The First Church of David Bowie, Phonomancer

Note: I maintain that one of the things that makes phonomancy remarkable is that it trains you to remain completely lucid while under the psychic load of superheroic doses of substantia . To gather evidence for this claim, I've long had a practice of shooting video during ceremonies. Lately my approach has been to do my visionary work in the dark, then turn on a bright light--a photographer's lightbox--so I can speak directly into the camera and explain what's going on in my head. What follows is a transcript of the comments I made between songs during last Saturday's ceremony. It's a useful document of my evolving method and visionary mythos. It's also eyewitness testimony to how effing weird it is to be seized by the Unconscious in this way, to be made a prophetic mouthpiece for the archetype of the Self in its aspect as the Herald. Recorded at 37:45, after the song "Moonage Daydream": I learned a really useful lesson. You can ask to see what...

The visions that come to me in ceremony are essentially dreams that I experience while wide awake. Like dreams, they evanesce quickly--if you don't record them immediately upon returning to "normal" consciousness (using that term advisedly, obvs), the details become blurry, or maybe you'll forget the experience altogether. That's where shooting video of ceremonies comes in handy. In between every song I work with, I pause to explain to the camera what just happened, how I'm feeling about it, and what's coming up next. That way I have a detailed record of events. The next day--or five days later--I can review the footage to refresh my memory about something, and sometimes even discover that I'd talked about an experience I didn't remember until that moment. The problem is this results in a lot of material. Imagine if you could wake up to write down a complete narrative for every dream you had in the course of an evening. Not only would you be...