The night previous, I returned to my bed chamber after nodding in goodnight to my departing dinner guests and found my sleep to be hard fought. I thought it would be another night of wrestling with the demons of regret, the voices of “why did you bring up Charlemagne at dessert? You know Ms. Devonshire is Francophobic!” echoing in my fretful-host post-party reflections but I was soon alerted to it being something else entirely.
A hot eruption of vomit from my gullet across my down comforter and unto my stately new globe with the recently updated “passage to India” cartography told me that my third helping of corned beef hash was more than just a probable deciding factor in Ms. Devonshire’s declining my advances-it was an invitation to a shamanistic voyage of the mind. My friend and fellow member of the City’s exclusive Men’s Club, Dr. Mortolo had begun recently exploring the uncharted recesses of the human mind through the use of electromagnets, hypnoelectric shock, lightning rods, applications of leeches, and electrified leeches to great increase of knowledge. Among his findings, Dr. Mortolo concluded that Beef Hash was but one way to travel to the spirit realms which envelope the ether layer just below the watery heavens. The same effects could be reached through ample voltage directed through the brain pan or through the medicinal drug ‘cocaine’, but corned beef hash of the sort I’d eaten a pound and a half of was the most potent and successful means to achieve this altered state.
Another round of vomiting, this time painting my silk drapes, readied me for my spiritual voyage. I was not in the least worried nor upset. My upbringing was afterall, as a Methodist and I had grown accustomed to fearful flights into the edges of sanity.
The first thing I became aware of was that I was floating in a perfectly white space. Or rather, a white lack of space. There was absolutely nothing about. It was as though I’d been transported back to Minnesota in the winter (a devilish vision for anyone in of itself) and all about me was pure whiteout. I was fully aware of my body: my powdered wig, my parasol, my wooden clogs, my merkin, my wooden teeth, my ivory inlaid false eyebrows; all was in place only there was no reference point to gauge myself against.
I walked. Or rather, I made a walking motion for there was no ‘floor’ to be had. After what felt like an infinity of this repeated walking motion without any sensation of progress, I felt as one who has been attempting to solicit a direct answer from a politician or seminarian. At long last, I saw the dirty tip of a digging spade appear as a gnat before my face and then the entirety of said shovel as it ‘dug’ deeper then followed by a venturing hand. I was plucked from the dread whiteness as a gopher may from its burrow and came up in a humble farmer’s field.
“I thought you mighta’ been watermelon.” The oafish looking brute said in a purely working class accent.
“Watermelons grow above ground, dear sir.” I said, brushing off my crushed velvet cape and wiping clean my nez pince.
“Then how come I’ve never seen one?” he countered.
“If you’ve never seen one, then mayhap you have seen one and not known it, my good man.”
That put him in the throes of thought and I hated to have troubled his mind so. To relieve him of his efforts, I told him of my experience in the void. “I was afloat in a vacuum of nothing!” I concluded and half expected his proletariat’s ears to begin fuming.
“P’haps it was you that was everything.” he said back without a courteous bow. “That is,” he continued as he placed a plug of chewing tobacco in his jowly mouth, “If there was nothing else around, you composed the whole.”
I clicked open my pocket watch and saw the hands were moving backwards, a phenomenon I owed to either the beef hash or my nightcap of laudanum drank from my lead lined grail. “Sir,” I said “I haven’t the foggiest notion of what it is you are trying to express.”
“That is, when the universe was the size of you (which it was but briefly despite your great girth) that all was measured by it, and within it. Distance is a flexible and arbitrary idea-and by your description, I would say that before I plucked you like so much a beet or a watermelon (not to contradict your belief of watermelons) from the ground you were everywhere.” The farmer placed a plug of tobacco under his right eyelid.
I felt quite put off by the man’s haughty demeanor and I told him as much. With a smart lash of my riding crop across his mealy mouth, I bid him adeiu. If the tears in his eyes were any sign, my departing hail triggered an active Francophobia within him and I quickly replaced it with a “good day” accented by another taste of my riding crop.
As I turned to make my way towards a village I’d espied upon the horizon, I was transported upon a great gust of wind back to my four poster and the candlelight of my room.
My bedroom door opened and in came my maid inquiring to my well being. I threw my chamber pot at her and in my distress instructed her to fill it. Thankfully she quickly obliged and then left me to entertain my troubled thoughts of the night’s happenings. 
Had the night’s voyage been a trip through the astral plane? Or had I been privy to the ‘seventh heaven’ spoken of by the Apostle? I put the guessing aside and settled down for bed joined by my fourteen wolfhounds and decided that the morning’s breakfast would be corned beef hash and  trepanation.

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