***SPOILER ALERT: This article refers to events of my book*** (Check out ‘AYAHUASCA! – Terror and Miracles in the Peruvian Amazon‘ before reading-on!)

In ‘AYAHUASCA!’ I describe many events of paranormal spirit-interactions, spanning the gamut from amazing to terrifying. Throughout those sleepless nights, there was the constant worry “Will this stuff follow me home?!”. Let’s be honest, I came home as traumatized as I was enlightened, and I’d just have to take things one night at a time.

For at least two weeks after returning home, I had trouble sleeping at night. Any little sound or shuffle shot me awake with fears of “Was that a spirit?!?!” – “Did I just hear a frog chirping?!!” but of course they were always regular household sounds. Sometimes I found myself shocked awake for no apparent reason at all, before falling back to sleep after a breath or two … And I’ll admit that for a while, I needed some kind of soft light in the room to sleep at all … But after a month or two without incident, I was sleeping without fears again.

On one particular night, I happened to have a dream related to Peru.

In it, I was looking at a slick new website for Maestro’s services and I was reading through its contents, pleased for his success. As I read, a voice on the computer then began to narrate the text aloud for me, so I turned from ‘reader’ to ‘listener’ and it went on. Soon after, the voice began to quote Maestro with a hard Spanish accent. I chuckled, thinking it was a very good impression of him by the narrator.

Then the voice actually became Maestro’s voice and it kept speaking.

Then the lights in the space suddenly went black.

The furniture and picture-frames on the wall fell through the floor and disappeared.

The walls of the room became the wooden ceremonial hut’s and Maestro was now chanting, somewhere out of sight!

I was suddenly laying on the ground, staring at that vaulted hut ceiling bathed in candlelight.

Then there was a commotion outside, the door opened, something came in!! The powerful presence of exotic animal forces projected from everywhere and something was approaching me! I was in that ritual all over again! NO!!!!

Then suddenly a hand covered my mouth, as if to calm me just before I could scream. My eyes shot open and I was wide awake, so shaken by the intense reality of the hand’s touch!!
The morning sun had come up outside and a soft blue light was spilling into the room through the window at my feet. I was immediately alarmed to find the mouth-covering sensation from the dream was still holding on to me! I tried to breathe in but couldn’t! I searched with my eyes for an answer and was chilled to see, clear as day, a blurry black mass like an arm sticking out from the shadows next to my bed and covering my nose/mouth area.

I flexed my chest harder to inhale, but my nostrils and mouth were plugged-shut by this force, which felt like ‘gelatinous air’. The flesh of this black mass had penetrated into my cavities, as if to smother me! Then I tried to utter a cry but found it muffled inside my skull, with no air able to escape! While the shadowy thing that looked like an arm held on to my face I eyed it intensely, trying to understand what the hell I was seeing! Was it trying to kill me? Was this Maestro or what?!

Just as the blood-panic of asphyxiation started setting-in, the thick air finally turned thin and I managed a single thirsty gasp while I watched the ‘shadow arm’ not pull-away from me but slowly dissolve from its fingertips to its elbow … In a short instant it was completely gone.

I sat up and looked around my very normal room. What the hell had just happened?

It could have been some strange offshoot of sleep-paralysis, I know. Even so, that would be interesting because I’d never had it before in my life. Does Ayahuasca make one more susceptible to sleep paralysis? Also, sleep paralysis arrests breathing from the diaphragm in the chest. In this case however, I was able to control my lungs just fine, even enough to push for a shout. My breathing was being physically blocked at the face!

I decided to receive it as a very creepy visit from Maestro, or some spirit from the ritual, or something – I don’t know! The watchman’s shadow? I hadn’t recognized any personality or intention to the dark arm, so it could have been anything. Whatever it was, it had been a shocking reprise of ‘impossible’, many months later. A potent reminder of what it’s like to see the impossible happen anyway, right before one’s eyes!

Two years later now, it hasn’t reoccurred.

Think of it what you will, I include it only for curiosity.