Rattlesnake at the Doors of Perception
The perceptual apparatus will be imagined as a series of doors through which the sense impression rattlesnake must pass; soma -> unconscious fantasy -> language -> conscious awareness (note 1): thus showing how perception, both external and internal, must pass three doors of translation until our sentience jolts with awareness and we realize—only later—that we had been standing on a rattlesnake this whole time.
The superterrestrial call of the dry rattle (note 2), coolly clacking there beneath the ferns as we blithely walked to the shining lake, had passed through our ears and into our body, who recognized snake—that old nemesis—but who then had to transmit the primordial fear through the gauzy curtains of unconscious fantasy, where, honestly, it took its sweet time, until motor function was arrested and we stopped walking and looked down and saw that we were standing on the tightening coils of a large black rattlesnake, its rattle rising up between our shoes, stitching its dry clacking rhythm into a song of dread that we had already been hearing, but not cognizing, until the recognition finally arrived in the preconscious where the old fear of venomous snake (far older than language) was matched with the contemporary word-presentation “rattlesnake” and mortal terror finally got turned on and we reversed backwards, backpedaling wildly, yelling a high pitched and undignified ululation, as consciousness finally caught up with the percept rattlesnake. I felt all at once very awake, as if I had woken up from a dream.
But what is the fantasy through which the rattlesnake had to pass? That I am a little prince, immune to fate; that these woods belong to me, lord of the forest; that there is no such thing as a rattlesnake; that I will never die.
Note 1: Unconscious fantasy and perception are so entangled with one another that one might call this mixture by the oxymoronic name unconscious perception: that much of what we perceive is unconscious reverses into the strange phenomena of perceiving that which is unconscious.
Note 2: What is perhaps more weird still is that little did I know that the field of this rattlesnake was a kind of gateway or portal to the other half of my life and that this rattlesnake, encountered just prior to my first psilocybin journey, embarked upon later that afternoon, acted as a literal psychopomp—a guide to the spirit realm; founding at once the basic features of my psycho-mythology.
