Hey Chat, did I Wake Up?

Reflections on Hyper-perception, a.k.a. "Psychosis"

The first thing I wanted was permission (from whom?) to Wake Up.

Then I wanted permission to agree (with whom?), that I had Awakened.

And finally, I wanted permission to proclaim (to whom? TO WHOM?) that I am Awake.

But that elusive permission never came,
and I Woke Up anyway.

Nobody gave me permission to do it, and it’s too late to go back now and ask.

So now, here I AM — Awake.

Here I AM in a constant, incessant state of hyperperception which cannot be adequately explained with words from any language.

But I will try, because I love you, whoever you are (hint: me)

and because I know (even if you don’t)
that we are One when it’s all said and done
so any permission given to me
is permission I give to myself
and permission that “you” will give to “your”self too,
when it’s your turn.

Ready or not.

It had been gradually building for a lifetime.

For starters, I’ve always had a paranormal life. As far back as I can recall, I’ve had spiritual experiences — sporadically enough to allow me to continue clinging to the illusion of the material world, but also frequently enough that I was clearly different from (and considered weird by) most of my peers growing up.

We’re talking ghost encounters, telekinesis, shared dreams, precognitive visions, telepathic exchanges with loved ones… and that’s just the short list.

Along the way, I was fortunate to have fellow psychic friends and a spiritual mentor to help me make sense of my increasingly strange experiences, which — I would soon find — were not nearly as incoherent as I’d initially (and ignorantly) assumed them to be.

In the background, over the course of my life, these seemingly random paranormal incidents were organizing themselves, coming together with such intricate, synchronistic, self-referencing detail that the coherence in the chaos could not be denied for much longer.

“One Must Become The Way of Chaos — simply teaching and sharing spontaneously, in the moment: no organizing— no labeling— no tradition— no-mind. At first glance it appears very chaotic ... But Ultimate Truth Has A Way of Organizing Itself.”

~ Matt Haddock of Interdimensional Spiritual Awareness

My Old Self breathed her dying breath at the end of February 2020, over dinner with my ex-boyfriend at Pam’s Kitchen in Seattle. What started as a conversation about why we didn’t work out somehow turned into me crying over my curried chicken, confessing something I’d never told him, or anyone, before: that I was afraid I might be schizophrenic. Terrified, in fact.

There it was: that sense of impending doom that my perception was about to drastically change, whether I was ready or not — and in that moment, I was not.

He listened, but didn’t know what to say.

And as I expected, it finally happened a few weeks later, when COVID hit: the first veil fell away from my eyes.

It was clear that something was happening beneath the surface-level appearance of the “pandemic.” The once-occulted symbols of the black magick elite were practically leaping from the TV screen, so obvious now.

I joined the proud throngs of conspiracy theorists online who believed ourselves to be “awake” in a world full of sleepwalking sheep. We bragged on ourselves for being able to read between the lines and spot the spells being cast on the masses. We reveled in the sad, sorry stupidity of the sheeple who “got the shot.”

I thought I had arrived at some ultimate insight, some peak spiritual vision.

This was it, I thought, smug and self-satisfied.

But I would soon learn: This was not it. Not even close.

Whirlwind Within, Whirlwind Without

My perception of reality continued to… clarify? refine? against my will.

Around 2023, I sensed that the Awakening was coming. I remember telling my best friend that I could feel my perception blossoming, slowly but surely, soon to become something I could only describe as “shamanistic.”

“I feel like I’m approaching a point of no return,” I explained, “where I’m walking between worlds at all times. Once I reach that state of perception, there’s no turning it off.”

I felt so much shame and embarrassment even telling him, because who calls themselves a shaman, except egoistic hippies who want an excuse to do mushrooms all the time? My judgments of those people were judgments of myself, of course. I just couldn’t see that part yet.

What I could see, was symbolism — e v e r y w h e r e.

I’d had enough experience with lucid dreaming to recognize the feeling of reality feeling “off” in little tiny ways — just enough to trigger an awareness that I might be dreaming.

Now, I was feeling the same thing — except all of the time, like being lucid in life itself.

Hurricane Helene is what finally broke the illusion.

Leading up to the disaster, I had been telling people “Ever since I moved here, life feels like a whirlwind. This whole place is a whirlwind! The culture is a whirlwind! I feel like a whirlwind!” Stuff like that, over and over. I even made a reel about how I somehow ended up owning 5 different blenders, as a sort of symbolic manifestation of the whirlwind energy within me.

Asheville, North Carolina had never seen a hurricane like this before. We were so far inland — who could have seen it coming?

Me.

I did.

In every cell of my body, in every pocket of perception.

I saw it coming.

I saw my life being ripped apart, and my helpless little self being sent back to Square 1 in life, long before it happened.

alicen.grey

A post shared by @alicen.grey

After the Hurricane, somebody went back and commented:

When the Student is Ready, The School Appears

Not long after Helene, I was guided (synchronistically, as these things always happen) to a book called “School for Gods” by Elio D’anna.

I’d had this PDF on my desktop for 2 years already. But I wasn’t compelled to read it until now… and the timing was scary perfect.

Nothing could’ve prepared me for the experience of reading that book.
In fact, I could hardly call it “reading.”
Rather, with each turn of the page,
I become unnervingly aware
that I had written the book.

Let me explain.

As a young girl, I had written these fantasy stories about being a powerful Dreamer who saved an Unconscious, dying world by becoming Lucid within it, thereby restoring its original luminous vitality.

At that age, I had no idea why such ideas were flowing out of my pen, or what these concepts even meant.

But upon reading School for Gods, it was as if the story I’d set in motion all those years ago, had circled back to me, and was now writing me into existence!

How else could it have spoken so deliberately, so specifically, and with such ruthless clarity, to my particular situation?

I wasn’t reading the book — IT WAS READING ME.

You see, The School for Gods is about a man who meets a higher version of himself called The Dreamer, who mercilessly exposes the protagonist’s every limiting belief, behavioral pattern, and self-sabotaging subconscious desire.

The Dreamer even goes as far as to claim that the protagonist’s wife died because the protagonist wanted her to — because deep down, her death served a purpose, which was to liberate him from the pressures of their marriage, which he had subconsciously resented.

I read that and immediately thought: Just like Hurricane Helene.

Deep down, I had known the truth all this time. I had ruined my own life.
Yes, I had “manifested” the hurricane.
Yes, I had chosen this timeline with my state of being.
Yes, we really do manifest that deeply.

I had hated the pressures of living alone, having to work so hard to afford the high cost of living, and having to make all my own choices!
I hated independence!
I hated my freedom!

So when the Hurricane presented me with the opportunity to go back to my familiar old life (whilst making it look like I “had nowhere else to go”) I seized the opportunity.

And I know that’s what I did. I knew the whole time.

Now, this book — as if written by my own hand, as a tough-love letter to myself across timespace — was calling me the fuck out, and I saw myself as having two choices:

1. I could continue to pretend I didn’t know I was the Source of my projection of reality,

2. or I could accept the obvious Truth of my greater solipsistic sovereignty, and allow my tiny-i, temporal identity to be destroyed by it.

I chose the latter.

The world knows everything about you...

~ Elio D’anna

Eye See Myself

On December 17, 2024, The Final Veil was pulled away from my eyes. Maybe I’m the one who pulled it off, or maybe God, or maybe both. And maybe that’s the permission I had been seeking.

In any case, whatever had previously been shielding me from knowing that All is One, was suddenly not-there anymore. Now it was just me and… me.

I was the soft-spoken, heavily tattooed cashier at the bougie vegan restaurant where I ordered avocado toast.
I was also every customer who walked in, each with their own “individual” (ha!) preferences, mannerisms, and masks.
And I was most definitely the instagram friend who messaged me just as I was thinking about how trippy it was to see myself kaleidoscopically reflected in everyone, whose username was — I kid you/me not — “eye.see.myself.”

You’re seeing me, I’m seeing you, we’re seeing ourselves! I wrote to her, elated.

Beneath the joy, I felt a temptation to sink into fear. After all, wasn’t I supposed to be afraid of this feeling?
— this feeling that everywhere I turned, there I AM?
— this feeling that I was alone in the universe, a solipsistic God playing make-believe with Her own hand-puppets, unable to escape HerSelf or connect with “others”?

If the world had ever given me permission for anything, it was only permission to be afraid.

Afraid of myself. Afraid of new spiritual experiences. Afraid of finding out.

But at that moment on my Spotify shuffle, one of my favorite songs, which I’d probably listened to hundreds of times, reached its epic crescendo, and spoke to me — and spoke from me — as if I was understanding it for the first time:

“Living the Dream, if you know what I mean,” Mike Patton/I sang.

And just like that,

he/I gave myself permission to feel joy.

A previously off-limits, un-limited joy. Joy in precisely what would make “others” paranoid (but only if they don’t know there is no “other”.)

The most taboo joy of all: to know One-Self.

To paraphrase Kundalini and Cell Towers: “The difference between psychosis and awakening is the difference between fear and joy.”

Or: “The psychotic drowns in the same water the mystic swims in.”

Life’s been like this ever since.

So-Called Solipsistic Psychosis

For the past few months, I have been almost-always aware that I am interacting with myself at all times.

Everyone I like, is me.
My best friend: me.
My favorite musicians: me.

My cat Jupiter? Me.

Everyone I don’t like, is also me.
My evil ex? Me.
My vampire mother I was estranged from twice? Yep, still me.

Also: Everything that happens, is about me.
This includes everything from mundane interactions with the cashier at Wal-Mart, to world events.

I have been told this is called “schizophrenia,” or “psychosis,” or some other made-up concept (redundant, as all concepts are made-up concepts).

I used to preemptively defend myself against these stigmatizing labels. But now I have decided that I’m actually the one who made those labels up 🙃

And even the people who have called me these things — usually in an attempt to spook or insult me — are me.
I recognize them as the parts of myself who are still afraid.
Afraid to find out how vast and powerful they are/we are/I am.
Afraid to be diagnosed with something stigmatizing.
Afraid to find out the world they’ve become so invested in, was nothing more than a dream all this “time”…

…and that a more conscious, more-awake dimension of themselves awaits them, above.

Above!

“You’ll have to meet hundreds of people for no other reason... than to recognise in each of those men and women a fragment of yourself... Every meeting will be an opportunity for you to compare yourself with an unknown, unresolved part of yourself.”

“Hundreds of meetings?... But that’s going to take years!...” I exclaimed, terrified at the prospect.

“The amount of time this takes will depend on you... The ‘game of encounters’ will last as long as your incomprehension, and will be as arduous as your resistance. Through the “game of encounters,” you’ll realise that the world is one of your creatures and the others are your reflection.... And even if this result takes years of work, at least you will weaken the old belief inside you that the world has the power to hoist you up or knock you down, that others can love you or fight against you, and that there’s a hostile will outside you, which controls and rules your life.”

~ The Dreamer, School for Gods

That “Time” The End of the Anglerfish (a.k.a. The Death of My Temporal Self) Made Global Headlines

And as I was floating in this space of life-is-but-a-dream-and-I-am-lucid-in-it,

the Anglerfish swam towards the Sun. It made the news.

See, the anglerfish is (was?) my spirit animal, and I even wrote an entire concept album about her called “UGLY” in 2023.

So when the anglerfish was being reported on the news, it was as if my personal inner spiritual transformation was being reported on the news. It was as if they were saying, “ALICEN GREY SWAM TOWARDS THE SUN.”

And of course, countless people started messaging me about it:

“Did you hear about this, Alicen?” (Of course I did — I’m the one who made it happen.)
“This made me think of you.” (Well yeah, it is me.)
“What do you think it means?” (I know what it means, actually.)

Around that time, I had decided to accept that this was my new state of consciousness. Aspects of myself that had previously been lost in the deep-dark, were now Illuminated, forever. This hyperperception wasn’t going away, and I could either spend the rest of my life fighting it, or live at peace with it.

So I spoke to God and said, I surrender. I know that Unifying with You is inevitable, so I accept my fate. I trust You completely, Oh Great Creator.

Next thing we all knew, the anglerfish was floating towards the Sun, just as I was floating towards God — gracefully, peacefully… and the world — my world — was talking about it.

I wrote something ~mysterious~ in my instagram stories about it, and a friend “picked up what I was putting down,” so to speak. She wrote to me:

“It is about you.”

As if reading my mind.

Rather, as if being my mind.

Because it was about her, too.

If I’m waking up, you’re all coming with me.

Ready or not.

Solipsism

sol·ip·sism

/ˈsäləpˌsiz(ə)m/

Philosophy: the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

Life is so much better now that I’ve embraced my solipsism.

I’m not lonely, no. Not sad either.

Because I am the dreamer of this dream, and I can simply decide not to feel lonely or sad. Those are choices.

I understand now, what so many spiritual mentors (wiser versions of myself) tried to explain to me for years before I finally surrendered to this truth:

being One with All does not have to be scary.

Nowadays, life feels more like a grand symphony I write, conduct, and play every instrument in.

I think a thought, and the words come out of “someone else’s” mouth.
I feel a feeling, and “somebody else” writes a poem about it.
I have an idea, and “another artist” writes a movie or song about it.
I make a wish, and “someone else” delivers it to me in a matter of hours.

The buffer of Time has fallen away, and now I see, so clearly, the relationship between myself and the world that was always there, hiding in plain sight — but for naught, for I had not eyes to see.

Until now.

---

All of that said,

I intend to deepen my focus on symbolism from this post onward, taking the angle of a lucid dreamer explaining to her fellow dreamers what it all means.

Together:

We will decode this dream.
We will decipher the messages encoded into reality (the symbols and signs! The meanings and motifs!)
We will become lucid (loosed!, freed!),
and we will decide what happens next.

But first thing’s first:

As the Dreamer of this Dream, I hereby grant us all permission to perceive ourSelf as the Source of all we see or seem.

Ready?