Excerpt from Panic Magic by Clint Sabom

I headed back to Budapest, to enjoy the peace and solitude of my flat dwelling in relaxations and releases. However, one night it struck me to try the levitation technique. It amounted to drawing the dense magnetic fluid from the stars, down into the body from the head, and filling oneself with it so much that the heaviness of the negatively charged magnetic fluid offset one’s own body weight. The two negative charges, earth’s gravity and magnetic fluid, would repel, and once sufficiently done, one would rise. When I first tried, I felt such grounding, such a force from my head to my feet that I felt stuck to the ground, more tightly than ever in my life. I would continue to do this each night, for only about 15 minutes, before returning to reading in my armchair and relaxing. But would you know it? One night, I did it! I came several inches off the ground! And the next night, and the next night, and the next night, I kept improving. C.K. had warned against learning the higher abilities before the introductory and middle ones (which I had so remarkably failed at), but here, in this flat, in a building two centuries old, with gunshot markings still in the stone from WWII, I learned how to levitate. For years and years, I told no one.

Upon returning to America, my mental health declined again. My psyche was depressed and anxious, and yet, I’d continue to perform these levitations, alone of course, until many years later, at the age of 47, when I had at last returned to a Bohemian scene in Atlanta, I decided to give public performances. An avant-garde theater eventually agreed for me to perform monthly, given the initial tickets were selling out the theater, and they would pay me $4,000 a month. It was the only job I had, but enough to subsist on. I would give dramatic monologues in between levitations. I would have audience members come up to verify that there were no wires or strings or other artificial illusions moving me, and I would levitate again. The shows continued to sell out. The manager of the theater thought firmly that this was just a steppingstone into larger things, and I would eventually depart ways with the Pushing Boundaries theater into bigger events. He had even been called by talent agents. But many of them wanted illusionists with a full show of spectacle, not just some guy preaching in between levitations. But I was fine doing just this for now. And even though the audience checked me, it was amazing how many thought it was still just fake. But people would still come, again and again!

I shared a three-bedroom house with Nova and Melanie. Nova, a painter, lived in the uppermost part, which was a loft, giving him room for an in-house studio. Melanie, an emerging gothic horror novelist, lived at the ground level. And me, in a basement efficiency-style apartment, where I had high ceilings and kept the spaciousness of emptiness open, filling it with little furniture and having my own bathroom. A portrait of Venus hung above my altar, where the soul stone sat, amid blue candles. I’m relieved that through my many lifetime hardships, I was still able to retain talents and personability, amid moving suddenly out of places, amid the alcoholism that ate my early thirties to dust and fake bronze.

The night before each performance, I had the dream that I always do that particular night, the one dream in an otherwise black dreamless sleep. In this dream of a capital precaution, Melanie and I floated in dark space, perhaps in damp clouds, perhaps the fog, perhaps beyond the skies of Earth in space. She would look at me with stern eyes, black-clad as she always was, approaching me with knives, swords, points of hardened wires, as if wanting to fight but never fully attacking. However, as disturbing as it could be, her shadows would enter me, giving me a sacred dark force that helped me levitate. After turning paranoid at this dream at first, I eventually came to relish it as an initiation and a reinitiation every time, as much as it contradicted her behavior (well not completely) in waking life.

But I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.