Acid for Squares E117: Twelve Nights, in Context

The episode at a glance

Watch the episode

Official video from the @acidforsquares channel. A note the submitters give themselves: some stories are graphic, and one is about violent nightmares.

Chapter guide: twelve stories with timestamps

The timestamps come from the episode description, and the submitters chose their own story titles. The two sponsor reads sit at 38:30.

Deep dive: seven experiences and their traditions

Seven stories carry the episode. We retell them as closely as they were told, and then we don’t ask “Is it true?” We ask: where do people and traditions know this exact perception, and what do they teach about it? The timestamps take you straight to the moment in the video.

1. Marcus: the elephant, the voice in the dream and the number 144

Marcus starts in February 2021 in a cabin in the Catskills (from 1:42). He and his best friend take mushrooms ceremonially, with breathwork and meditation. In the snow, eyes closed, he sees a dark red web that feels “intelligent, ancient, strangely familiar” – and then hostile. He calls on a gatekeeper guide he had read about in a book. A small bluish-white portal opens, a glowing blue elephant steps out, and the web is gone. Then comes an overwhelming maternal presence; his friend feels it at the same moment as “Mother Earth in the forest.” Months later, a dream: a man tells him purpose and excitement are waiting for him in Utah. By the end of the year, as he puts it himself, he was in “questionable psychological territory.” At a job training he finds a taped-up notice, a login page and a drop-down menu with four states – one of them Utah. Days later he is in a hospital unit. A nurse takes his blood pressure; the top number reads 144. He thinks of the 144,000 in Revelation. When he asks what happens now, she answers: “Now we attack.” That is where his submission ends.

Marcus titled his own story “Psychosis.” For exactly this borderland, Stanislav and Christina Grof coined a term in 1989: spiritual emergency, a crisis in which breakthrough and breakdown can be the same experience. In their anthology Spiritual Emergency (1989) they describe how people in these phases read signs and messages everywhere, and why companionship matters more than an outside verdict. Psychologist David Lukoff and colleagues pushed for what became, in 1994, the first DSM-IV category for a “religious or spiritual problem” (Lukoff, Lu and Turner, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1992). And the elephant? In Hinduism, Gaṇeśa is Vighnahartā, the remover of obstacles, whose image guards doors and thresholds. Paul B. Courtright shows in Gaṇeśa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (1985) that he is also the lord of beginnings, the god invoked before every crossing. An elephant dissolving a hostile web at a threshold: anyone who knows that teaching recognizes the motif.

The number 144,000 really does appear twice in Revelation (7:4 and 14:1), as the number of the sealed. Carl Jung called meaningful coincidences like this synchronicity in 1952 and treated them as a principle of their own. For the Grofs, that very flood of signs is part of the crisis itself. Both sit side by side in Marcus’ story, and he tells both openly.

2. Stephanie Medina: “Do we remove the puppy?”

Stephanie describes three nights in a row (from 11:04). On the first, she dreams a craft shines its light on her and she feels a vibration through her whole body. She wakes up, the vibration stays, she can’t move, and she knows two beings are standing at the foot of the bed. She tells them in her mind: if you are of the light, you can stay; if not, leave. On the second night, around 3:30 a.m., a hospital-grade light floods her room. A monotone voice near her head asks whether to remove the puppy for “the procedure”: “Do we remove the puppy?” (15:25). A voice at her feet says yes, and the snoring weight beside her is gone. She opens her eyes and sees a small being in a khaki cloak, and a second at the foot of the bed whose thin arm extends to touch her navel. Warmth, vibration; after about 20 seconds “the procedure is over” and the dog is back. The next day a mentor, a psychic medium, names “the long finger” before Stephanie says a word. On the third night a tall, glowing blue-green being, neither male nor female, introduces itself as Sasha.

Folklorist David J. Hufford spent decades collecting accounts of waking paralysis with a presence in the room, published in The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982). His finding: the same core features appear in cultures with no contact with one another, and the tradition rests on real, shared experience. The “examination” scene – light, paralysis, beings at a table – is one Thomas E. Bullard documented as a recurring episode across hundreds of reports in UFO Abductions: The Measure of a Mystery (1987). Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack described in Abduction (1994) how many experiencers move from terror toward transformation and connection. That is the arc Stephanie tells: from fear for her dog to meeting Sasha and to abilities she says have grown since.

3. Lauren Ryan: “It’s okay. I love you. You can come in.”

Lauren was adopted at one day old in an open adoption (from 23:46). There was contact with her birth mother’s family, but her birth father was never ready to meet. As a child she prayed to him every night, telling him she loved him and that everything was okay. At about 13 she learned he had died by suicide; years later, that his mother had died the same way. In her early to mid twenties, not looking for anything spiritual, she wakes with a jolt several mornings in a row, as if someone were too close. On the fifth or sixth morning, between four and five, she says toward the door: “It’s okay. I love you. You can come in.” (27:35). Her birth grandmother, whom she knew from photos, floats in, crying, and asks how she is. They reach for each other, and Lauren physically feels her finger. The grandmother recedes – and at the foot of the bed sits her father, watching. Her reading: he didn’t know how to come in, and his mother came to help.

Researchers call encounters like this after-death communication. Bill and Judy Guggenheim gathered thousands of accounts for Hello from Heaven! (1995) and sorted them by sense – seeing, hearing, touch. Icelandic psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson studied encounters with the dead in The Departed Among the Living (2012; Icelandic edition 2005) and found more such reports in Iceland than in any other European country. In many traditions the threshold between night and morning is the hour the ancestors come, and European folklore returns again and again to the motif of permission: spirits enter when they are invited. Lauren’s words at the door are more than an anecdote. They are the invitation so many traditions describe.

4. Joshua Mostow: a movie theater of life review

Joshua, a music producer and DJ from Sacramento, says he was in a medically induced coma for two weeks starting October 13, 2025 (from 31:06). He experienced his hospital bed rolling through the building into a giant movie theater full of spirits, riveted to a bright screen. His inner knowing: this is a life review. Then a dark waiting hall “like a DMV” full of waiting souls, a forest with a gazebo, rooms that smelled of decay and rooms full of oneness. He notices a loop, marked by a snake painting on a wall, and learns to pass through a wall by shifting his frequency. In the morning he sees a former coworker giving him his meds. The coworker later tells him he hasn’t been a nurse since 2016.

The life review is one of the core elements Raymond Moody drew from hundreds of accounts in Life After Life (1975). For The Lancet (2001), Pim van Lommel and colleagues interviewed 344 people after cardiac arrest; 62 of them, 18 percent, described a near-death experience. The waiting hall of souls has an older home still: the Tibetan Book of the Dead, first brought into English by W. Y. Evans-Wentz in 1927, describes the bardo (Tib. bar do), the in-between state in which consciousness passes through light and dark, beautiful and terrible rooms. Joshua learning to move by thought matches the bardo teaching exactly: there, the body follows the mind.

5. Tiffany Harris: the hallway that wasn’t there in the morning

It is 2017; Tiffany is 26 and taking night classes for her master’s (from 40:30). Around 10 p.m. she wants to print a paper at the university library, is 13th in the queue, and goes looking for the restroom. A dark hallway, blue light under a wooden door, a weathered sign that looks like it came from outdoors, a small vestibule, a second door with a slide lock on the outside. One large room with old vertical fluorescent tubes by the mirror, and in her head: don’t look in the mirror. Outside she hears college girls chatting. When she opens the door, no one is there, and the voices stop. The next morning she sits at the same computer. Where the hallway was stands a solid wall with a bookcase, exactly as wide. Next to it, an ordinary women’s restroom with stalls. She has never found the hallway again.

The most famous story of this kind is set in Versailles in 1901: Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, two Oxford academics, wrote in An Adventure (1911) that in the gardens of the Petit Trianon they walked through a landscape that no longer existed and met people in 18th-century dress. The motif has older roots in the fairy lore of the British Isles: Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, described in The Secret Commonwealth (1691) the realm of the “good neighbors” lying beside ours, its doors showing only at certain times. And the voice about the mirror? Many cultures treat mirrors as passageways; in Jewish mourning custom they are covered during shiva (Maurice Lamm, The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, 1969).

6. Fausteja: the blue light over the Scottish Borders

Fausteja tells of a night in the countryside of the Scottish Borders (from 52:44). Around 1 a.m. Fausteja stands with a friend at the garden fence, fields beyond with no light at all. All evening Fausteja had – out of character – kept urging a walk into the dark field. Then a neon-blue light in the clouds; it comes closer in a smooth curve, a beam sweeps the next field, draws near, stands above them. Over the village it switches off, back on, off again. Around 1:30 the sound returns, one only Fausteja can hear, and the light hovers over the house. Then: head on the pillow, eyes open, morning, with no sense of time passing. The next day both keep forgetting what happened.

That exact pattern – a light, then a gap in time, then a memory that fades – is what Budd Hopkins described in Missing Time (1981). Jacques Vallée showed as early as 1969, in Passport to Magonia, that the same elements run through European fairy lore: lights, paralysis, lost time. And no place fits better than the Scottish Borders. In Earlston, then Ercildoune, lived Thomas the Rhymer in the 13th century. Under the Eildon Tree near Melrose he met the Queen of Elfland and was gone for seven years, as the tradition tells it. Fausteja lost a night in the very landscape where Scotland has told this story for seven centuries.

7. Drew Bankey: eyes full of stars at Chaco Canyon

In 2018, Drew Bankey and Drew’s wife celebrate their anniversary at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (from 1:01:10). On leaving, Drew sings a Native American prayer song as thanks to the spirits of the valley. That night, at a B&B in Cortez, Colorado, around 2 or 3 a.m., Drew wakes to a ringing in the ears. Out on the deck the sound moves into the chest and pulses, as if in the heart chakra. Next to Drew’s feet stand two other feet. A shadow as tall as Drew opens its eyes, and inside are stars, galaxies, planets. Drew is pulled in, travels through star systems and receives a creation story about the interconnectedness of everything. A week or two later, a dream: Drew stands on the deck as that being and watches Drew light the cigarette. Since then Drew has spoken of bilocation.

Traveling through the stars inside another being is the celestial journey Mircea Eliade described in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (French 1951) as the heart of shamanic experience. Yoga knows the inner ringing as nāda, the inner sound the Nādabindu Upaniṣad teaches as a path inward. And bilocation has its own history in the American Southwest: the Spanish nun María de Jesús de Ágreda reported being carried by angels to the Jumano between 1620 and 1623 without leaving Spain. Fray Alonso de Benavides, custodian of New Mexico, recorded in his 1630 Memorial that the Jumano spoke of a “Lady in Blue” who sent them to the missionaries.

The other five stories

Shorter, but meant just as seriously: five more submissions and the traditions that know them.

What’s new compared with Part 1

In E116, the first part, lights, mantis beings and near-death experiences with bright endings dominated. E117 is deliberately darker: shadows, paralysis, a “procedure,” a hospital unit. What’s also new is how openly submitters name the hard parts. Marcus titles his story “Psychosis”; Elle speaks of slipping into “little bits of spiritual psychosis” after two weeks without sleep. Caiti Hansen is back for a second time: in E116 she described benevolent mantis beings, now the Hat Man. The hosts also share that they are directing the official Dolores Cannon documentary with Ozark Mountain Publishing, Cannon’s publisher, and they explicitly give permission to clip the show as long as it is credited.

What stays open: several stories stop mid-scene. Marcus’ submission ends on the nurse’s line, and Joshua says he would love to tell more. Whether the winner gets to finish in the studio depends on the comment vote.

What the community says

The vote happens under the video, and you can see which stories land. As of November 2, 2026, YouTube comments, shortened:

The mood is strikingly united: almost no mockery, a lot of “me too.” Most votes go to Marcus, Drew Bankey and Lauren. Several comments share crises or encounters of their own. On Reddit and X we found no notable discussion of the episode as of November 2.

Why this matters for the new world

“We feel that this is disclosure,” the hosts say at the end (1:21:58). They don’t mean a press conference; they mean twelve people stepping in front of a camera under their own names. Hufford argued for exactly this in 1982: start from the experience, not from the explanation. What the episode shows is a pattern the traditions have long known. The encounter comes at the threshold – between sleep and waking, between night and morning, in doorways, hallways, at a garden fence. And almost every time, a stance decides how it ends: Stephanie sets a boundary, Lauren offers an invitation, Elle prays.

For you, that means: if you know a night like this, there is language for it, in many cultures and across a very long time. You can take it seriously without carrying it alone. And you can ask the same question Stephanie asked: are you of the light? Then stay.

Open questions

Glossary

Further reading

FAQ

Sources