Greg blinked again. The leaves were still white. They hadn’t been earlier in the day. Was it his eyes?
He touched one, half-expecting it to crumble like ash, but the leaf felt normal—cool, slightly damp, alive—and when he pulled his hand back, his fingertips were stained with white.
He cleaned his hands on the weathered barn jacket. Was the dust glowing?
Now the jacket had faint luminescent streaks across the pocket, like someone had dragged a glow stick through fabric, and Greg realized the light was pulsing in time with his heartbeat.
“What the?” and the moisture leaving his mouth took on the visuals of musical notes. He sat down.
The ground beneath him hummed—a low frequency he felt more than heard—and the white leaves above began to drift down in slow motion, each one trailing a faint melody as it fell.
He handed the note over to his therapist.
“That’s it- in third person like you asked.”
“That’s what you saw?”
“All of it. I blinked again and I was sitting on the bench, hadn’t moved. Leaves were the right colors again.”
“Drugs?”
“I’ve done acid. Years ago. This wasn’t that.”
“There are flashbacks,”
“This wasn’t that. What was it?”
Dr. Fenway stopped twirling his pen and took 15 seconds. He counted them in his mind.
“The brain tries to find patterns. Order in chaos. Sometimes it’s more successful than others. Sometimes it’s so unsuccessful that it rips off the slate of your eyes and rewrites it on its way to your consciousness.”
“That sounds far fetched. Like an LLM?”
Dr. Fenway’s mouth twitched—not quite a smile. “In a way, yes. Your brain is predicting what it expects to see, filling in gaps, and sometimes…” he tapped the note on his desk, “sometimes the prediction model breaks down and you see the raw data before it’s been properly interpreted. The white leaves, the glowing, the visual sounds—those might be your brain’s error messages.”
“Or the raw data?”
Dr. Fenway set down his pen entirely, and for the first time in their sessions, Greg saw something flicker behind the professional mask—uncertainty, or maybe recognition.
“That’s the question, isn’t it? Whether your brain filters reality into something manageable, or whether it constructs the only reality you’re capable of perceiving. If it’s the former, then yes—you might have glimpsed what’s actually there.”
Greg sat back slowly. “Which do you think, doc?”
Dr. Fenway stood and walked to the window, looking out at the perfectly ordinary trees lining the parking lot. “Three months ago, I saw my dead mother standing in my kitchen. Not a dream, not a memory—she was there. Told me something I had no way of knowing.” He turned back to Greg. “The next day, I found out it was true. So you tell me, Greg—do I think you saw raw data?”
Greg swallowed. “But why? And why now? That’s what’s driving me crazy. You’re Jungian in your training right doc? What would he say?”
Dr. Fenway returned to his chair, but didn’t sit—just gripped the back of it. “Jung would say your psyche is compensating. That when consciousness becomes too rigid, too fixed in its patterns, the unconscious breaks through—sometimes violently. He called them ‘numinous experiences.’ The Self trying to get your attention.” He paused. “But he’d also ask: what were you thinking about right before it happened? What’s trying to emerge that you’ve been ignoring?”
“I was saying the Jesus Prayer.” It was almost a whisper.
“The Jesus Prayer?”
“I found my old copy of Franny and Zooey—I started tracking down the original texts so to speak.”
Dr. Fenway’s expression shifted—something between professional curiosity and personal alarm. “The repetitive prayer. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ Over and over until it becomes automatic, until it supposedly opens something.” He sat down now, leaning forward. “Greg, how long had you been saying it when the leaves turned white?”
“2-3 hours? The time slips while saying it.”
Dr. Fenway’s knuckles went white on the armrests. “Christ. Greg, I need you to listen to me very carefully. The Jesus Prayer, the Hesychast tradition—it’s not just meditation. It’s a technology. The monks who developed it documented… side effects. Visions, yes, but also—”
He stopped himself, stood again, paced to the bookshelf. “I’m going to tell you something that could cost me my license. After my mother appeared, I started researching. There are others. Dozens of documented cases of people who practiced contemplative prayer and started seeing things. Consistent things.”
“What kind of consistent things doc?” Greg realized suddenly his palms were sweating on the leather recliner. Leather recliner? Hadn’t it been cloth?
Dr. Fenway didn’t seem to notice Greg’s confusion about the chair. “Layers,” he said, pulling a worn journal from the shelf. “They described reality as having layers. The first layer—what we all agree is ‘real’—is just the top one. Stable, consensus. But underneath…” He opened the journal, and Greg could see cramped handwriting, diagrams. “Underneath, the monks wrote about a ‘living substrate.’ Where thoughts have color, where intention has weight, where the boundaries between self and other dissolve. They called it—” He looked up. “Greg, what is that chair made of?”
“Leather.”
Dr. Fenway closed his eyes. “When you walked in today, that chair was cloth. Charcoal gray microfiber. I’ve sat across from it for six years.” He opened his eyes, and they were wet. “Greg, I think your prayer didn’t just let you see the substrate. I think it destabilized something. And now it’s bleeding through. The question is—” He looked at his hands, turned them over. “The question is whether it’s just you, or whether you’ve opened a door for both of us.”
Greg started muttering something. Slowly at first. And then the hum was fleshed out a bit more before becoming almost audible.
Dr. Fenway heard the prayer in Greg’s breath and lunged to stop him. Too late. The walls took up the rhythm, a low chord rising through plaster and wood, and outside the window the trees began to unpeel into white.