Flickering
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2011
- Messages
- 1,118
Background is I've only tried weed a few times before, and I'm sensitive to it, prone to all sorts of hallucinogenic effects where others will find it simply relaxing. As of tonight, I discovered that the intensity of it can, for me, equal that of more pronounced psychedelic compounds - I dropped six hits of acid last week, but this was weirder.
Came home from a stressful day at work, money worries, study worries, coffee's worn off, and I decide I'm going to get drunk. Halfway through a bottle of port I change my mind, and pull out some bud I haven't tried yet. I've heard it makes for an interesting combination to mix alcohol and cannabis, and most people like it, so I inhale the fumes having no idea things are about to get odd. I'm not sure how much the wine had to do with it, but the following hour or two took me to one of the stranger headspaces a drug has ever shown me.
It starts with fear. So much of it, tingling and twisting in my stomach, coming from nowhere but finding all sorts of channels to express itself through. My thoughts lately have been so existential, it's pathological - I think about death and what does or doesn't come after all the time, I see the human world from a detached perspective like I'm not part of this species - and I start to think this is it, I'm finally starting to notice I'm going crazy. All the weed and the acid is going to bring out some latent psychotic condition, I'll start hearing voices, and they'll have to put me away in a year's time. The sense of losing control at this paranoid thought is consuming, and I struggle with it for a while before realising I can't reason my way out of this.
But, I'm no stranger to this bullshit, even if I was expecting to be able to relax tonight. This is familiar psychedelic fear, and my dim bedroom is starting to take on the tone of a dark mushroom trip. I put on some music (excellent artist to help you navigate a darktrip) and channel the anxiety through my body to the rhythm. I create a calm space in the back of my mind to watch this panic as it tries to devour my primate mind and body. I begin to realise that, though I haven't consciously felt real fear like this in a long time, it has in fact been under the surface for longer than I can remember. Grasping hold of this knowledge, I begin to remind myself of the value and power of a dark hallucinogenic voyage, and this reminds me that I am, after all, only thinking this way due to the influence of the substance. I have no clue why the substance in question is cannabis; it feels more like psilocybin. But, I'll go with it. I don't have a choice, and I know there's another three hours or so of this to go.
Unpleasant sensations steal across my body. Hyperaware of my teeth and gums, I also feel rings of sharp psychedelia shooting down my nose on repeat. My eyes feel like they're dripping out of their skull. My entire body image begins to shift, spots of exaggerated nerve signals lighting up all over it. My nervous system doesn't know what to make of this. A sense of altered-ness has come over me that's too heavy to just be weed. I feel like my thoughts, speech and head are weighed down, not in a relaxing way but in a drowsy, intoxicated one. I attribute this to the alcohol. My thoughts begin to echo and when I take the headphones off, cartoonish auditory hallucinations persist. I run a finger along the sore muscles of my jaw, and my sense of identity suffers disorientation as my brain translates the feeling of my facial structure in twisted ways. Wild caricatures appear in my mind's eye and I find it hard to hold onto my self. This reminds me of things I have experienced on much heavier substances, and an image of someone vomiting up his own body recurrently on a 5-MeO-DMT trip sets my imagination off crafting ever crazier trips in my head, each of them disturbingly vivid. The boundaries of my mind feel loose, like I might slip into one of those hallucinatory nightmares without warning.
And now we enter a place where the absurdity of reality threatens to tear apart its own fabric and leave me shaking on my bed having a psychotic break. I see an image of the human brain surrounded by blackness, then sheathing itself inside the skin and bone of a human body, taking on its form, and implicitly attributing elements of the body to its identity. The brain dons other clothes - culture, language - components of what we are. I try to see the brain in its naked form and find myself looking at nothing. I am looking for what you might call the human soul, but cannot see it. Something is wrong with the way I've been looking at things.
It dawns on me that I have seen beyond, and can never go back to the way things were before. That my life as a human is as strange to me as the churning gut of the most powerful psychedelic, and has been for such a long time. We are born to a world where we build this thing called a self amidst a backdrop of brand new experiences. We're shown that this life is both unique and finite; eventually you will cease, there will be no more conscious experience, an entire view of the world will be extinguished as if it had never been, as if the world itself had never been. And all the while being in such a powerless form, helpless even against the uncertainty, the inability to grasp all of it at once, as you try to make sense out of a system where matter congeals into consciousness, where everything is made of tiny particles and waves you can't see, and most of the grander structure appears lifeless. An entire universe where only one tiny corner was ever aware of it at all. It's ridiculous. The self rebels against the idea. Demands to know what else there is to this. Curiosity scratches beneath the wood of the coffin in my head. I have wanted to die for what feels like a lifetime, just to see what's beyond the self.
Turning to an Alex Grey picture, I imagine my formless soul being carried through it after death, believing itself liberated of the body but in fact still just a cog in a much, much larger machinery, condemned as it were to the fate for eternity. Condemned to never understand. The need to know meets the incapacity to know it, and the friction is the past years of my life.
By now the negative effects have begun to fade. Not having found any resolution, I lie down and close my eyes to lose myself to a peculiar blend of cannabis and hypnagogia. Bizarre imagery fills my head as the logic centres of my brain switch off entirely, shutting down some of the limits of creativity. I wake to a sudden clap of music through my headphones, and the 'trip' is over.
Fucking existence, right?
Came home from a stressful day at work, money worries, study worries, coffee's worn off, and I decide I'm going to get drunk. Halfway through a bottle of port I change my mind, and pull out some bud I haven't tried yet. I've heard it makes for an interesting combination to mix alcohol and cannabis, and most people like it, so I inhale the fumes having no idea things are about to get odd. I'm not sure how much the wine had to do with it, but the following hour or two took me to one of the stranger headspaces a drug has ever shown me.
It starts with fear. So much of it, tingling and twisting in my stomach, coming from nowhere but finding all sorts of channels to express itself through. My thoughts lately have been so existential, it's pathological - I think about death and what does or doesn't come after all the time, I see the human world from a detached perspective like I'm not part of this species - and I start to think this is it, I'm finally starting to notice I'm going crazy. All the weed and the acid is going to bring out some latent psychotic condition, I'll start hearing voices, and they'll have to put me away in a year's time. The sense of losing control at this paranoid thought is consuming, and I struggle with it for a while before realising I can't reason my way out of this.
But, I'm no stranger to this bullshit, even if I was expecting to be able to relax tonight. This is familiar psychedelic fear, and my dim bedroom is starting to take on the tone of a dark mushroom trip. I put on some music (excellent artist to help you navigate a darktrip) and channel the anxiety through my body to the rhythm. I create a calm space in the back of my mind to watch this panic as it tries to devour my primate mind and body. I begin to realise that, though I haven't consciously felt real fear like this in a long time, it has in fact been under the surface for longer than I can remember. Grasping hold of this knowledge, I begin to remind myself of the value and power of a dark hallucinogenic voyage, and this reminds me that I am, after all, only thinking this way due to the influence of the substance. I have no clue why the substance in question is cannabis; it feels more like psilocybin. But, I'll go with it. I don't have a choice, and I know there's another three hours or so of this to go.
Unpleasant sensations steal across my body. Hyperaware of my teeth and gums, I also feel rings of sharp psychedelia shooting down my nose on repeat. My eyes feel like they're dripping out of their skull. My entire body image begins to shift, spots of exaggerated nerve signals lighting up all over it. My nervous system doesn't know what to make of this. A sense of altered-ness has come over me that's too heavy to just be weed. I feel like my thoughts, speech and head are weighed down, not in a relaxing way but in a drowsy, intoxicated one. I attribute this to the alcohol. My thoughts begin to echo and when I take the headphones off, cartoonish auditory hallucinations persist. I run a finger along the sore muscles of my jaw, and my sense of identity suffers disorientation as my brain translates the feeling of my facial structure in twisted ways. Wild caricatures appear in my mind's eye and I find it hard to hold onto my self. This reminds me of things I have experienced on much heavier substances, and an image of someone vomiting up his own body recurrently on a 5-MeO-DMT trip sets my imagination off crafting ever crazier trips in my head, each of them disturbingly vivid. The boundaries of my mind feel loose, like I might slip into one of those hallucinatory nightmares without warning.
And now we enter a place where the absurdity of reality threatens to tear apart its own fabric and leave me shaking on my bed having a psychotic break. I see an image of the human brain surrounded by blackness, then sheathing itself inside the skin and bone of a human body, taking on its form, and implicitly attributing elements of the body to its identity. The brain dons other clothes - culture, language - components of what we are. I try to see the brain in its naked form and find myself looking at nothing. I am looking for what you might call the human soul, but cannot see it. Something is wrong with the way I've been looking at things.
It dawns on me that I have seen beyond, and can never go back to the way things were before. That my life as a human is as strange to me as the churning gut of the most powerful psychedelic, and has been for such a long time. We are born to a world where we build this thing called a self amidst a backdrop of brand new experiences. We're shown that this life is both unique and finite; eventually you will cease, there will be no more conscious experience, an entire view of the world will be extinguished as if it had never been, as if the world itself had never been. And all the while being in such a powerless form, helpless even against the uncertainty, the inability to grasp all of it at once, as you try to make sense out of a system where matter congeals into consciousness, where everything is made of tiny particles and waves you can't see, and most of the grander structure appears lifeless. An entire universe where only one tiny corner was ever aware of it at all. It's ridiculous. The self rebels against the idea. Demands to know what else there is to this. Curiosity scratches beneath the wood of the coffin in my head. I have wanted to die for what feels like a lifetime, just to see what's beyond the self.
Turning to an Alex Grey picture, I imagine my formless soul being carried through it after death, believing itself liberated of the body but in fact still just a cog in a much, much larger machinery, condemned as it were to the fate for eternity. Condemned to never understand. The need to know meets the incapacity to know it, and the friction is the past years of my life.
By now the negative effects have begun to fade. Not having found any resolution, I lie down and close my eyes to lose myself to a peculiar blend of cannabis and hypnagogia. Bizarre imagery fills my head as the logic centres of my brain switch off entirely, shutting down some of the limits of creativity. I wake to a sudden clap of music through my headphones, and the 'trip' is over.
Fucking existence, right?
I've had similar thoughts, on stronger psychedelics. Weed used to be really psychedelic for me too, but not in quite such a clear way.