Reflections on the Recent Convergence of Interdimensional Hyperspace Entities 👾
Or: a recap of my visit to Meow Wolf Denver.
📍 Coordinates: Fika Coffeehouse, Parker CO.
📖 Reading Time: ~6 minutes.
🧉 Vibes: Day 20 of the Warrior100. Meditation is getting considerably better. Sat straight, still, and focused for the full 45-minute session today. Still early but the progress is palpable. We’re starting to put together branding for the next Hero100 launch at New Years. It is going to be phenomenal! I’ll give you three words: neon psychic jungle. 🦁🌀🌿
Note: the photos in this post are not mine. Thank you internet!
I had the pleasure of taking a visit to our local intergalactic interdimensional convergence station this past weekend…
…otherwise known as a visit to Meow Wolf in Denver, CO.
For many years I had heard whispers of this living myth. Las Vegas. New Mexico. Now Denver. An immersive art exhibit equal parts psychedelic and alien.
It’s like Willy Wonka meets Alice in Wonderland rolling with Rick Sanchez.
Yeah, seriously.
A gargantuan exhibit, the size of a conference center, 4 floors and 4 different universes. One universal golden story thread runs through them.
From Meow Wolf:
“Nearly three decades ago, a freak cosmic event known as the Convergence tore away pieces of four different worlds in the blink of an eye. Ripped from their loved ones and native planets, scores of displaced citizens were thrust into this new Convergence of Worlds, with only memories of the lives they had before.
Memory itself became so vital that an entire memory sharing economy developed and soon flourished. This new memory economy was all the more important because in the wake of being smashed together, these worlds were wracked by relentless “Memory Storms”: psychic aftershocks of the Convergence that would scatter citizens’ memories whenever they struck.”
From the moment you walk into the elevator and your Guide tells you, “The elevators only deliver you, they won’t take you down, you need to find your way back to the exit,” you are smacked with the most familiar psychedelic feeling of “there’s no going back now.”
Forward. Only forward.
Onward we went, into Numina, a Pandora/Avator-esque world.
Then we crossed the threshold into an entirely mechanical junk world where drums, pianos, and chimes play themselves in autonomic mechanistic rhythms.
Crawl through the hole in the door and be thrust into a museum of a highly advanced alien civilization, with living replicas of organic architecture floating in the crystalline display cases, beckoning for your anthropological observation.
It was truly a masterpiece.
What a joy to spend the hours of the afternoon walking through this paradise. Deep gratitude to the team and artists who worked for what must have been months if not years to bring this together fully.
It is game-changing. It thrusts you into a dimension of presence, novelty, and multi-sensory stimulation that breaks you out of any habitual loops you were stuck in. For a brief moment in time, you become a child-like astronaut, an intrepid explorer or foreign space-times.
Several things about Meow Wolf stuck out to me:
1. The Level of Detail is Miraculous.
Meow Wolf warns you that you’ll never be able to see all of it. They are correct.
One room has small pipes protruding out of the walls. Probably two dozen of them blended in near-seamlessly with the rocky cave texture of the walls themselves. A design detail. You could walk by it and never know they were there. And yet every single one of those pipes has an audio story, some alien-friend personal story, playing continuously through it. You could stand at one of them for 10 minutes and not hear the end of it. And there were dozens.
Or, head into a side room that was originally a janitor’s closet, and stumble across the Book of Whales. A comprehensive digest that would take you easily 30 minutes to read cover-to-cover, detailing the history of the evolution of the Crystal Palace and how they settled this land.
Everywhere, the details are immaculate.
A random kiosk on C-Street, one of dozens, complete with custom products in alien languages. Everything was intentionally crafted and created with love.
And believe me when I say there are hundreds and hundreds of these individual installations.
Working computer installations that have secret documents loaded up on them. Hundreds of pieces. An entire multiverse storyline. The history of Convergence playing on newscast TV stations they filmed. It’s incredible.
It is a living masterpiece. The detail shows that it was made with love, it was made for immersion, and it was made to allow people to surrender to a completely new reality, however momentarily.
2. The Opportunity for Reverse Culture Shock
I’m not sure how much this was planned, but it’s certainly my favourite part of the Meow Wolf experience.
Walking through each room, you are both overwhelmed by and invited to pay attention to every detail. You better look up because there might be something important on the ceiling! But don’t forget to look at the flower in the corner, there’s a never-before-seen species taking a nap on it. Follow the river of light, because it’s actually water falling from a cosmic nature woman at the top of the mountain.
You become an adventurer turned anthropologist. Studying the language, the nature, the symbols, the worlds of these new strange lands. It shows you how much beauty, presence, joy, and fun can be found in the mundane.
And it prepares you, consciously or unconsciously, for the return to your old world. To the ‘real world’ once you’re done. How do you feel walking out of Meow Wolf, a place of deep intentionality, art, and beauty, onto the streets of the outskirts of downtown Denver, the building surrounded by 3 intersecting highways?
Meow Wolf invites you to find the strange, alien beauty all around you. Notice the intricate details of the scratches on the car bumpers. The strange symbols of the Latin alphabet. It makes you consider how the world is being built, and be shocked (in a good or bad way!) by the state of your own culture here on Earth.
3. Unlocking and Inviting Awe & Wonder
Rapturous awe is likely the most consistent emotion people feel walking through Meow Wolf.
I bet that you can bring into your mind the faces and emotions of the children when they first walked into Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. You can picture it, can’t you?
The reaction is the same here.
And something about knowing that made my heart happy. It feels like there are so few things designed to bring joy, playfulness, and wonder back into people’s lives. Even movies rarely do it these days. But the level of alien, the degree of expectation surpassing excellence that Meow Wolf exhibits, is able to crack through the barriers of jadedness protecting most people.
And for a moment, however brief, they are invited into a sense of serious play. A sense of wonder and awe at the strange foreign lands, the immaculate rendering of every minute detail, and the opportunity to truly discover something new for the first time again.
And hopefully, hopefully, a little bit of that magic comes back home with them, back into Earth, and back into our oh-so-human homes.
After you exit through the gift shop, of course.