He was on the Tube one night when he had his first glimpse. He was playing that old Tube game of avoiding the gaze of his fellow travellers, and had settled his eyes on a Burger King ad on the opposite side of the carriage. He was thinking of the Nothing, and remembered a Channel Four documentary he'd seen the night before: scientists had confirmed there was a black hole in the centre of the galaxy, a point of extreme emptiness. One scientist had suggested that it was the gravity of this black hole which held the galaxy together. And he thought: Is there a black hole in the heart of me?

Thinking this, the Burger King ad suddenly expanded, as if he was looking at it through his Inspector Gadget magnifying glass. It eventually filled at least two thirds of his visual field. This spooked Croon, especially as he was a McDonald's convert, so he looked instead at a London Underground map further down the carriage. This time, the map got smaller, as if it was receding from him. And there was so much space between them.

Croon wondered whether he was having a flashback. He'd taken enough drugs in his time, however, to know this effect wasn't chemical. The space he thought, awe-struck. I've never noticed the space.

He was now genuinely freaked, so he looked at his fellow passengers for a bit of a reality anchor. Unfortunately, this only made things worse. His visual field broke into three two dimensional panels, all seemingly pressed up against his eyeballs. He made the mistake of looking a woman in the eyes, and instantly her being was divided into three different perspectives, like a Picasso painting.

The sense of intimacy was terrifying.

Suddenly he got the horrible feeling that the whole carriage was collapsing into him. He groaned, covered his mouth, closed his eyes... but his mind was more claustrophobic than any carriage. The walls are closing in... need air...

<<I'm losing my mind>> he said.

Just then the train pulled into a station, probably Waterloo. Croon bolted out the door, praying that a bit of fresh air might chill him out. Even as he walked up the stairs he worried that if he wasn't careful his body would collapse, and he would be dissolved into the vast empty world which now surrounded him. Thankfully, whether it was from the air or a CIA mantra he was repeating in his mind, he did mellow when he hit the outside. After a few deep breaths he was back to a reasonable level of coherence.

Hey he thought: I am an initiate. Maybe this is one of those higher states. After that he spent the rest of the night wandering London, just checking things out. He found his way to the banks of the Thames, under a near full moon, and sat down to gaze down on the water. This was a rather perilous thing to do with the water looking like it was about two inches from the bridge of his nose, and he got concerned that he might fall in. He looked up at the moon instead.

And then 280,000 kilometres of space were compressed into a centimetre of lunar awe.