Transcendence
You listen to a song and experience some profound changes.
(Suggested soundtrack: Emerald Rush by Jon Hopkins)
You're digging through record store bins, and you find an old vinyl record with a hypnotic cover, whose colors look like they're almost swirling off the print.
When you start playing the record at home, your attention is instantly locked into the intricate soundscapes, sending goosebumps in waves across your entire body. You can barely feel the chair you're sitting in anymore.
The music reaches deeper into your subconscious, laying bare your deepest desires, clear of all the cruft that a lifetime of social conditioning had buried them in.
As your brain starts grappling with the ramifications of seeing these desires clearly for the first time, more shivers move down your skin. You start feeling warm as your skin starts shimmering.
With every beat of the music, the world around you is stripped away more and more, replaced with a kaleidoscope of colors. Stars, nebulae, galaxies fill your field of vision as the universe pulses around you, changing you.
It feels like an inevitability at this point, as your body has become fluid, malleable, that it would start to take on the shape you've always wanted it to be. The shape it always was supposed to be.
This changing of your body from banal to familiar, unwelcome to cherished, wearisome to invigorating feels like the natural progression of this dimension you find yourself in. The world that sought to salt the fields of your identity holds no power here.
As the record winds down, your room gently comes back into focus, your corporeality is reasserted, your new form is brought into sharp relief.
The record clicks softly, and you stand up, shakily, and walk over to the full-length mirror that you know wasn't there before. Your eyes trace your new outline, your fingers feel the texture along your bare arms.
But you notice, more than anything, your brain doesn't seem to be fighting anymore. The raging needs and desires, for so long choked under the mud that angry people filled your head with, now sing clearly and brightly inside you.
And you know exactly who you are now.