Dave The Penguin (6 page)

He was now at the Beta level of
his mind, the fully conscious wide awake top levels, and he would
be descending down through Alpha, though Theta, and then into
Delta. He could make the tower higher later on, up to Gamma levels
and beyond, if he so desired. Which all sounded ‘cool’.

He would be gently guided down
through each of the levels exploring various areas, virtual-scapes,
and imaginative constructs. He would be learning habits,
techniques, developing tools at different levels of the mind to
help him, and would learn how to see into the collective spiritual
mindscape, and influence things, and that he was in control and
could return to being awake at any time.

Really
Cool
thought Dave again, but he didn’t
really understand what it all meant.

He was then told to
imagine some lift doors in front of him, on the roof of the
skyscraper, which opened onto a lift shaft that went down to every
level of his mind - all the way down through this very tall
skyscraper - this skyscraper that was his mind, this very tall
skyscraper here that he was standing on.
Mmmmm
he thought,
things seemed to be repeated a lot,
perhaps the tape was also suitable for people who were slightly
deaf or forgetful.

The doors opened; he was told
to walk through them, and to turn around and face the open doors,
which he obediently did.

Now Dave was a literal sort of
guy, he had a very vivid and precise imagination, and he did what
he was told. He was always willing to be open to suggestions, and
do what he was asked to do, and his imagination was likewise.

However in this particular
instance the narrator had neglected to tell Dave to imagine the
lift itself, which most people would have taken for granted, but
not Dave.

Dave plummeted………..

The sudden shock made Dave
physically jump, and he accidently pressed the fast forward button
on the tape player under his wing. Down, down, down, the mind shaft
he went, like, well, a falling brick really, accompanied by a high
pitched whizzing squeaky voice sound in his ears from the tape as
it rifled through the lessons and levels.

Dozens of levels that he would
have spent weeks practising getting to, entering, and exploring,
flashed past in seconds.

Dave wasn’t worried though, he
thought it was all part of the course, and he looked on with
interest, as it all went by, at speed. Images of open doorways full
of interesting things strobing past him like rapidly presented
flashcards, colours changing as he went.

He was quite calm and he could
feel his breathing and mind slow in frequency as he fell. This was
all very interesting stuff.

He was now past the Beta levels
and past the Alpha levels and onto the Theta levels.

It was surprising what
you could see and take in in just a flash or instant vision, like a
photo flashed into the brain of each open doorway as it went past
straight into his mind. Whistling past, each doorway giving a
brief
woofing
sound in the air as it flashed past.

Also, as the walls were like
glass, he could also make out things through them that were on the
floors around him, and below. He looked down to the next level and
he could see and recognise his spiritual helper, just as Dave had
imagined him to look like.

It was Dave but as a cross
between a famous penguin scientist, the angel Gabriel, and dressed
like Gandalf holding a staff with a beard, coming towards him to
greet him with a warming knowing smile.

As Dave appeared in the doorway
at velocity his guide’s expression changed to that of complete
horror realising the situation. “Oh Christ!!!” his higher self
shouted and reached forward to grab Dave as he sped past.

But he was not quick enough,
and Dave looked up to see his head disappearing above, with arm
stretched downward and shouting out again “Oh….” something begging
with ‘f’ and ending in ‘…ing’ that Dave didn’t recognise, and then
a long “hell, nooooooo” came the fading cry from above, and wide
eyes disappeared into the darkness above.

The last thing Dave heard was
his spiritual guide’s faint voice calling out in the distance
above, “Grab the cables, grab the bloody cables” and then it was
gone.

Dave looked around behind him,
and sure enough there were a couple of twisted cables or ropes;
there one was silver one and one gold, but they were well out of
reach, even if he had hands.

He
was now passing the Theta levels, or so it said on the
signs on the doors to the floors, as they flashed past. Inside the
floors there were brilliantly coloured, intensely vibrant, lands of
highly elaborate decoration and fauna.

He had seen lots of them
in films like the
Wizard of
Oz
and
Alice in Wonderland
, and
Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory
but whoever had put these
together must have been very busy. They all looked so real, vivid
and intense. He was very curious to try and see more, explore them,
be hypnotised by the never-ending stories, and imaginative
constructs, dimensions and alien places.

One level had colourful coral
and fish, with mermaids and alien penguins, all of which he had
never seen before. There was even a land full of soft white powder
that looked very like home and very inviting, with lots of brightly
coloured stars and lights in the sky, like diamonds. Very dreamy
like the spectrum of colours you got in the sky in the South some
nights. But he had never been there.

The levels started to change
and became much harsher, extreme, darker, denser, less colourful
and yet more intense. He also started to feel very sleepy. He was
now starting to pass the Delta levels.

There were warning signs in
funny languages written all over them, and symbols. It was all
getting quite brutal, hard, less hypnotic, and very much more
threatening, and felt dangerous.

He was very tired now, but he
couldn’t go to sleep – mainly as he didn’t have his teddy with him.
Which was very lucky for teddy.

His mind started to reduce its
frequency of working, and everything slowed, as if he was watching
a slow motion film, the scenes where people would hang in the air
for several seconds, arms and legs raised, groaning at each
other.

He was now seeing lots of
things he didn’t like - scary, intense, powerful, dramatic things.
It was like being inside a whirlwind of thoughts, visions, and
sensations, but unprotected, exposed, unshielded. All this would
normally be filtered and translated by his unconscious mind in his
sleep.

There were lots of things there
he hadn’t seen before, and couldn’t describe, and seemed to come
from somewhere else, somewhere dark, dangerous and brutally
unrestrained. He tried closing his eyes and tapping his heels
together as he had seen in a film, but he forgot that being a
penguin he didn’t have any heels, and neither did he have his
special weekend sparkly red shoes on.

What had at first been very
entertaining views, and an interesting journey, were now getting a
little unpleasantly uncomfortable, and all far too much to take in
to his small conscious mind.

It was very much more feral,
and primitive, animalistic but from animals he didn’t recognise,
and from long ago.

It was getting darker too, and
colder; he was a very long way down now.

It certainly took a long time
to fall inside a skyscraper, and he wasn’t liking where he was
going.

His dreams would normally
translate and protect him from all this, but not now.
He was now reaching terminal velocity, and he
was going to hit the bottom.

Dave
tried flapping his wings but it was useless, he was no
butterfly. It just resulted in him tipping upside down. He looked
down but it was just blackness below with the sides of the shaft
opening out and disappearing into nothingness.

He was now facing the cables or
whatever they were, that had been behind him. In the darkness they
had changed, and they now looked dark blue and black, the only
colours he could see.

He waved his wings sideways a
bit more slowly and he managed to get his feet around them,
twisting. He began to spin upside down, and the cables span with
him, and wrapped around his feet. Faster and faster he span until
he became very dizzy.

Then suddenly the walls
vanished completely and he was out, out into some vast dark cavern,
but still falling. Just like Gandalf when he fell with the
Balrog.

He couldn’t see the sides of
the cavern but he could feel the vastness of it, the depth.

Down, down, he could see dark
water far below him now - black cold, and deep, like you had deep
below the big icebergs, far out in the ocean at night. It was
swirling around, like giant whirlpools off as far as he could see
into the dark. A giant whirlpool below him, vast, with smaller
whirlpools within it, churning and flowing. He was going to die, he
knew that now.

Yet the water was very
beautiful though, in its own way - dark, forbidding, vast, cold,
yet beautiful. It was like he was inside an unimaginably vast well;
a well of penguin souls and minds, with all their memories and
knowledge held therein, and he was the bucket.

He felt the cables tighten
around his ankles and the soles of his feet. Where the spiralling
had become too much for the cables they started to tense and
stretch, then they went taut in an elastic reaction slowing his
descent. Slowing, slowing.

It was the mother of all bungee
jumps, his mates would be so proud.

The water came up fast.
He flinched as his head went into the icy water. It was instant and
vast. In that split second he knew everything, everything that
every penguin had ever known; all the experience, skills,
knowledge, understanding and comprehension was there all in his
mind, all at once.

It was as if his mind was in
some vast swirly flowing field thing, where all information was
instantaneous, and there all at the same moment. There was no time
here, no distance, no space, yet everything made so much sense.

This was the collective
penguin mind consciousness thing he had been told about, but it was
not in a form that he could cope with in his own conscious mind.
Amazing, he thought.

While he was there, he thought,
he would maybe try and influence things, change what was in the
mind with his thoughts. It was something to do after all. So he
imagined a sea full of fish in the waters where he lived, they were
all big and tasty, slow and easy to catch, millions of them.

Worth a
try,
he thought. But it was somehow
exhausting draining all his energy, painful to do, and his mind
ached.

He knew he could get the
answers to Everything. He thought for a moment,
How do I defeat polar bears
? As he thought, images of polar bears; what they were,
what they looked like, everything about them came into his
mind.

Then the answer came
clearly and precisely to him
in his mind,
without ambiguity, and the answer was ….

..
Don’t be so bloody stupid
…

…
then it all
stopped.

He was being pulled out of the
water fast, flying back up, out, out of the cavern, and up, up, up
into the shaft again. Someone was pulling him up, he looked up
again past his feet, and there was light, light coming from above
at the end of the tunnel above.

It looked so attractive,
welcoming, warm, away from the cold depths he had been in,
something was pulling him out.
Probably Gandalf
he
thought.

Then it all vanished. It was
dark, and he woke up. He opened his eyes, sat up, and he realised
now that he was back on the beach again. But everyone had gone,
vanished, the sky looked different, and so did the snow and
ice.

He still felt upside down.

There was a growl from behind
him. He turned in horror to see a massive white four-legged polar
bear with massive teeth snarling at him several feet away; it had
long claws and a hungry look, and he could smell it’s breath.

Dave’s stomach turned, which
was quite a significant manoeuvre. Fear took him and he froze, he
closed his eyes as he could not face the thought of seeing his own
death, and this was as near death as he had ever come.

Then there was a loud
click.

The tape had stopped, and
the
Play
button had popped back up on his tape recorder.

Then he REALLY woke up this
time.

Dave slowly opened his eyes,
and looked up to a sky that he recognised, and sounds around him of
other penguins. His body felt like heavy rocks, everything was
brightly coloured and vivid and intense around him, he looked
around all the other penguins on the beach and they all looked very
strange, sort of glowing.

But they were also all very
excited about something, and they all seemed to be preparing to go
off somewhere, somewhere out to sea. Dave wondered what the fuss
might be all about.

It had all been a bit much for
Dave, a crash course into the depths of the mind and into everyone
else’s.

Down all the way to the bottom
without stopping, and yet having a clear picture of what was going
on without being hypnotically drawn in to the other levels on the
way.

Mistakes happen in life -
that’s how we learn, evolve and change. But then again sometimes
things aren’t mistakes, and it was surprising what things you could
find on a beach that weren’t necessarily there by coincidence.