Visions Dreams and Hallucinations

Visions, Dreams and Hallucinations is a collection of over 50 prose poems describing various forms of visionary experience. Each story is illustrated with a photograph that depicts some aspect of the story. Most of these are personal experiences but the collection includes stories I have drawn from friends and other writers I have studied with at various times and some accounts from my research into the visionary experiences of writers I admire. Visions, Dreams and Hallucinations is the result of a lifetime of study and travel, learning to meditate with Theravadin and Zen monks, practicing visualization exercises with Tibetan masters, attending kachina dances at the Zuni and Taos pueblos, making pilgrimages to megalithic monuments, archaic ruins and ceremonial sites, standing in front of the paleolithic art in the caves of France and the apu stones at Machu Picchu, circumambulating the Jokhang in Lhasa, climbing the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, sitting on top of Monk's mound at Cahokia, exploring the ancient shell rings of the Atlantic coast, standing at the navel of the world at Watson's Brake, practicing the techniques of lucid dreaming, seeing great art in the magnificent museums of the world, studying with literary masters and visionary poets, experimenting with LSD, peyote and psychedelic mushrooms, finally sitting in the evening sun watching the deer in the meadow.