The four walls of that small cell blurred, but remained as a misty outline. The reddish light faded; black night took its place; the black turned to gray. For a while it was like two superimposed pictures; the cell, and behind it another place.
Then the cell was gone.
I was standing in a dim twilight that had a soft blue tone to it. I was in a much bigger room now. The walls were a funny color, like gray human flesh.
I stared at the wall as I climbed to my feet, wishing there was a door or window so I could see out. And as I looked—a window was there! Or rather, an opening melted away for me.
A feeling of wonderfulness, of magnificence went through me. I staggered like I was drunk with a feeling of thundering joy. I walked over and looked out. A soft sun was setting over soft purple hills. Everything was like that, soft and inviting and warm; beauty, like in a dream that you forget when you wake up. That's what it was like. And I knew there was much more I couldn't see or feel.
They had expanded my mind so much that Third-Stage reality was gone. I was in another world of awareness. But I guess even they couldn't expand my mind enough to see what the real Fourth Stage was, all of it I mean. Maybe we'll all know, sometime.
There was a sensation of aliveness—in everything. Walls, floor, ceiling, the very air, all the outside of the room, the green fields and giant ferns, everything seemed alive. And when I walked there was that feeling of bursting freedom.
Malcolm had said that with increasing awareness, a similarity developed. One got nearer to the basic energy of all things with his own expanding mind. But this wasn't for me to understand; maybe it won't be for but a very few—not for a long time yet.
I looked out. I wanted to be out of that room and down there on that wonderfully soft grass with the ferns that seemed alive and calling to me. A square of grayish metal moved out of the wall and came to me. I knew what to do. I sat on it, and it carried me out of the room, through the wall, and down to the ground. There was a connection between the processes of thinking in me, my wishes, and the hidden machinery in the metal square.
Machinery powered by some great efficiency that used mind-energy. I got off the square and it raised and went back through the wall of the tall cone-shaped tower. And as I looked, the tower disappeared. Where it had stood was a field of shoulder-tall flowers with bright red blossoms.