Grant Morrison once described an experience so strange that it became one of the major inspirations behind The Invisibles. The Scottish writer claimed that while visiting Kathmandu in 1994, he encountered mysterious silver beings that appeared to take him outside his physical body and show him another level of reality. According to his account, these entities also gave him an extraordinary explanation for why time exists and what human beings may really be.
Morrison never hid an important detail about the experience. He had been smoking hash during the trip and openly admitted that he had been heavily stoned throughout much of the week. However, he insisted that what happened on the roof garden of his hotel felt completely different from his normal experiences with cannabis, because instead of simply feeling intoxicated, he suddenly felt as though he had left his body and entered an entirely different state of existence.
Morrison described something closer to an encounter with higher-dimensional intelligences, where the beings supposedly showed him that the human body we experience every day may only be a small section of something much larger that exists across time.
Even stranger, Morrison said the entities reminded him of the mysterious beings previously described by psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. McKenna had famously spoken about “self-transforming machine elves” that he claimed to encounter during intense DMT experiences, and Morrison immediately noticed similarities between McKenna’s descriptions and the strange forms he believed he saw in Kathmandu.
Grant Morrison Went To Kathmandu Hoping Something Would Happen
Morrison discussed the experience during his appearance at the Disinformation Convention around 2000 while explaining some of the ideas behind The Invisibles. He told the audience that the comic had partly become his attempt to express what happened to him in Kathmandu several years earlier and how dramatically the experience had changed his understanding of reality.
Morrison even jokingly described what happened as an “alien abduction,” although his account was very different from the traditional stories usually associated with that phrase. He said the reason he was abducted by aliens in Kathmandu was because he had gone to Kathmandu wanting to be abducted by aliens, presenting the whole experience with the same mix of seriousness, humor and self-awareness that appeared throughout his talk.
Before the experience, Morrison had already been interested in magic, altered consciousness and unusual ways of changing human perception. He was therefore not describing himself as an unsuspecting person who suddenly found himself pulled aboard an extraterrestrial spacecraft, because he had deliberately travelled hoping to experience something extraordinary.
While sitting in the roof garden of the Vajra Hotel, Morrison said something eventually happened that went far beyond what he expected. He had been smoking hash and was already familiar with its effects, but he stressed that being stoned normally did not make him leave his body or experience a completely different world.
Morrison explained that when someone regularly uses cannabis, they generally know the difference between being high and completely losing contact with ordinary reality. He joked that if someone goes to a garage while stoned, it is still clearly the garage, and if they go to a convenience store, it remains the same store even if their perception becomes more interesting.
That was why Morrison found the Kathmandu experience so disturbing and fascinating. He said he suddenly felt as though he was no longer inside his physical body, while strange beings appeared around him and seemed capable of interacting directly with his consciousness.
The Beings Looked Like Something Terence McKenna Had Described
Morrison described the entities as silver, constantly changing forms that resembled liquid mercury or living chrome. Instead of having recognizable humanoid bodies, they appeared more like intelligent metallic shapes that could continuously transform themselves.
The description immediately reminded Morrison of Terence McKenna, whose work he had read before travelling to Kathmandu. Morrison did not try to hide this possible influence and actually pointed it out during the talk, acknowledging that the entities might have looked the way they did partly because McKenna’s ideas were already somewhere inside his mind.
McKenna famously called them “self-transforming machine elves.” He claimed that when he took DMT, these entities could somehow use a kind of visible language. Instead of simply speaking words, they appeared to “sing” incredibly complex objects into existence, then showed those objects to him as if they were demonstrating something.
Morrison believed that experiences like his own and McKenna’s might be filtered through the nervous system of the person experiencing them.
The Beings Asked Morrison Where He Wanted To Go
According to Morrison, the entities then asked him where he wanted to go, and his immediate answer was Alpha Centauri. The response was almost humorous because Alpha Centauri is one of the first nearby star systems people often think about when imagining extraterrestrial travel.
Morrison claimed he was then taken to what he believed was the Alpha Centauri system, where everything appeared surprisingly realistic to him. He said the stars seemed to move in a way consistent with how he understood the system should behave astronomically, making the experience feel less like an ordinary dream from his perspective.
After this, Morrison asked the beings what was happening and why they had appeared to him. He said they told him that they had come to show him certain ideas so that he could put those ideas into his creative work and eventually communicate them to other people.
However, what the beings allegedly showed Morrison next became far more important to him than the initial alien imagery. He said they took him into what he understood as the fifth dimension, somewhere outside the normal experience of space and time, and from that perspective they supposedly explained what time actually does.
Morrison Said The Human Body Is Much Larger Than We Realize
To explain the idea, Morrison asked the audience to think about themselves when they were around ten years old. Everyone knows that their childhood self once existed because they remember being that person and may have photographs proving that moment of their life was real.
Morrison said the entities gave him a completely different way of thinking about this problem. According to the explanation he received, the ten-year-old version of you may not truly be gone at all, because it may remain part of a much larger structure that human beings cannot normally perceive.
From our ordinary perspective, life happens one moment after another. A person is first a baby, later becomes a child, grows into an adult and eventually reaches old age, with each stage apparently replacing whatever existed before it.
But Morrison asked what the same life might look like to something capable of standing completely outside time. From such a perspective, every stage of a person’s existence might be visible simultaneously rather than appearing and disappearing one after another.
Your birth, childhood, teenage years, adulthood and every movement you make throughout your life could therefore form part of a single enormous structure stretching through spacetime. Morrison suggested that this complete structure, rather than the temporary body we currently see in the mirror, might represent the person’s true body.
He compared the shape to a gigantic centipede extending across time. Every place you walk, every staircase you climb, every journey you make and every position your body occupies would form part of a continuous four-dimensional object beginning at birth and ending at death.
The person you experience at this exact moment would therefore be only one tiny slice through that much larger structure. We feel as though the present version of ourselves is the complete person because our consciousness only experiences one section of time at once.
Morrison Used A Simple Hand Analogy To Explain Something Even Stranger
Morrison then used another example to explain how apparently separate things could actually belong to one larger object. He asked the audience to imagine a completely flat two-dimensional world inhabited by creatures capable of perceiving only length and width.
If someone from our three-dimensional world pushed a hand through their flat surface, the two-dimensional creatures would not see an entire hand. Instead, they might see several separate circles appearing where different fingers intersected their plane.
From their limited perspective, those circles could look like completely independent objects. They would have no obvious reason to believe that one circle on one side of their world was physically connected to another circle somewhere else.
A three-dimensional observer would immediately understand what was happening because all of those separate circles would actually belong to a single hand. Their apparent separation would exist only because the creatures living in two dimensions lacked access to the additional dimension where the connection became obvious.
Morrison said the entities suggested that human beings could exist in a similar situation. We look around the world and see billions of different people, each apparently possessing a separate body and individual consciousness, but that separation might partly result from the limited way humans perceive reality.
From a higher-dimensional perspective, Morrison suggested, apparently separate people could actually be different intersections of one much larger entity. Just as several circles in a two-dimensional world could secretly belong to a single hand, individual human beings might be connected through dimensions that our ordinary senses cannot perceive.
Time May Exist Because Something Needs A Place To Grow
According to the explanation Morrison said he received, there is a basic problem with existing completely outside time. If there is no sequence of moments, then nothing can grow in the familiar sense because there is no earlier state followed by a later state.
A timeless entity could simply exist, but normal development requires change. A baby becomes a child because time passes, a seed becomes a tree through a sequence of transformations, and knowledge is accumulated because one experience happens after another.
Morrison said the solution shown to him was to create a universe where time exists. A portion of a larger being could enter that universe and then undergo birth, experience, growth, learning and eventually death as it moved through the temporal environment.
From this perspective, time becomes something more than a measurement used by clocks. It becomes the mechanism that allows transformation to occur.
Morrison therefore described the universe almost like a womb in which higher-dimensional beings could develop. What we experience as a complete human life might actually be only the developmental phase of something whose mature state exists beyond the reality we normally perceive.
He also described the realm beyond ordinary space and time as something like a sea of pure information. The beings appeared to exist naturally within this environment, while humans normally experienced reality only through limited sections of spacetime.
Morrison Said Humanity Might Not Even Be Born Yet
Morrison suggested that humanity itself might be passing through a developmental process similar to the growth of a fetus inside a womb. A fetus begins as something extremely simple before gradually becoming more complicated and organized. Different structures emerge at different stages until what originally looked like a small group of cells eventually becomes a complete human being.
Morrison wondered whether human history could appear the same way when viewed from outside time. From our perspective, history seems chaotic, with civilizations rising and collapsing, wars breaking out, technologies appearing and cultures constantly changing.
However, from a higher-dimensional perspective, those events might resemble different stages in the development of one enormous organism. Human civilization could be slowly moving toward a level of coherence and self-awareness that is currently impossible for us to fully understand.
That idea led Morrison to one of the strangest statements in the entire talk when he said humanity had not even been born yet. He also joked that there was not a single adult on the planet, which he suggested might explain a great deal about human behavior.
Behind the humor was the much stranger possibility that what we currently call civilization could still be an embryonic stage. If humanity eventually develops into something radically different, people living today might be comparable to cells inside a body that has not yet finished forming.
Morrison Never Demanded That People Believe His Story
. Morrison admitted that he had been using hash, admitted that he had previously read Terence McKenna and even recognized that the appearance of his entities could have been influenced by ideas already present inside his mind.
At the same time, he continued to insist that the experience felt fundamentally different from anything he normally experienced while using cannabis. For Morrison, that difference was important enough that the Kathmandu event remained one of the most influential experiences of his creative life.
The question of what the beings actually were therefore, remained open. They could be interpreted as extraterrestrials, psychological constructions, entities encountered through altered consciousness, symbolic manifestations of the unconscious, or something else that does not easily fit into any existing category.
Morrison seemed less interested in proving their objective identity than in understanding what the experience did to his perception of reality. The ideas he brought away from Kathmandu eventually became deeply connected with his writing and particularly with The Invisibles.
Kathmandu Changed The Direction Of The Invisibles
The Invisibles was already filled with ideas about magic, consciousness, hidden realities, secret forces and the manipulation of perception. After the Kathmandu experience, Morrison increasingly treated the comic as a way of exploring the possibility that human beings might be capable of perceiving reality in completely different ways.
Rather than simply writing a fictional adventure about strange forces, Morrison wanted the comic to contain something of the transformative quality he believed he had experienced. The story therefore became a place where he could experiment with ideas involving higher dimensions, mystical states, identity and the possibility that ordinary reality is only one limited layer of something much larger.
This is why Morrison’s Kathmandu experience is more interesting than simply calling it a celebrity alien-abduction story. The silver beings are certainly the most attention-grabbing part, but the ideas he associated with them go much further than extraterrestrials visiting Earth.
Morrison was essentially asking what a human being would look like from outside time. If every stage of your life still exists as part of one complete four-dimensional structure, then the person you see in the mirror would represent only one temporary slice of your real existence.
He was also asking whether individual humans could be connected in ways impossible for us to perceive. Just as two-dimensional creatures could mistake different sections of one hand for separate objects, perhaps people experience themselves as separate because they cannot perceive whatever higher dimension might connect them.
Whether Morrison’s experience was produced entirely by an altered state, something inside the human mind, a genuine mystical experience or something completely unknown cannot be established from his account. Morrison himself provided no physical evidence that the entities existed independently of his consciousness, and his admission that he was using hash remains an essential part of the story.
However, the experience remained powerful enough to influence Morrison’s work for years afterward and led him toward one of the strangest ideas he ever discussed publicly. Perhaps the person experiencing life at this moment is not the complete human being at all, but only one tiny cross-section of something much larger extending through time.
If Morrison’s experience is taken purely as a thought experiment, the conclusion is still difficult to shake. Humanity may see itself as fully developed and separate individuals living inside a familiar universe, while from some completely different perspective we could be only fragments of a structure we have not yet learned how to perceive.
