Visions Dreams and Hallucinations
Visions Dreams and Hallucinations
J. M. White wrote and published Visions Dreams and Hallucinations in 2025, 2026 Anomolaic Press, Brush Creek, TN.
Please read an excerpt below.
This book is available for purchase at Amazon.com.
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. The book 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.
we drove to Evansville Illinois
to see a psychic reader
we got to her place in the early evening
Katherine was an older woman with pure white hair
and a light airy voice that rose at the end of her sentences
we sat facing each other with our knees almost touching
she closed her eyes and talked about me
she said she saw a fire with the smoke rising high in the sky
and that signified a long life
when it was over we sat around her table talking
Katherine’s dinner arrived but she ignored it as it grew cold
as I sat facing her she had a large glass vase on the table
it held about two dozen red plastic roses in various stages of openness
some were just buds and others were fully open
beside them sat a chrysanthemum growing in a small pot
it had a beautiful white flower crowning the top of the plant
the roses seemed garish and artificial next to the chrysanthemum
as I was looking at the flowers Katherine began telling me a story
how she received the plastic roses from a friend
as a Mother’s Day gift many years before
she said they were all little rose buds when she received them
and she put them in a small vase
and placed the vase in the middle of the table
as time passed the little rose buds began to open
until they eventually outgrew their vase
and she transferred them to the vase they now occupy
a professor from the local university heard about the flowers
he makes monthly visits to measure their growth
and says the stems are getting thicker and longer
and the petals opening and getting larger
as she told the story my gaze shifted from Katherine to the roses
now they were transformed
they were no longer garish and artificial looking
now they appeared real
more than real
the petals looked soft and velvety with a glowing luminosity
they were intensely beautiful
the roses totally eclipsed the chrysanthemum
they had vibrant beauty
I stood up and reached out to touch one of the petals
as I stood Katherine directed a question to me
I looked at her and sat back down and answered
when I looked back
the roses had returned to the red plastic of before