Otherworld - Episode 133: Behind the Curtain

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

Matt Baldwin, a psychotherapist and musician, recounts his experience of unexplainable lost time that ultimately led him to a hypnotherapist, where he worked to piece together what may have happened through the symbols and visions that surfaced in his consciousness. Check out our Merch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For business inquiries contact: [e-mail] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode features several experiences from a man named Matt, who is a psychotherapist living and working in Pasadena, California. And I think you'll find that his job as a psychotherapist is what makes this episode so unique. There's a lot going on in Matt's story, missing time, hypnosis, dreams, and UFOs. But the way he analyzes, and relates to his own experiences

is what makes this story particularly interesting. I've spoken to a lot of people in the process of making this show, and I don't think I've talked to anyone with quite the same perspective as Matt. I think any listeners who are fans of Carl Young, James Hillman, or Jacques Valet

are going to be really into this episode. All three of those are people who wrote about how the mind interacts with unexplained phenomena specifically through symbols, myths, and altered states of consciousness. In this episode, Matt experiences several things in physical, waking reality that most people would find shocking and terrifying. But I think for Matt, that shock is outweighed by his desire to understand the meaning of these experiences and the limitation of the human mind's ability to comprehend them.

This is episode 129. The title is Behind the Curtain and you're listening to Otherworld. Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue.

I'm worried about all the science. Up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. If it swims were just like wrong. Everybody moves back into the light,

even if it takes them a minute. So my name is Matt and I'm a musician and I'm a writer. The work that I do to survive is I'm a therapist, and I mostly do psychedelic work with ketamine. So I have a long background with that, also doing conventional talk therapy,

and I live in South Pasadena. I've always been the kind of person who wants to look behind things and into things. I'm always, like, trying to squint into the depths of things. You know, when I was a teenager, I was doing all the sort of, you know, normal experimentation with consciousness, I was trying different things, and psychedelics just really stood out to me as something that there was a different, they were offering something different to me, and I didn't quite know what it was. I mean, luckily I had read Terrence McKenna and Rom Doss, and so I kind of just, just like bookmarked that and went along with my life and focused on making music for the next, oh, I don't know, 10, 15 years after that. And then I got into this really intensive course of my own therapy, and at that, same time, this sort of pit of my stomach hunger to have psychedelic experience came back.

And luckily, the person who I was working with had a lot of experience with that and was able to sort of guide the process of this exploration and unfolding into my own personal psychedelic work. And around that same time in the Bay Area where I was living, the first psychedelic psychotherapy training program came online at CIS, the California Institute of Integral Studies. And I applied. And at that point, I was pre-licensed. I was an intern, and they didn't accept me. They rejected me because it was a really competitive program at the time. And so I told them, you know, I'm going to keep applying until you let me in.

And they let me in. They made a special provision for me as an intern, and they let me in next year. And so I did a year-long postgraduate training in psychedelic psychotherapy. But in the meantime, ketamine, you know, it's approved to work with legally. It's an anesthetic, but there was a lot of sort of anecdotal evidence that it had mental health. benefits so they started prescribing it for that and that led to the sort of the developing field of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and so I got into that thinking that it was kind of a bridge to psilocybin and MDMA as it turned out I found out that ketamine is its own incredible powerful medicine with all

of this depth and that also I like it because it's it's shorter acting and it has a real gentleness which you know things like lSD and psilocybin don't always do it's an experiential therapy so so it's about having a kind of experience, the sort of the container of therapy allows someone to have an experience. Oftentimes it's like a much bigger sense of identification than your normal sense of self. And that's very helpful if someone, say,

has catastrophic depression or, you know, out of control, suicidal ideation. If all of a sudden, it's like they're picked up off of the map zooming way out and it puts, it can put that, those struggles into a much bigger context. of who they are. And lo and behold, that leads to a sense of sort of like options, that, you know, there's more that you can be, that you are sort of much more than you know at any given moment.

So I grew up in a small town on the central coast of California called Pacific Grove. It's right near Monterey, Carmel. And, you know, it's another beautiful place. I mean, it's a pretty provincial place and so being interested in punk rock and culture. I got out of there as soon as I could. I left when I was 18. But it was a wonderful childhood, like growing up, swimming in the ocean, lots of time spent in the woods and the sand dunes. And what I'm going to tell you about today, it starts there. It was a brief period where I moved back when I was 19. My grandmother, my dad's mother, was dying of cancer. My family asked me to move back in with her and kind of look after her. She wasn't really in the sort of the acute phases of dying yet. So she was still

driving around, going to the grocery store, stuff like that. And so really, it was more to just kind of keep an eye on her. It wasn't like real hardcore caretaking. So I moved into a room in her place. Moving in with her was wonderful. I mean, we would hang out in the evenings and listen to, you know, she had a record player. We'd listen to like Dean Martin. And this is where I really developed my fondness for crooners. She'd play Frank Sinatra. Like I remember, we listened to We Small Hours of the Morning and September of my years, those two albums. We would listen to music together. She would say, you know, like, can I make you a meatloaf sandwich? And when she'd go to the store, she would buy me a six-pack of beer. So we would hang out and she'd have a martini and I would

have a beer and we would listen to music. And it was this really sweet period. You know, so it didn't involve a lot of caretaking. It was more just spending time together, keeping each other company and getting to spend, you know, the last few months of her life with her. So this experience, it started for me. I was taking a class at the local junior college. And I remember I rode my bike home. And it was, you know, a normal afternoon. You know, I went to class with some friends of mine who I had grown up with. And then I rode home along the coastline. We hadn't been drinking. We hadn't been taking any drugs. I wasn't particularly tired. And, you know, I say this, you know, as someone who has perturbed his consciousness in a lot of ways,

like I've done a lot of work in trance. I've been extremely sleep deprived. I've blacked out from drinking. I've taken different types of drugs. So I know what it's like to be in different places along the spectrum of consciousness. And what I'm about to describe is a completely different experience. It's unlike anything I've ever known. So what it involved was I came home.

I had a bite to eat. and I put on a kettle. There was an old copper kettle that my grandmother used to make tea. I filled it up with water and I put it onto the stove and I turned it on high. And at that point, you know, it's as if the film of my life was snipped out.

And, you know, the block of time that was missing is about 16 hours. I'm wondering if I would even have noticed this because the way the missing time was really highlighted for me was that I wasn't. I woke up the next morning and, you know, there was nothing odd about how I woke up, wasn't fully clothed. I was in my bed, as I would be, but I don't remember having gotten into bed.

But I do remember coming back downstairs and feeling as if I had slept particularly deeply, but feeling well rested, coming downstairs, going into the kitchen and seeing that the copper kettle, it had burned up entirely. And so what that meant was that the wooden handle on the top of it had burned into cinders that fell all over the stove. And then the copper kettle itself had taken on all these layers of ash and sort of like sloughed those off onto the stove too. And then it had imploded in on itself. And it was all discolored. And there was a note underneath it that said Matthew, exclamation point, exclamation point with all of these jagged underlinings. That was from my grandmother. And I remember she came down shortly afterward.

And she said, what were you thinking? You could have burned the house down. And it was at that point that I noticed that I first noticed the missing time. Because I really tried the best I could to sort of reach back in my mind to what had happened the night before. Like, you know, I was thinking the first thing I thought was this is not like me. I'm not a forgetful person. You know, I'm pretty careful. And I'm not the kind of person that would just put the kettle on the stove and just let it, you know, burn up.

It didn't have a whistle on it too. I remember that. So I don't know if that would have woken me up. But I remember looking at the kettle, looking at the note, talking to my grandmother, and reaching the best I could with my awareness into what had happened the past night. And there was two really weird things. There was an utter blankness, like a complete and total blankness, like a nullity and void of experience.

You know, like if you black out from drinking, there is, You know, there's often some kind of like patchy memories here and there. And even if you don't remember something, you remember that something happened. Whereas this was a sense of utter nothingness. It was like, I want to keep saying that it's as if the film had been removed. The other thing was that I had this strange sense of indifference. You know, you would think that if something as bizarre as that happened to you, that you might freak out a little bit and be like, well, what happened?

you know, did something bad happen to me? Was I drugged? Was I taken somewhere? Did I do something? You know, there was no evidence that anything out of the ordinary had happened. That anyone had been there, that I had gone anywhere, that I had done anything. I mean, it's the sort of the impression that I get is that, like, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. In fact, like nothing had happened.

It's almost like I had put the kettle on. The time had been removed. and then I just was transported to my bed and my eyes opened. And somehow most of my clothing had been removed. You know, like my room looked normal when I woke up. It didn't seem like, you know, I had a car, I had a bike, didn't seem like I had been anywhere. No one that I knew got in touch with me and was like, you know,

said that I had been somewhere. So I have the sense that I stayed in the house. The only thing I had done was I had let this kettle burn up, but I found myself unable to actually register the sort of the high strangeness of what was happening to me. It was just this kind of bemused, like, oh, okay, yeah, I don't know what happened. And there was something about that that allowed me to just move on very quickly. Like, I think oftentimes, if I'm confused by something,

I'll kind of take it as a challenge and try to figure it out. I didn't do it in this case. I was confused and felt numb and indifferent. And that allowed it to kind of just drop out of my consciousness relatively quickly and just going about my day, going about my week year, until it just slipped into the past. And I always remembered it like, oh yeah, there's that one night that just disappeared. And I would kind of check in on it.

But again, it had that quality of numbness to it and indifference where like I kind of couldn't take it seriously. and it didn't register as anomalous at all. It just felt like a hand came and just smoothed out the wrinkle in that experience so that I didn't notice it. So a couple of years after this experience, I mean, I kind of just, I didn't know what to make of it, and I had the indifference. It made it very easy to just move on to the next thing.

I mean, it was actually, it was way too easy, in fact. And for me, that involved finishing school. I went to UC Berkeley and studied rhetoric there. You know, spent most of my time hanging out in music circles, playing shows, starting to make records. And then in my late 20s, I had that sort of, oh, shit, moment where it was like, I have to figure out a career. Because, you know, there's a whole tradition of solo guitar players not making money

and dying penniless. And I was very aware of that, that like, my heroes were all, all struggled financially. So I had been having these amazing experiences in therapy. I mean, I went into therapy because I had trouble grinding my teeth from anxiety. And I just opened the phone book and I found my therapy. I found a therapist's name. It just, I get random. I called her and I said, I want help with hypnosis for teeth grinding.

She said, yeah, I have experience with that. And within a few sessions, we extinguished the teeth grinding. I never really did it again in any significant way. but what happened was I started having lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences. That came right along with hypnosis, which was really incredible. And that got me very interested in, you know, I started looking for a frame to put around those experiences. Really what I came up with was sort of occult practice and the Western esoteric tradition. And I started doing a lot of reading.

Around the same time, I decided to go to grad school to become a therapist. The one thing that was amazing about the therapist that I, I worked with for so long was that, you know, just like she said, I can help you with the teeth grinding and the hypnosis. When I started to become interested in psychedelic work, I asked her, I said, you know, I'm getting interested in this right now. Is there, you know, what do you know about this? And she said, well, I have quite a bit of experience with that. So that started happening. Along with all of my interest in occultism, magic, psychedelics, I started getting back into UFO literature. You know, It's something I've always been interested in.

I loved The X-Files as a kid. You know, I got really into John Keel, Mothman prophecies. But another person who was particularly important to me was Mike Clellant and his book, The Messengers, which is all about the connections between owls and UFO experience. And it's just a story after story. The book is story after story of people who have uncanny experiences involving owls and UFOs. And one thing he pointed out again and again, which I knew, but I hadn't quite connected the dots with, was that missing time is like a hallmark of contact experience

and that if you have it, you ought to look at it. And so here I come back into therapy with my therapist and I say, you know, I have this night of missing time and I don't know what to make of it. I've been reading this book. I, you know, she specializes in hypnosis and I said, you know, is this something we could do some work on? And yet again, she says, yeah, I have quite a bit of experience with that.

This is this thing where I went in for this garden variety. complaint, teeth grinding, and I ended up coming out of the work with her. The work kept on getting deeper. It was like we were discovering trapdoor after trapdoor in successive deeper floors of consciousness. So what happened is we almost treated it like psychedelic work where, you know, psychedelic work always starts out with preparation, which is kind of like setting the stage, what do we know so far, also kind of looking at your intentions for doing that work, and preparing for something very big to happen. So we did some of that,

and in those sessions it involved telling the story. Then there's the active session where we did, I think it was an hour and a half or two hours in a hypnotic trance, where I recovered a bunch of information, and then we did multiple integration sessions. And I think that all of that stuff needed to be in place because the stuff that came through and the experiences of what happens to me afterwards

were so big and weird and destabilizing that the support was really helpful. I see the same thing in psychedelic therapy. Some people think that they can just have the psychedelic experience and that that's good enough, right? It's going to act on their brain. Well, it's not. It's about the container. It's about the relationship and it's about the meaning that you make out of it.

So it was in the preparation session that I told her about the story. And I had never told her about it before either, about the missing time. And she said, okay, well, let's do a regression for that night. Let's go back to that night into that lacuna, into that sort of blank spot on the map, and see what's there. But through a hypnotic lens. All right. We'll be right back after this quick break. She acknowledged that hypnosis is not.

It's not a science. It's almost more of an art. And that there's something creative about it. So that, like, what you recover from a hypnotic experience, it may be changed. it may be confabulated, made up, or it may be something entirely new, you know, and it may be some mix of all of those elements. You know, I think it would be a kind of malpractice for her to be like, we're going to remember exactly what happened that night. She didn't do that. She was just, she wanted to open up to this as a type of exploration, understanding that it might have types of overlay on top of it, but that there is something in there and that it's something worth doing. what you find in there, it may not be admissible in a court of law as a kind of evidence,

but that it still might be extremely useful for you personally, you know, and spiritually. But she never was offering it to me as a kind of like, let's clear this up. It was more like, let's go inside and see what emerges and then see what we, see what sense we can make of that. maybe symbolically, maybe just in terms of energetically how it feels in your body, that kind of thing. I've done my own hypnosis training and I experienced years of hypnotherapy myself and the benefits from it. I mean, the real incredible benefits. And, you know, I've been practicing for 13 years at this point. So I think the trouble that people try to get into is like thinking that they're going to get some type of like narrative clarity as to what happened.

I don't think that that's what happens with hypnotherapy. I think you get things that are not that, but that may, in other terms, be very useful. So the session started, as always, with me gazing into a candle flame and that was across the room, sort of to my therapist off of her left shoulder. And I was sitting on her couch, and I think usually as I go into trance, I would sort of sink down into the couch and become more and more relaxed. And it's this state, you know, I'm sure many people,

have done this or experienced it just kind of organically, spacing out really. It's kind of between wakefulness and sleep. It's this highly suggestible space that you get into. But also people find when they go into those spaces that stuff emerges from them, images, stories, impressions, feelings. So eventually I lay down on the couch and entering the state would involve counting me down with numbers. And then there was a part where she's suggesting that you're going deeper and deeper underground, like kind of underground or deeper, deeper and deeper within yourself. And at that point, I start to go into probably something like a theta state, you know, where it really does almost feel like that, that sort of moment where you're about to fall asleep, but you're able to

perch there and kind of hang out in that space where you're almost asleep, but not, you know, falling asleep entirely. And so she started asking questions, like, can we go back to that night? You know, and, you know, there's a whole, I'm not great at this, because hypnotherapy is not central to my practice, but there's a whole way of talking and using suggestive language that helps people to have these experiences. And I probably won't get that right here,

but she would say things like, can we sort of move back and in towards that night, moving back towards that space, that time, and then opening it up to wherever that takes me, Well, the first thing that I experience is being back in my bed, in the room, the room that I had in my grandmother's house. You know, lying there with the sort of the comforter over me and just looking up at the ceiling. I don't remember a lot of the details of the room. It's a sense that the room was dark, so I couldn't, you know, I didn't know where my guitar was.

I didn't know where my schoolbooks were. It was just lying in the dark looking at the ceiling. The next thing I noticed was that there was a feeling of like a magnetic energy. in the room, like this sort of ambient, magnetic dust floating in the air, and that you could just feel this charge that almost made the entire skin all over your body feel more alert and almost like it was being pulled outward. Well, this charge slowly began to kind of coalesce around my body, and it slowly sort of sucked in, sucked in until it was like a sheath around my body, and then it moved within my body. And as soon as it did that,

that, I floated up off the bed. No sense of the, at this point, of the comforter or the temperature in the room or anything, it maybe was closer to an out-of-body experience than anything. But being brought up towards the ceiling. The ceiling was big. It was this big, like, gabled roof. I mean, I want to say it was like maybe 16 feet high or something like that. So lifting all the way and floating up to that center beam and then floating below it. And there was a sense that there was a kind of swirling light beyond it. You know, like I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. I don't know how to describe it other than that.

So the ceiling just sort of ceased to exist. And I was pulled up through the ceiling. The second I passed through it, these tears began to pour out of my face. In the room where I was having the regression, I remember feeling it. It's a type of crying where tears just dump out of your eyes. And so it's not like a convulsive crying where you're like, you know, your stomach muscles are flexing and you're crying and the tears come out when you do that. This is lying perfectly still. And it's also strangely kind of, I wouldn't say it's emotionless, but it's not associated with sadness at all.

It's almost more has to do with like just a kind of raw energetic intensity. after the crying or while it was happening I was brought up through the ceiling and I was brought very suddenly into a room a pretty small room and I'm lying on a metal table like an exam table this sort of classic UFO abduction element I don't have any sense of what I'm wearing and I'm lying there and I'm in a room that's surrounded by heavy red velvet curtains like in a movie theater from the 1930s. And I look around, without sitting up, I'm able to kind of look around,

and I see that there's a black and white checkerboard floor, kind of like the Masonic and diner, you know, diner pattern. And it occurs to me that the room that I'm in is very similar to the red room from Twin Peaks. Now, it doesn't have, you know, the dwarf talking backwards or the chair and Agent Cooper's not there, but I'm there, and the exam table is there. And I'm sitting there, and at this point I start to feel some fear, and I see these images begin to pulse in the left and right fields of my vision. And in the right side is it gray aliens

face, and in the left side is a blank white mask, and you can see through the eyes and the mouth like it's empty. And so it'll pulse. Gray alien in the right side. empty mask in the left side. Gray alien, empty mask. Gray alien, empty mask. And that was very helpful to me. I think those two images being shown to me in that way kept me from going crazy from this experience

because when I did the integration work around this with my therapist, I felt like I was being given a key to the experience was that what I was being shown was a kind of a mask for something deeper. And that it was a mask that was using like my own, personal symbol set of stuff that belonged to me, sometimes from pop culture, things that I had read, things that I was interested in. It was as if whatever intelligence guiding this experience reached into my head and used elements out of my own symbolic language to speak to me and to create this experience for me. And at one point, after lying there for a few minutes in describing the

room to my therapist through the trance, I say, I'm going to sit up. And she says, yeah, why don't you go ahead and do that, you know. And so I sit up, sitting on the edge of the table with my legs dangling off of it, I decide that I'm going to get up and walk across the room, and I'm going to part the curtain and see what's on the other side of the curtain. So I get down on my feet and I start walking towards the red curtain, and I walk towards it. And all of a sudden, appearing in the center of my field of vision is, from Star Wars, an imperial guard. You know, they have the kind of like the Trojan slit mask. The mask kind of goes down into a piece that covers their shoulders all in one piece. And then there's the red flowing cloak underneath that and like a halberd or spear that they're carrying.

And so it appears right in front of me. And I'm feeling fear. And I get the sense that this is some kind of guardian, right? Now, again, this is pop culture. This is coming from very early childhood. I loved Star Wars when I was a kid. and here's this element from Star Wars appearing in this space and there's a sense that it's like threatening me, it's menacing me,

it doesn't want me to cross this threshold. And so I sit there and look at it for a while and then I decide, you know, whatever, I'm just going to walk right past it. And I just walk actually through it. And it just kind of dematerializes. But there was something about having to confront fear in that moment and to say I'm not afraid. that felt like that was the important part.

And at that point, I walk up to the red curtains, and I part them with my hands. And this is an odd thing to describe, but I'll give it my best shot. Part the curtain with my hands, and I stick my head out into this, like, utter blackness and void. And at this point, the perspective shifts from my eyes to weigh off to the side in the darkness,

and I can see myself looking out and floating in front of me is a huge gray alien head floating in space. And it has these black glittering in different eyes. And like the eyes were this incredible quality of black. They were like obsidian mirrors.

And I just let myself gaze. I described it to my therapist. And again, at that moment that I encountered the eyes, again, more tears squirting out of my eyes in my actual body. In that same way where I'm not crying, my eyes are just dumping tears to the point where my entire head is wet and the pillow behind me is wet. So gazing into these enigmatic black eyes

and I was looking into these eyes and I was thinking, what do you have to show me? You know, why am I here? What is, you know, what does this mean? What are we doing? No answer. And so the head began to sort of tilt back and forth, almost as if it was like on a swivel. And it was like neither nodding nor shaking its head, it was just kind of tilting back and forth in this odd way.

And so I sat with that. I sort of sat with the mystery of that for, I don't know. It's hard to tell what happens with time in those spaces. But I sat with it and then I kind of just came up with something. an idea for what to do. And I said to my therapist, I'm going to go in through the eyes. And just through a force of will, I projected my consciousness along the beam of my gaze into the black eyes. And at this point, all of a sudden, I drop into this other channel of experience, which involves shooting through space at top speed, moving through colored

landscapes, colored geometric landscapes, shooting in a very specific direction. And as I'm moving in that direction, more tears coming out of my eyes. And there's just a feeling in my bones, in the center of my being, that I'm moving towards the star serious. And that's been, you know, it's significant to many different groups, both from the West and other parts of the world. But moving towards the star serious. So moving through all of these landscapes for quite a while. And eventually, the flight stops. And I'm in this place. It's like I'm in a realm of almost like the platonic forms.

There's all of these geometric shapes hanging perfectly frozen in space. And there's a sound as if the meditation bell has just rung. But it's sustaining endlessly. It's like this ding. And so I'm in this space where everything is held in suspension. held in suspension by this one musical note and it's like it's a vast space but somehow it's also contained and I'm there I'm looking around

and all of a sudden in a kind of a it's like an old, that old movie effect of solarization where it's kind of like an iridescent flash solarized flash across my vision and then it goes back to to darkness. And then at that moment, my therapist's voice cuts back in and she says, okay, we're going to begin bringing this experience to a close. I'm going to count you back up. And you're going to feel the energy rising through your body. And you're going to feel yourself

slowly entering the room, feeling more awake, you know, and sort of doing the sort of the, you know, counting you, you know, welcoming you back, counting you out of the hypnotic trance. I came back into the room, was lying there on the couch. You know, my face completely wet from having been crying, you know, for much of the experience, just kind of mystified as to what the hell just happened. I didn't know what to think coming out of it. And I remember we didn't do like sort of immediate processing of what this meant. We kind of just wrapped it up, focused on grounding me and I left.

I think for the rest of the day, I was just, kind of spaced out and a little bit in awe, but I didn't know what to make of it. It didn't have the indifference of the night of missing time, but it was a sense of confusion, a sense of not knowing how seriously I was supposed to take that, if it was real, if it was something I created in the moment, if it had any meaning for me personally, or if it was kind of just felt like sort of off-gassing of the unconscious mind. I wasn't sure. I didn't know what to make of this. I didn't walk up.

There was no takeaway from that experience. It didn't resolve neatly like that. I wish it had. I continued meeting with my therapist for a couple weeks afterwards, making the best sense of this inner hypnotic experience that I could, but it wasn't like a slam dunk as to what it meant. I think really the flashing mask and gray alien head, it was telling me to look at it as masks. And when I think about that, I think what that means is

symbols and to work with those the best you can. It took me a lot longer than just the two weeks after that session to really figure that out. So I went on with my life and I was doing this crazy job as a street social worker in San Francisco and that involved a lot of things. But on that particular day, the particular day that we're talking about, the sort of the next chapter in this experience, I was taking a client of mine to a methadone clinic in San Francisco run by the county called Ward 93. And I had also found a client of mine dead. I don't know if it was in that intervening two weeks, but it was around that period. So there's this, again, this sort of atmosphere of death. And, you know, so this was someone who I cared about very deeply. And

anyways, I was dropping this client off at Ward 93 to get his method. And I remember dropping him off. And at the county, you drive these great big old white Ford vans, like, what is it, like an E350 or something like that, you know, the 12th passenger van. So I was driving down Mission Street. I was driving back from the, from the methadone clinic, back to the county clinic where I worked. And I remember thinking, God, my iPhone, it's just like destroying my attention span. And it feels so bad. And like, what do I do about this? You know? How do I, how do I, like, counteract, you know,

what the, what the iPhone is doing to my, my, my, my consciousness. And I thought to myself, right in that moment, I said,

well, it's meditation. Like, like, the answer is meditation. And at that very moment, I looked up to my left, and I saw a craft. The shape was a triangle.

But I was looking almost underneath it, and looking, Looking up from the bottom, there were these two triangles sticking out of the front of it. In aircraft, in aeronautics, you would call those canards. They're kind of like little forward wings on certain planes. You see them on like little tiny planes. And if you look at the overall shape, it's almost like a slightly modified star of David. There was the, definitely the triangle pointing up.

And then it was like there was a smaller triangle pointing down, the lower point of which was inside of the larger triangle, but the upper two triangles of the downward pointing triangle, you could see sticking out. And I was looking up at the bottom of it, but I could see parts of the side of it. So it was kind of like looking up,

you know, not perfectly underneath it off to the side, sort of looking up at it and getting a sort of a diagonal view of it up in the sky. It was large, probably the size of a bus. And it was floating perfectly still in the air over San Francisco, like up over Newee Valley. It was sitting perfectly still

And it was also, if you've ever been Underneath a plane when it's landing And it's pretty close to you You can look up and you can see the seams in the metal And you can see the rivets And you can see like the mist in the sky Kind of like making certain parts of it fuzzy For a little moment and then it'll pass through that

And it had facets like it wasn't smooth It like it was kind of polygon which again gave it a kind of an aerospace look, but no windows, just, you know, black, dull surface, you know, as far as I could see all around it. It just, it had this incredible objective reality. And I think this really stood out in contrast to the hypnotic experience, which felt, like I said, fuzzy and impressionistic. This craft, when I saw it, it felt hard and it felt flat, and it felt like, it was

was not of this world, but on the terms of this world, in terms of solidity, you could have reached out and, like, banged your fist on it. And also, something that's worth pointing out is that it was kind of a tactical gunmetal black. So it had a menacing quality, you know, the same color as, like, you know, a black assault rifle or a B-2 bomber, that kind of dull tactical black. And what I thought in the moment was like, oh my God, it's happening. Like that's it. That's the thing. You know, this is what this has all been leading to.

And there was a sense, I mean, I almost heard it like a voice in my head. And it was like, don't doubt it. Do not doubt this experience, you know, because the night of missing time was an absence of experience. The hypnotic experience was a kind of fuzzy dreamlike experience. this felt hard and objective in a way that like I did not feel like I could push it away or question it. I was like, I'm seeing it. This is it. And this is what it's like to see a UFO. So I looked up and it was perfectly silent. And I'm driving. So the car's in motion at this time. No one else notices it. I later on I googled to see if anyone had seen this craft. There was nothing about it.

And I considered making a Mufon report, but like I don't know if I trust those people. And so I didn't do it. There was no sound, and it was just floating perfectly still. It was at 4.18 p.m. in the afternoon. I saw it for maybe eight seconds. And what happened was that I was in motion, and a building came between me and the craft, and I lost sight of it. And I did, at that point, what you're never supposed to do as a county employee. I put the van in reverse, and I reversed quickly through a red light to see if I could get. So I went back into the intersection where you could get the vantage again,

and I looked up and it was gone. And luckily I didn't smash into anyone doing that, but I was so flabbergasted that I had to do it. I was like it felt like one of the culminating periods of my life. That was the first time in this whole experience that the awe and the wonder just washed over me. And I was like totally overwhelmed.

And I think these kind of things are traumatic because they like just rip a hole in how you think reality works. Like it reminded me being mugged. There was a time I was mugged in a very violent way. It involved having a gun held to my head. And after I escaped and was okay, like, you know, shaky, short of breath, face feels hot, being like, oh yeah, like I'm here, I'm alive,

this is all very real. I just survived that thing. Like it was a similar feeling in a way. Not necessarily fear, but like this this feeling of like oh, this is very real. This is very real and this is very serious. And whatever this is not messing around. And it's coming to me.

And it came to me in this way that it felt like it was meant to confirm something about the previous two experiences. I remember I went back to work and I just went into my office and shut the door and just like didn't talk to anyone for the rest of the day and then went home. I went home and I wrote out, you know,

this is what you're supposed to do with different types of consciousness experiences. You're supposed to go home and write a detailed account, right? Because this stuff can be so squishy and hard to capture and easy to forget that I went down and I wrote out all the details of it. This friend of mine pointed out, he said, when I told him about the experience and I described the craft, he really latched on to the fact that the craft was menacing, tactical, military black.

He said, that's important. What does that mean to you? And I was like, well, I don't know. It was, you know, I'm sort of riffing it out. It was black like a weapon. You know, it was a weapon. And he said, what did it destroy? And I remember saying, well, it destroyed my notion

of how reality works. And now I'm building a new one, which involves a different sense of potential for mind being not necessarily a local thing and for thoughts being causative and for things to exist outside of the sort of spectrum of what we're normally used to. And so, you know, something was destroyed for me. Because I'll tell you what, this was a lot more powerful than psychedelic experience, because during psychedelic experience, you can always provide yourself with the reassurance that I have taken a drug, it's in my system,

and it will go away, and I'll go back to seeing things how I used to. More. or less. But with this, these things were coming unbidden, uninvited, coming to me, and they were changing things for me in a very forceful way that I had not asked for. Ultimately, I feel like these were, you know, I say it was like having the gods back me up against the wall. You know, it's like, like they were making me an offer that I couldn't refuse in terms of the potential for reality to have much deeper aspects than we're used to acknowledging. And looking back on that first incident, the night of missing time, I still have no idea what happened. I mean, if I had to guess, I would guess I went up, got undressed, and got into bed and slept all night,

and that this was an inner experience, and that the hypnosis experience was a symbolic representation of what happens to me that night, which will, I'm guessing, forever remain mysterious to me. But I think if you had been able to let yourself into my room, you probably would have just seen me, you know, sleeping peacefully. That's what I'm guessing. I'm not like, you know, they talk about the extraterrestrial hypothesis, the ETH. I'm not an ETH person, which is, you know, the idea that aliens on Venus create a craft and then they fly over here and they look at us and then they fly back. You know, this seems to be something that's much more entangled with our consciousness. and that's not to reduce it down and say this is just some psychological projection.

I think it's more than that. I think it's a both-end proposition. Ultimately, through talking about it a lot, I came to look at this experience as a kind of initiation into a different type of consciousness and initiation into a totally new worldview. Lon Mila Duquette, the occultist, has a book. The title is something.

Like, it's all in your head. You just have no idea how big your head actually is. Okay. Thank you so much to Matt for speaking to me and sharing all of these experiences. Like I said, I've talked to a lot of people in the course of making this show. And I really don't think I've talked to anyone quite like Matt. He is so analytical. And I found it very amusing that his interest in the symbolic meaning of these things,

seemed to outweigh the shock and terrified reaction that most people would have in the face of seeing a UFO or experiencing missing time or something like that. I thought this was also a good way of incorporating hypnotherapy into the show. I have interviewed a hypnotherapist on Patreon before, if you're curious. Using hypnosis to recover memories is complicated and highly debated. critics say that it's just as easy to create a false memory in hypnosis as it is to recover a real one. But Matt knows this, and that's not what he's set out to do. I thought Matt's experience and his way of interpreting it was really interesting,

especially considering my recent interview with Daniel Sheehan. By the way, Matt is a musician, and we ended up using some of his music in this episode. so thank you to Matt for sharing his experience and part of the soundtrack for this episode. This one was called Behind the Curtain, and you've been listening to Otherworld. Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Cobra Man.

The soundtrack of this episode is by Juice Jackal and North Americans. The song you're hearing right now and that played at the beginning of the episode is Water Fever by Matt Baldwin. Yes, that Matt Baldwin, the one from today's episode. This episode was edited by Theo Krantz and engineered by Theo Schaefer. Our associate producers are Nikki Kate Delgado

and Haley Pearson. Our artwork is by Coltac Studios. If you want to hear bonus episodes of Otherworld, you could become a patron at patreon.com slash Otherworld. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, and telling your friends about the show.

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