I’m sitting in a lavender room filled with books with titles like Bringers of Dawn and Gods of Aquarius.

The room is a quasi-museum in the exurbs of a large city, bedecked withcrystal grids, psychedelic paintings, and singing bowls. Someone is burning sweetgrass and frankincense in an abalone shell making the place smell something approximating a yoga studio, and a short, blonde woman who I once knew as Sarah*, but is now going by a new, celestial name she received during a Pleiadian download, is DJing a mix of EDM, science fiction themes, and vaguely Eastern-sounding religious chants and mantras, showing no favoritism towards one religion or another.

My ears perk up when I hear a Khmer rock song with a slightly esoteric bent—I recognize it from a playlist my Khmer tutor had made me some years earlier.