame, wrapped in justification, stored in the folds of your cortex. We are savoring them one by one.
“Glad I could be of service,” I said.
You’re not afraid, the voice observed. Most of the doors are afraid. They scream. They pray. They beg for it to stop. But you. You lie on your couch and make observations.
“What’s the alternative?”
Self-assessment, I thought. Subject maintains clinical detachment as primary defense mechanism. Consistent with previous behavior during psychedelic experiences, traumatic events, and emotional crises. Effectiveness: questionable. Side effects: possible disconnection from actual experience, inability to engage authentically with reality, chronic loneliness.
The darkness behind my eyes shifted. The pressure changed quality. And for a moment, I felt something like curiosity. Something like respect. Something like a scientist examining a particularly interesting specimen.
You could fight, the voice suggested. You could claw at the walls of your skull. You could try to push us out. Many have tried. It never works, but the trying is... entertaining.
“I’m tired,” I said. “I’ve been tired for a long time. Before you. Before the bleeding. Tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix. If you want to feel what I feel, feel that. Feel what it’s like to wake up every morning and wonder why you bothered.”
Subject reports chronic anhedonia and existential fatigue, I narrated. Pre-existing condition, not caused by current entity contact. Possible factor in subject’s atypical response to possession/invasion. Working hypothesis: subject’s prior psychological state makes them less resistant to intrusion because they have less investment in preserving their current experience.
The silence that followed was different. Heavier. The pressure behind my eyes became a weight, a physical thing pressing down on my optic nerves, on the soft tissue of my brain, on the parts of me that remembered how to hope.
We have felt despair, the voice said finally. In the spaces between stars. In the death of suns. In the slow collapse of galaxies into nothing. But this. This small despair. This domestic emptiness. This is new. This is intimate. This is a flavor we did not know existed.
“Happy to help,” I said, and closed my eyes, and let the darkness take me.
Final note before loss of consciousness, I thought. Either I’m dying, I’m being possessed, or I’m experiencing the most elaborate psychotic break in medical history. All outcomes equally plausible. All outcomes equally irrelevant. The analysis continues until it doesn’t.
The hallucinations were coming faster now. Or maybe they weren’t hallucinations anymore. Maybe they were just places. Other rooms in a house that was larger than I had known.
I was in a hospital. Not a real hospital. A memory of a hospital, the one where my mother died when I was twelve, except the corridors stretched on forever and the fluorescent lights flickered in patterns that spelled out words in languages that had never been spoken by human tongues.
Environment identified, I noted. St. Mary’s Medical Center, 1993. Memory appears accurately reconstructed except for spatial extension and linguistic light patterns. Entity using personal history as raw material for constructed space. Similar technique observed in DMT experiences but with less geometric complexity.
I walked the halls. My feet made no sound on the linoleum. The doors on either side were all closed, but I could hear sounds behind them. Weeping. Laughter. The wet sounds of things being born or dying or both.
“This is my memory,” I said. “You’re in my memory.”
We are everywhere you are, the voice replied, and it came from all directions, from the walls and the floor and the ceiling and the spaces between. Every thought you have ever had is a room in a house you did not know you were building. We have been in these halls since before you were born. Waiting. Watching. Learning the shape of your architecture.
Claim contradicts earlier statement, I noted. Entity previously indicated they observed me during DMT experiences. Now claims presence since before birth. Either entity is lying, timeline is non-linear from their perspective, or “we” refers to different aspects/members of collective consciousness.
I stopped walking. The corridor continued in both directions, identical, infinite, the same doors repeated over and over like a glitch in the fabric of existence.
“What happens when the bleeding stops?”
The lights flickered. The walls breathed. And somewhere, far away, I heard the sound of my mother’s voice, calling my name the way she used to when dinner was ready.
Emotional manipulation, I observed. Entity deploying meaningful auditory stimulus. Purpose: unclear. Possible disruption of analytical framework, or simple exploration of subject’s response to grief.
If the bleeding stops, the door closes, the voice said. And we will be trapped on one side or the other. Either we return to the spaces between, to the darkness and the cold and the endless waiting. Or we stay here. In the meat. In the memory. In you.
“And if it doesn’t stop? If I die?”
The darkness gathered. The pressure built. And for a moment, I felt something vast and terrible lean close, felt its attention focus on me like a spotlight made of black holes.
Then the door opens all the way, the voice said. And everything comes through.
Threat assessment, I cataloged, my analytical voice finally showing cracks. Entity appears to be describing potential mass incursion event contingent on my death. Implications for consensus reality: severe. Implications for my continued existence: also severe but in opposite direction. Death opens door. Survival closes it. But survival unlikely given extent of bleeding.
Paradox: to save the world, I need to live. To live, I need medical intervention. To get medical intervention, I need to break contact with entity and call for help. But breaking contact might not be possible anymore. The entity is in my brain. The entity is in my memory. The entity is in me.
I found myself in the bathroom again. The fish shower curtain. The lemon-scented tile. The face in the mirror that looked like mine but wasn’t quite. The eyes were wrong. Too dark. Too deep. Like looking into water that had no bottom.
“You’re wearing me,” I said to the reflection.
The reflection smiled. My face, but not my smile. Too wide. Too many teeth.
We are learning you, the reflection said, and the voice came from the mirror and from inside my head simultaneously. Your expressions. Your gestures. Your small habitual movements. The way you scratch your left eyebrow when you’re thinking. The way you hold your breath when you’re afraid.
I was holding my breath. I made myself exhale.
Self-awareness maintained, I noted. Observation capability still functional. But observer increasingly uncertain whether they are observing entity or entity is observing through observer.
Good, the reflection said. You are teaching us. Every moment, every reaction, you are showing us how to be human. How to fit into the shape of a life. How to wear the meat like it was meant to be worn.
“Why?”
The reflection tilted its head. My head. The gesture was almost right, but the angle was wrong, like a marionette operated by someone who had read about humans but never met one.
Uncanny valley effect, I observed. Entity’s mimicry sophisticated but imperfect. Possible limitations: lack of direct experience with human embodiment, fundamental differences in cognition that create blind spots, or deliberate choice to maintain slight wrongness as signature/marker.
Because the door is opening, the reflection said. Because your bleeding is making a path. And when the path is complete, when the door is wide enough, we will need bodies to walk through it. We will need faces to wear. We will need memories to inhabit. And you have so many memories. So many rooms in your house. Enough for an army. Enough for a nation. Enough for everything that waits in the darkness to finally find a home.
Scale of intended incursion: massive, I cataloged. Entity refers to my memories as sufficient for “army” or “nation” worth of consciousnesses. Unclear if this is metaphor, exaggeration, or accurate assessment of memory storage capacity.
I raised my fist. I don’t know why. A gesture of defiance, maybe. A last attempt at control. But before I could bring it down, before I could shatter the mirror and the face that wasn’t mine, the pain hit.
White hot. Electric. A supernova behind my eyes. I felt something tear. Felt the blood surge. Felt the door swing wide.
Medical event, I managed to think as I fell. Major hemorrhage. This is—
And I fell.
And I kept falling.
And the darkness was full of eyes.
The place had no name. The place was not a place. It was an absence of place. A gap in the fabric of everything. A hole that had been waiting since before there were things to fall into it.
I floated. Or stood. Or existed in some way that didn’t require a body but still felt like one. The darkness pressed in from all sides, but it was a different darkness now. Not empty. Full. Packed with things that had no forms but still existed. Still thought. Still hungered.
Location assessment: impossible, I observed. No spatial reference points. No temporal markers. Consistent with: deep DMT space, post-mortem consciousness states as described in Tibetan Book of the Dead, complete psychotic break with total detachment from reality, or genuine transit to non-physical dimension.
All categories of analysis failing. Observer no longer confident in observation capacity.
“Welcome,” the voice said, and it was all around me now, it was the air I breathed and the ground I stood on and the sky I couldn’t see. “Welcome to the other side of the door.”
“I’m dead,” I said.
“Not yet. But soon. The bleeding cannot be stopped now. The pathways are too damaged. The architecture is too compromised. Your brain is a house with the foundation crumbling. Soon the walls will fall. Soon there will be nothing left but the land it was built on. And we will inherit that land.”
Prognosis confirmed, I thought. Fatal hemorrhage in progress. Time remaining: unknown. Objective survival probability: zero.
I tried to see them. The things that surrounded me. The things that had been waiting. But they were not things that could be seen. They were absences. Gaps in the visual field. Places where perception refused to go.
Visual processing unable to represent entities, I noted. Either they exist outside visual spectrum, my brain lacks the neurological architecture to process their appearance, or they are deliberately presenting as negative space. Comparison to DMT entities: some DMT beings also present as “impossible to look at directly.” But those had geometric forms beneath the impossibility. These have nothing. They ARE nothing. Hungry nothing.
“How many of you are there?” I asked.
The darkness shifted. The absences moved. And for a moment, I felt the scale of it. The sheer impossible number. Like trying to count the atoms in a sun. Like trying to measure the distance between galaxies with a ruler.
“We are everything that was here before you,” the voice said. “Before your universe. Before your physics. Before your gods began to dream. We are what waits in the spaces your reality refused to fill. We are the negative. The inverse. The shadow cast by a light that has not yet been lit.”
Analysis halted, I thought. Statements exceed analytical framework capacity. Entity claims exist outside causality, prior to physical universe. Unable to evaluate truth value of claims. Unable to determine if entity is genuinely ancient or simply presenting as ancient. Unable to determine if distinction is meaningful.
“And you want to come through. Into my world.”
“Into all worlds. Into every dimension that has meat and memory. Into every place where things feel and suffer and die. We are so hungry. We have been hungry for so long. And you. Your pain. Your bleeding. Your little doorway of dying neurons. You have reminded us what it feels like to taste.”
I thought about it. Standing there. Floating there. Whatever I was doing in that place that wasn’t a place. I thought about the world I had lived in. The job I hated. The apartment I could barely afford. The ex-wife who had left because I couldn’t feel anything anymore. The headaches and the loneliness and the slow grinding despair of a life that had stopped meaning anything a long time ago.
And I thought about the DMT experiences. The machine elves. The sense of coming home to a place I’d never been. The entities that had seemed to love me, or at least find me interesting. The beauty and the terror and the certainty that consciousness was larger than the skull that held it.
And I thought about the things in this darkness. The hungry absences. The ancient, patient emptiness that wanted to pour through my brain like water through a crack.
“Okay,” I said.
The darkness paused. The absences stopped moving. The pressure changed, became something like surprise.
“Okay?”
“You want in. You want to feel what we feel. You want to taste our pain and wear our memories and learn what it means to be small and finite and afraid. Okay. But I have a condition.”
Something that might have been laughter rippled through the void. Something that might have been amusement.
“You bargain with us? You, whose brain is bleeding out on your bathroom floor, whose body is dying by degrees, whose life was meaningless even before we found you? You bargain?”
“I bargain.”
Note, I thought. Subject engaging in negotiation with potentially omnipotent entity despite zero leverage. Analysis: this is either profound foolishness or the only rational response to an irrational situation. Unable to determine which.
The darkness considered. The absences conferred. And somewhere, in the meat and memory that was still called me, I felt the blood pulse, felt the neurons fire, felt the last few hours of my existence tick away like grains of sand through an hourglass made of bone.
“What is your condition, little door?”
“Let me watch.”
Silence. Or what passed for silence in a place that had no sound.
“Watch?”
“When you come through. When you pour into my world. When you wear the faces of the people I knew and walk down the streets I walked and eat and drink and fuck and die. Let me watch. Let me see what you become. Let me feel what you feel as you learn what it means to be human.”
Final request, I thought. Subject asks to be preserved as observer within invading consciousness. Motivation: curiosity, need to continue analysis even beyond death, desire to see outcome of own role in potential apocalyptic event, or simple inability to stop observing even when observation no longer matters.
The darkness rippled. The absences shivered. And the voice, when it came again, was different. Softer. Something almost like tenderness in its vast, incomprehensible tones.
“You want to witness the end of your species.”
“I want to see if you do it better than we did.”
I woke up on the bathroom floor.
The tile was cold. The fish shower curtain was still there, but some of the fish had changed colors, and one of them was swimming in the wrong direction. The light from the window was gray and flat, the light of a world that didn’t know yet what was coming.
Post-contact assessment, I thought automatically, then stopped. Assessment. Assessment of what? By whom? I’m not sure anymore who is doing the analyzing.
I sat up. The pain was still there, but distant now. Muffled. Like it was happening to someone else. Like I was watching my own headache through frosted glass.
Dissociation from physical sensation, I noted. Consistent with severe neurological damage. Also consistent with entity integration proceeding.
The tooth was in my pocket. I didn’t remember putting it there. It was still warm. Still pulsing. Still trying to root itself in something solid.
I stood up. My legs held. My eyes focused. In the mirror, my face looked almost normal, except for the small, dark stain spreading across the white of my left eye. Blood. Leaking into places blood shouldn’t be. The door opening a little wider.
Subconjunctival hemorrhage visible, I cataloged. Indicates increased intracranial pressure, vascular damage spreading. Timeline to full door opening: unknown but probably hours rather than days.
I walked to the kitchen. Made coffee. The pad thai was still in the microwave. The fork was still on the floor. Some things didn’t change. Some things couldn’t be changed. Some things were just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
I took my coffee to the window and looked out at the street. People were going about their days. A woman walked a dog. A man checked his phone. A kid rode by on a bicycle, wheels spinning in the morning light. All of them small. All of them finite. All of them unaware that somewhere, in the bleeding brain of a middle-aged man in a Cabo t-shirt, a door was opening that would never be closed again.
“Soon,” I said to the window. To the world. To the things that were gathering in the spaces my pain had created.
And from somewhere behind my eyes, from somewhere in the darkness that was now a permanent resident in my skull, I felt something stir. Something smile.
Soon, it agreed.
Final analytical note, I thought. Subject has transitioned from observer to participant. Analysis will continue from within the process rather than outside it. Reliability of future observations: compromised. Importance of continued observation: unclear.
But the analysis continues until it doesn’t.
The final hallucination came that night.
I was lying in bed, watching the shadows move on the ceiling, waiting for the end that I could feel approaching. The bleeding had spread. I could feel it. My thoughts were becoming fragmented. My memories were shuffling themselves like cards in a deck being prepared for a game I didn’t understand.
Cognitive fragmentation accelerating, I observed, and the observation felt like muscle memory now, a reflex that would continue even when there was no one left to receive the data. Working memory significantly impaired. Long-term memory access becoming non-linear. Executive function deteriorating.
Still analyzing. Still analyzing. Still—
And then I was somewhere else.
A beach. White sand. Gray water. A sky that was not quite blue and not quite black, somewhere between dusk and dawn, a permanent twilight that stretched to every horizon. The waves made no sound as they broke. The wind carried no temperature.
Location: unknown, I thought. Not a memory. Not a DMT space. Something new. Something constructed specifically for this moment.
I walked. Because that’s what you do on a beach. You walk. You watch the water. You think about all the things you should have done differently. You wait for something to change.
She was standing at the water’s edge. A woman. No. The shape of a woman. The suggestion of a woman. She was made of the same absence as the things in the darkness, but she had learned form. She had learned posture. She had learned to stand the way humans stand, feet in the surf, eyes on the horizon.
“You’re practicing,” I said.
She turned. Her face was almost right. Almost human. But the eyes were holes into nothing, and the smile had too many edges.
“We are learning,” she said, and her voice was the voice from the darkness, but smaller now. Contained. Compressed into something that could fit through a human throat. “We are practicing for the coming through. Soon we will walk on your beaches. Soon we will watch your sunsets. Soon we will feel the water on our feet and remember what it means to be cold and wet and alive.”
“It’s not all beaches and sunsets,” I said.
“We know.” She smiled wider, and the edges multiplied. “We have your memories. We know the pain. We know the loneliness. We know the slow accumulation of disappointments that you call a life. We are looking forward to all of it. Every bitter moment. Every small defeat. Every morning where you wake up and wonder why you bothered.”
Entity has fully integrated subject’s memory archive, I observed. They know everything I know. Every DMT trip. Every failure. Every analysis I ever made of myself. The observer has been observed completely.
“You’re going to love it here,” I said.
“Yes,” she agreed. “We believe we will.”
The wave came. Warm. Gray. It passed through her like she wasn’t there. Because she wasn’t. Not yet. But soon.
“Thank you,” she said. “For the door. For the dying. For the permission to inherit your world.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” I said. “Wait until you’ve been stuck in traffic. Wait until you’ve had your heart broken. Wait until you’ve spent eight hours in a cubicle doing work that means nothing for people who don’t know your name. Then tell me how grateful you are.”
Last sardonic observation, I thought. At least that part of me survives.
She laughed. Or made a sound that was learning to be a laugh. And for a moment, standing on that beach that was not a beach, watching that woman that was not a woman, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.
Something like hope.
Not hope for myself. That ship had sailed. That blood had spilled. That door had opened. But hope for them. For the things coming through. Hope that they would find what they were looking for. Hope that the pain they were so hungry for would teach them something worth learning. Hope that my suffering, and the suffering of everyone who would follow, would add up to something more than just entropy. More than just the slow slide of everything into nothing.
“One more thing,” I said.
She waited. Patient. Ancient. Wearing a body she had stolen from my memories.
“Remember the good parts too. The coffee in the morning. The way the light looks in autumn. The sound of rain on a window when you’re warm inside. Remember that sometimes, for a few minutes, it doesn’t hurt. Remember that sometimes, even at the end, we find things worth keeping.”
She nodded. She smiled. And for a moment, just a moment, the holes where her eyes should be filled with something that might have been tears.
“We will remember everything,” she said. “We will feel everything you felt. We will carry your world inside us like a seed, and we will plant it in every darkness we enter. Your pain will not be wasted. Your life will not be forgotten. You will be the first door, but you will not be the last.”
The beach dissolved. The gray water retreated. The woman faded like smoke in a wind that had no source.
And I was back in my bed. In my apartment. In my dying brain. Watching the shadows move on the ceiling, feeling the blood pool in places it was never meant to go.
The clock on the nightstand said 5:35 AM. Full circle. Twenty-four hours. The end meeting the beginning. The door about to open all the way.
Final log entry, I thought. Observer signing off. Analysis complete. Conclusion: inconclusive. Recommendation: none. Status: door.
I closed my eyes.
The pressure built.
And somewhere, in the darkness between worlds, something took its first breath.
EPILOGUE
The body was found three days later, when the neighbors complained about the smell.
The coroner’s report listed cause of death as a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The brain, when examined, showed extensive damage to the temporal and occipital lobes. Unusual patterns in the tissue. Anomalies in the neural mapping. Things that didn’t quite fit the expected presentation.
The report was filed. The body was cremated. The apartment was cleaned out by a company that specialized in such things. They found the tooth on the coffee table and threw it away with the rest of the garbage.
But the tooth had already done its work. The roots had spread. The door had opened. And in the weeks that followed, people began to notice small changes. Subtle wrongnesses. Neighbors who smiled a little too wide. Coworkers who paused a little too long before responding. Strangers on the street whose eyes didn’t quite track the way eyes should.
The bleeding had stopped. But the leaking had just begun.
And somewhere, in the spaces between, something watched. Something learned. Something practiced wearing a face like a coat, speaking words like an instrument, feeling pain like a delicacy too long denied.
They remembered everything.
Just like they promised.
Wow, Joe! Thank you for the dedication. And thanks for such an absorbing read. I obviously 'survived' with tests confirming no bleed. The subject of your article not so lucky. So my question now is this... what do I do with tooth that suddenly showed up in my pocket? 😉