sweat lodge and a curious scratch

Sketch book image of the very humble sweat lodge in Arizona. A simple structure made from arching re-bar, old blankets and canvas. In the foreground is a fire pit with collection of VERY hot rocks. Double click on the image for a hi-rez view.

part ONE of this story HERE

After the intensely scary events in the tent (story posted below) in Delores Colorado, Natascha and I were basically stuck in the four corners area with my Subaru in the shop. We had a rent-a-car and a few days of time. We went to the groovy coffee shop in Cortez and we used skype to contact Miriam Delicado and we asked her what we should do. She told us we needed to do a sweat lodge with a Navajo Shaman named Howard. So we drove to south west to Canyon De Chelly in Arizona.

Canyon De Chelly is on of the most beautiful and magical places on earth, and it’s all on Navajo land, so to enter into the bottom of the canyon requires a guide. We spent the day with wet feet in the cold muddy river with a wonderful guide named Francine. Afterwards we went to the Spider Rock Campground, a ramshackle establishment run by Howard. We were all set up to have the sweat the next morning, along with a few other folk at the campground.

Natascha, Howard and me (with a cat) early in the morning at the Canyon De Chelly Spider Rock campground.

I was curiously unaware of what I was getting myself into, it felt like I was proceeding without intention. It was more like I was being pulled toward the sweat lodge, rather than actively seeking it.

At some point that day I took my shirt off and I found a curious scratch that ran roughly from above my belly button up toward my left shoulder. (see sketch to the left) I had been in the tent in Delores Colorado that morning, and this would have been the first time I took my shirt off since the scary events the previous night.

Scratch isn’t quite the right term, if you looked at it closely it was actually some sort of rash. It wasn’t an abrasion, instead it was a bumpy length of tiny blisters in a long straight line. These were long rows of little bubbles of yellowish fluid right at the surface of my skin, each little blister was smaller than a grain of rice. It was weird, and I've never seen anything like it (on me or anyone else).

I’m color blind, and even I could see the thin red line. It looked like some allergic reaction, like someone took a pen full of poison ivy ink and drew a straight line on my chest.

It didn’t itch or feel bad, but it was certainly curious. It healed up slowly and cleanly over the next few weeks.

Did this red line happen the previous night in the tent in Delores? Was is associated with those terrifying memories? At the time both Natascha and I asked the same thing, and we we quick to dismiss those thoughts. It might have come from some desert cactus, but I did not do anything the previous few days with my shirt off. I have no memory of getting scratched by any plant, like a poison oak (a common tree in that area).

Now, over a month later I’m left questioning how I got that weird scratch and I don’t have an answer. Could it have happened that creepy night in Delores? Why didn’t I think to take a photo?

When I entered the lodge I wore a bathing suit, and my bare chest displayed that long red scratch. There were eight of us in the dark cramped shelter, with a pit in the center for the very hot rocks.

Howard lead a really impressive ceremony. It was mystical and playful all at the same time. I felt rooted in my own world, and simultaneously connected with something beautiful and ancient. The overriding theme was to surrender to the heat.

There were four separate sessions within the dark little lodge, each one getting progressively hotter. The final session was berserkly hot, and everyone inside was forced to lie down so as to breathe the cooler air near the dirt floor.

The whole thing lasted a few hours, and when it was over everyone was fatigued and quiet. I spent the rest of that very pleasant day drinking water and napping. Natascha took a long walk with Howard’s little dog.

The next day Natascha and I said good-bye to Howard in the morning, and slept in Valley of the Gods (in Utah) that night. And that - is another interesting story.

Myself and Natascha smiling above the Gooseneck Canyons in the Colorado River in the Four Corners area of southern Utah.

irrational fear inside our tent

Dream image inside a tent, where I felt myself floating up above my pad with a glowing flat mandala circle off to the side.

I just returned home after spending two beautiful weeks in the four corners area. A close friend, Natascha, flew in from Germany specifically to explore and camp in the canyons and sandstone of this amazing part of the West.

During our trip we had a collection of curious happenings, and this posting is one of the more dramatic experiences. Natascha is here with me as I write this, and she’s been adding details she remembers as we try and make this written work as accurate as we can.

We were on our way north back to Idaho when we noted some issues with the brakes on my car. We went into a small mechanic shop in Cortez Colorado and they pretty much said we would die if we drove on the broken brakes. So, we were stuck down in the four corners area for five more days waiting on parts. We rented a cheap car and made the best of it.

Late in the afternoon of Thursday May 13th, Natascha and I asked the very nice coffee shop girl (wearing a very groovy hippy dress) in Cortez if she knew of any spots to camp near town. She said there was open camping on the BLM land outside of the town of Dolores, just a few miles up the road.

We followed her directions and ended up in a secluded area of tall trees a short ways off the forest service road. We found a secluded spot with an old fire ring and some broken beer bottles. Perfect for our one-night camping needs.

We set up our tent and headed back into the town of Dolores and ate pizza at a cute local brewery. Our table was situated right next to the window and it looked out on the very quiet corner of a VERY tiny town.

During dinner, Natascha was quite emotional. As I write this she explained that she was very much in crisis, she was feeling sad and didn’t quite know where these emotions came from.

After pizza we went back to the camp site and climbed in our small tent. It seems like we quickly went to sleep. This is where things get strange.

I was suddenly jolted awake because Natascha had screamed. It was just a short shriek of fear. My instantaneous response was to bolt upright and scream with an intensity that would be hard to describe. I was screaming in fear, sure enough, but it was also a primal outburst of defense.

I've slept in the mountains for decades, and I've dealt with some scary stuff in the dark. Bears in camp, moose tangled up in my tarp strings, rats crawling across my face - but I have NEVER been frightened in a way that would come close to those moments in that tent.

I switched on my headlamp and held it in my hand. I asked Natascha what happened. I actually had the wherewithal to say, "Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind. Don't think, just tell me what happened."

She said almost nothing, simply stating, "I saw a face."

Natascha later explained that she felt blocked, like it was simply impossible to tell what she had actually seen. She also tried to articulate that she was perhaps still in a lingering realm where time had a different meaning, and I was firmly in our time reality, and it created a sort of disconnect between us.

While in the tent in the moments after our screaming session, I stammered to Natascha, in a voice on the verge of panic: "Look - if we need to - we can just leave - right now - we can leave the tent set up and just drive to town and get a hotel room - we can do that if we need to..."

I was freaked-out, and it came out in my voice. This is something I would never say in any normal circumstance.

She asked me, "Do you believe in evil ghosts?"

I thought carefully and replied, "No." My response was less out of honesty, and more an attempt to keep the mood from getting any scarier.

At some point I looked at my watch, and it was only 11:40 PM. My reaction was, oh sh*t, it's so early and now we have to worry about scary stuff for the rest of the night!

I had one arm over Natascha as we lay there. We sat in silence for a short time, we must have spoken a little, but I can’t remember anything of what we said. Perhaps we were both silent. I know my heart was pounding, and my thoughts seemed trapped in a kind of horror.

I lay there thinking, "This is f*cking terrifying. This is insane. How could I EVER camp out here? How could I ask for this kind of f*cking sh*t!" My mind was spiraling out of control.

I ended up chanting a repetitive mantra in my head, "Love and Light, Love and Light, Love and Light..." Over and over and over. This is how Anya Briggs ends her emails, and it might seem corny, but I really MEANT it!

At one point I put my arm back in my own sleeping bag and promptly fell asleep. I have to say it seems weird as I write this that I could slip back into sleep after being SO freaking' terrified. It seems impossible that we could both simply doze off again.

Later that same night I had a dream. This was a weirdly vivid dream. It took place inside the same tent, no dreamlike distortion, it was very accurate to the interior of the tent. (see the illustration above) I'll add that this dream was NOT scary in the least, it was curiously void of any emotion - good or bad.

I saw a big round mandala figure up and too my left, situated in a very specific point in the tent. It was a simple circle about the size of a large pizza with a lone dot in it's center. It looked very much like the blurry cataract image in my right eye, and strangely flat unlike a 3D orb. (more on that below).

Then I was floating up off the floor of the tent. The elevator-up sensation of slowly up rising felt strangely familiar (more HERE). I thought to myself, "I need to remember this - I need to remember this - I need to remember this..."

Then the the environment of the tent changed to a backdrop of white light. I thought, "Am I on a table? Am I on a table?" I didn't understand where I was. It was a mysterious realm with a uniform white glow around me. Was I on my back? Was I upright?

The dream abruptly ended when Natascha spoke up and said, "Mike, you are floating!" I don't think she actually said this, but I remember it clearly in that dream state. Her words sort of pulled me back down onto the sleeping pad, and the dream ended.

The next morning we immediately began to talk about the events of the night and more details emerged.

I asked Natascha what she saw that made her scream, and she explained that she saw a face within a circle. I pressed her for more details and she said, "I can’t say, but the only thing that seems to match is that drawing you did, of the face in the circle from your blog." [ link ]

This was very curious, she didn't know about my dream yet, and she described something very similar to the round mandala I saw. The way it looked to me was like the image I see in my right eye.

I asked where the face was positioned, at the time I assumed it was directly over her, centered above her face. She instead pointed up and off to her left, at an area in the wall of the tent - exactly where I saw the glowing circle in my dream. Again, I hadn't shared the events of my dream yet. More weirdness about this mandala shape HERE.

Notes from my small sketchbook, written the morning after the experience in the tent.

What actually might have happened is very difficult to say. I cannot dismiss the irrational fear that overcame both of us. This feeling of terror was entirely different than any emotion I have ever experienced, amplified in a way that seems extraordinary. I must have sensed something beyond a jolt of surprise when Natascha woke me with a short scream.

What is even more bizarre was the extremely vivid nature of my dream, along with the matching details to whatever Natascha witnessed. This is also extremely curious.


NOTE: I modified the swear words so the automatic blog format doesn’t add a extra blocking window when readers try and log on.

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Part TWO to this story inked HERE

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Follow-up posting:
There was an odd mark on my chest that appeared, as far as I can tell, from this experience in the tent. Click HERE for more on this disturbing story.

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Mac Tonnies and friends yukking it up in Wyoming

Additional info added Jan 28, 2012:

I found this image on-line, it was posted by a member of the film-crew from Canada that traveled with Mac in 2009 to produce a documentary for CBC television. I was struck by the orb in the photo, and it immediately reminded me of the floating mandala shape I saw inside the tent. Now, this floating orb in the photo could be nothing more than a speck of dust in front of the camera, but who knows? I am sceptical of these kinds of orb photos, but I suspect that some of them represent a genuine unknown.

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Max Ernst, The Twentieth Century, 1955

Text added Feb 11, 1012:

I found this image on a Secret Sun posting about Max Ernst. The mandala sphere in this painting seems to closely match my memory of the glowing circle in the tent.

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Text added March 13, 2013:
This experience shows up on a curious map with other odd events all lined up in a straight line in southern Utah. (linked HERE)
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Text added March 25, 2013:

In June of 2011 I had the honor to sit in as the guest host for Whitley Strieber's on-line subscribers and inter view Dr. Janet Eizebeth Colli. I had done my own interview with Dr. Colli just a month earlier. During this follow up interview we talked about this event in the tent with Natascha. This all ties back into the yellow line on the map of southern Utah, the tent experience was the Eastern most of the three points on that line (that's it's own bag of worms).

This conversation seems a little bit like a client and a therapist, where I ask for help and she shares her insights.

one-click audio download HERE

Thanks to Whitley for letting me post this 30-minute interview here on my site. His site is Unknown Country.

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the shiny red balloon

The shiny red balloon, 14 months later. It lives safely in my sock drawer.

I met a woman at a Starbucks in the lobby of a tacky casino in Laughlin Nevada. We sat together and drank coffee on one of the first mornings of an eight day UFO conference. She is from Germany and her name is Natascha. We got along wonderfully and talked about the strange scene here at the conference. This happened a few mornings in a row, and soon we were sitting together during the presentations, and by the end of the conference, we were spending almost all of our time together.

Up until this conference, Natascha had almost no interest in the UFO phenomenon. How she ended up in Nevada is a curious story, she was told by an astrologer to travel from Germany all the way to Las Vegas to attend this eight day event, so she did. It proved to be the start of new chapter of her life. She realized that, somehow, this subject was important.

On the final day, after the conference had officially ended, she was planning to take a shuttle van to the Las Vegas airport for her flight home. I said I would drive her, it was no problem. We spent our final time in the casino at the same Starbucks, saying goodbye to friends we had met. It was late in the morning when morning we got in my little Subaru and started the drive North.

The highway out of Laughlin is though the desert, and it’s bleak and empty. This created a surreal mood after being cooped up in the casino for over a week. Natascha had her iPod, and she played me some music from two of her friends in Germany. It was a haunting series of tones created by a man rubbing crystal bowls and a woman singing. Less than a year later I had dinner with this same couple - but that’s another story.

We talked and tried to make sense of the of our time together at the conference. It was about an hour drive before we arrived in Las Vegas. It was actually a sad time in the car, because we had become quite close.

We were both hungry, and there was plenty of time before the flight and we were eager to find someplace to eat. We are both rather health conscious vegetarians, and the food at the casino was dreadful, and now we were heading into the outskirts of Las Vegas, and I was doubtful we would find anything that would fit our needs.

But, we passed a WHOLE FOODS grocery store, I made a U-turn and we doubled back, and within a few minutes we were pulling into the parking lot of the strip mall. I found a space for my car, and eased in. Natascha was on the passenger side, and she got out and stood up. I was on the drivers side, and I got out.

I looked across the roof of the car and saw that Natascha was standing there, with a curious expression on her face, and she was holding a shiny red balloon. I walked around to her side of the car and she seemed a little perplexed. She handed me the balloon, it was heart shaped with the words I LOVE YOU on it. I was confused, she definitely did not have the balloon in the car during the drive, so I didn't understand where it came from.

I gently set it in the car, closed the door, and we went into the grocery store together.

We never mentioned the balloon.

Our lunch together was very nice, we ate salad and fruit in the deli. She also got some food for the flight home (mostly chocolate) and I got some food for my long drive back to Idaho (mostly chocolate).

We went to the airport, and I walked her up to the security gate and we said good-bye. It was an emotional farewell and there were some tears. I walked out of the airport feeling sad and confused.

And then I spent the next 16 hours driving, with a shiny red balloon on the passenger seat, with the words I LOVE YOU staring up at me.

I got home and with in the first day or so I called her on Skype. Early in the conversation I asked: “Natascha, where did that balloon come from?”

She paused and then said, “I don’t know.”

We were both perplexed, and I pressed her on it.

She finally said, “I’m not sure, but I think it was just there when I opened the door of the car and I picked it up.”

I met Natascha over a year ago, in February of 2008. Since she has been back in Germany, we have talked almost weekly (and sometimes daily) either on the phone or thru Skype. These conversations have a way of getting very deep, in a way that seems to help me - a lot. I don’t quite know what to make of our intense relationship.

I feel like I’ve met a true soul mate.