Places

Generally, astral doorways simply open for the person who finds them; occasionally, you’ll need a password or other form of key. Once you get through that entrance, you’ll find yourself in the Vulgate: the portion of the Astral Umbra dedicated to common concepts and easily-grasped ideas. Here, the truly weird aspects of the High Umbra begin to manifest: flying eyeballs, four-dimensional temples, Escherian landscapes, and snowing geometry… that sort of thing.

In the Vulgate, you can find endless hallways filled with doors; rivers that speak in human languages; glass-tree forests where each leaf is a memory; places where the local reality takes on the flat, brightly colored, and caricatured appearance of an old-school comic strip… complete with word- and thought-balloons. Libraries where books that were never written can be found, philosophical paradises in which abstract theories like Communism and anarchy really do work the way their proponents say they should work… If you took the analogy of Plato’s cave (which actually exists here, by the way), where people see the shadows cast on the walls and believe it’s reality, the Vulgate is where the watchers start to turn away from the wall and begin to see the things casting those shadows.

And no, that view isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Like all portions of the Otherworlds, the Vulgate can be scary as hell… and yes, you’ll find real hells in the High Umbra too, shaped by the things people fear about the concept of Hell. Beyond the freaky shit that’s part and parcel of the realm, there can also be a terrifying sense of disconnection. We humans are accustomed to the world as we know it; when you take that world and start breaking it down into its conceptual components – when the blinders we wear come off whether we want them to or not – the experience can be

unnerving, depressing, even shattering. There’s a desert where the reflective sands show you the way that other people see you, stripped of all your self-identified illusions, and a realm in which the shared hallucination of money is revealed by stacks of phantasmal treasure.

A traveler can feel her senses disassociating themselves from one another, breaking her perceptions into a fractal broken mirror rather than a coherent whole… or worse, she can actually see herself from outside her skin, watching that skin peel off or melt to reveal the muscles, bones, and mushy goo beneath her illusion of self. This is the realm of bad trips as well as ideals, and of ideals that reveal themselves in all their potential ugliness… an ugliness made even worse because of its purity of truth.