François Bucher (1972) is an artist and writer from Cali, Colombia. He is also co-editor and founding member of Valdez Magazine. He will bring with him shaman Isaias Mavisoy Jansasoy from Colombia and neurologist Felix Hasler from Germany.

Elementals: a visit to the inter-dimensional pantheon

… Regina was fully coming out of the closet, as the conversation evolved… she talked about gnomes without any apology; she told us that there were some there, in her Paris apartment and she brought one over to show us. So she asked me to open my hand placing this elemental energy on it. To my surprise I did feel its weight on my hand, so I felt inclined to hold it for a while and then, not knowing what action to take, I posed the invisible being gently on the table.

She also told us about her trip to Japan. She was very curious about what she would see there, in the inter-dimensional field, since her perception of the world of egrego- res is vivid and constant. A big surprise:
she met with the cuddly figure that Miyazacki has featured in his animated films: the famous Totoro. The Japanese director must have seen it as well. She decided to travel with this Totoro character on her shoulder, and she invited yet another very different demon that was hiding – of all places – inside of an image of itself: inside a tourist souvenir that represented its hidden profile in our familiar third dimension. Looking into the eyes of the statuette would make it quite clear to us that it was indeed not lacking a soul.

A month later – she said – back in Paris, a police woman who is clairvoyant despite herself, had come to Regina’s apartment and after a while, in an embarrassed tone had enquired about the white cuddly thing that was running around. Regina smiled.

Rick Strassman’s experiments with the DMT molecule (nicknamed “the spirit molecule”) in the University of New Mexico were quite extraordinary in their results. The experiment showed, amongst many other things, that some voluntary subjects who had taken the compound – which is the “active ingredient” in the Ayahuasca brew – had identical experiences to other subjects. They all narrated stories about being abducted by aliens, while lying in the beds that were set up for the laboratory experiment. It is claimed that DMT is naturally produced by the pineal gland in altered states and deep meditation, so the study was not so much about the effects of a drug, but rather about the mystery around the commonality of inter-dimensional experiences by individuals who have nothing in common. The subjects of the experiment indeed had the exact same kind of experience; they didn’t have visions of Christ for being fervent Christians, nor of Buddha for being Buddhists.

Graham Hancock, who is famous amongst other things for his efforts to sustain and demonstrate proto-historic claims, enriched the Strassman experiment’s range in his book “Supernatural”. He noted the fact that alien abduction accounts were identical to the stories of fairy abductions in the 17th Century and that, upon closer inspection, the alien was phenotypically alike to the fairy; only the translation from a folk imaginary world to a sci-fi imaginary universe had altered the interpretation of the SAME signifier in the hallucination. But then, one might ask: can this really still be called hallucination? Considering these twin experiences we might speak about a dimensional “threshold” rather than “hallucination”.

I saw a 50 cm little demon, with hair on half of its face and a long braid, mingling between someone’s legs. It was so vivid that I thought I had missed noticing the presence of a child amongst the group I was with… a delirious speculation considering this took place during an Ayahuasca ceremony in an ancient cave atop a mountain in the Sacred valley, in Cuzco, in the middle of the night. The shaman told me these beings are seen by most people that drink the brew, as I had. He described yet another breed that was smaller in size, about 20 cms high. The next day he invited me to his tribal land in the deep Urumbaba valley, he said he would give me a special treat there, he would offer me a brew that was prepared in a special way as to produce the vision of the dragon. I had heard of snake ayahuasca, monkey ayahuasca and jaguar ayahuasca but never of the ultimate thrill – dragon ayahuasca. He told me about the fire that comes out of the mouth of the dragon… it had never occurred to me that European heraldry – and its fire spewing beasts engraved in coats of arms – was far from being symbolic, it was a literal description of the world beyond the veil, to which the European culture is almost absolutely blind now, in the present tense.