The candles took the flame from the match without anything odd happening, and the preliminary obligations went without anything to bait my apprehension with. I turned away after finishing my obligations to prepare the table for the summoning of the spirit. When I turned back, the right candle had an unusually large flame and about half an inch of wax had melted and ran down the side of the taper candle.
“Alright. I guess. I’ll snatch it after they’ve cooled.”
The preparation and actual summoning continued without any surprises. After speaking the words, instead of a pressure wave rushing over my face, I was suddenly reeling from a tidal wave of suffocating lethargy. Feeling like I was drowning, I found myself unable to focus my thoughts or my eyes. I gave the gesture as greeting and challenge anyway and struggled to find some aspect of the spirit to use as a beacon.
A glimpse of him returning the gesture flashed into my vision. I seized the image and used it to pull myself to the spiritual space before the table. Though the scene gradually assembled itself around me, I felt unstable, as if merely by blinking I would disintegrate.
«Go now. Release me. You are not in a proper state to continue in this manner.»
He clasped his hands and settled them on the table to punctuate his command. I nodded in agreement and slurred the words of the license to depart. After the final word left my lips, the vision ceased and I found myself seated and wavering before the table.
Total time trying to stay awake: 7 minutes.
I recorded the time and some key points in a notebook for later. I still had another thirty minutes to myself before I had to leave for work. I was still disturbingly drowsy.
The table I am using for this work is low enough that I am able to be seated on the floor with meditation cushions and be at the proper relative height to be comfortable. I was so sleepy that all sense of propriety and decorum left me. The bed was only five feet away. It might as well have been five miles.
I had to lie down where I was or I was going to fall down where I was.
I set the stopwatch app on the phone for thirty minutes and started it, laid down on the floor, and rested my head on the meditation cushion before the table.
I don’t remember closing my eyes. I didn’t so much “go to sleep” as I did “blackout”. Usually when I sleep, even if I don’t remember the dream, there is an awareness that I was unconscious and asleep. There was no sense of being elsewhere. I was, then I wasn’t, then I was again.
My eyes opened and focused on the feet of the table. I remained still for a while as I was confused about why I was lying on the floor. The phone lay near my head, counting down time. Ten minutes had passed since I set it.
I was still sleepy but nothing like the desperate suffocation I had felt before. Trusting in the app to wake me when the time expired, I started to fall into a comfortable sleep when I realized where I was.
The working table had become a type of altar dedicated to Saint Cyprian with what items had migrated there and what items had migrated away to make room for them. The daily obligations kept the table scented every day and while the work did not qualify as [Patient Caller’s] prescribed prayers, it was helping me deal with my wounds.
I tried to remember all the words I had read and heard about the dangers and proper preparations for laying one’s head at one’s altar. Then I remembered whose “altar” I was lying before. I figured if Saint Cyprian took advantage of my lethargic state to download something into my head, that something would surely be of benefice. I doubt I’m the first overworked student he has had to deal with, physical or otherwise.
I remained on the floor, closed my eyes, and got another fifteen minutes of very good sleep before the app sounded and I had to go to work.