Hello everyone,
This is my first time posting at bluelight, but I recently had an experience that I thought might be interesting to share with people who appreciate such things. The report is fairly long (about 4.5k words) but this was a remarkable thing for me. I've been doing some looking around on the internet and I haven't been able to find anything similar to what happened here, so if anyone has gone through anything like this please let me know because I'd be interested to share my thoughts on the subject with you.
Just so you know, the name I use to refer to myself in this post is Eamon.
Here goes:
It all began on Friday the 30th of January 2004. The four of us (myself, Fro, Andrew, and Joe) had been playing D&D at Andrew’s place since 6:00PM and after a mostly successful adventure I (the DM) decided to call it quits at around 11:00PM as I noticed symptoms of late night humor syndrome evident in most of the players. After we had packed up and sat around for about fifteen minutes we decided that we were incredibly bored with nothing to do and not tired in the least (with the exception of Fro who had been at work all day). Now all of us knew that Fro had acid, it was just a question of whether we were willing to stay up the night and trip or go to bed and be properly rested for the arrangements that we all had for the next day. Naturally we decided to stay up and trip (except Joe who decided to stay sober because he had a headache). Andrew, Fro and I dropped at 11:37PM and after sitting around talking until about 12:30, Andrew, Joe and I decided to go for a walk, leaving Fro at Andrew’s alone. First of all we set off up the hill in Curtain where the bushfires struck last year, walking along the bicycle path around to the oval on the south side of the suburb. From what I remember the walk was interesting at the time, as the effects of the acid were kicking in, but in retrospect it was not particularly memorable after the events that occurred later in the night.
The walk felt a lot shorter than it actually was, but I assume that was because of the acid, which on previous trips had greatly distorted my sense of time. After walking around the greater part of Andrew’s suburb of residence, we returned to his house at 1:37AM (thank you Fro for the times). At this point I knew that I was feeling some effects of the acid, but they were insignificant compared to anything I had experienced taking acid before and I was rather disappointed by how sober I felt. There were no visuals yet, no strange sensations, and everything felt too normal for an acid trip. We tried an OBE (Out of Body Experience) method from Robert Peterson’s book (http://www.robertpeterson.org/obebook.html), but none of us had any significant success. Andrew then came up with an excellent suggestion – marijuana. Although I used to be one of the biggest stoners on Earth, I stopped smoking about six months ago allowing myself the occasional indulgence every few weeks. Point in case – my tolerance for marijuana was lower than it had been for a very long time. Marijuana does a lot to my sense of paranoia, but I was in good company, and paranoia is an old friend of mine anyway. So in I went to the bathroom to smoke my cone, all ready to lie down, relax, and trip the night away.
As soon as I pulled the cone I stepped out of the bathroom and was assaulted by sensations. Looking back, it was at this point that weird stuff started happening, but all the effects aside from what I positively knew was drug induced (e.g. visuals), crept up on me slowly because I had never experienced them before. Bits of everything I could see were melting, but I took this in stride because I was fully aware that I had just smoked marijuana and that it was having more of an effect than it should because I had low tolerance and there was acid in my system. I don’t know how long I sat there doing nothing but thinking, but every so often I started to get the strange sensation of darkness getting closer and closer to me, when suddenly the sensation was replaced and I was jolted into full awareness. It began very slowly, just an impression in the back of my mind, but as time went on it increased in intensity. The night wore on and we broke out numerous tripper toys like a makeshift strobe light, and an assortment of computer games (Farcry while tripping is very cool). However, despite all this sensory input, the sensations of darkness and awareness that I was experiencing and the jolt that occurred between them were growing stronger and stronger. The darkness quickly became intimidating in my mind, and the awareness was magnified to a degree that I had never experienced before. Eventually I was almost forced to notice them because I found it more and more difficult to concentrate as the sensations intensified. I started to notice that I couldn’t finish thoughts, or that if I finished a thought I had difficulty understanding it. I vaguely remembered something like this happening the last time I took acid, but nothing to this degree had ever happened before. After a while I literally did not know what was happening. I could see my surroundings and interpret what my senses were telling me, but I couldn’t add all my thoughts together and get the entire picture to make any sense. When everything else had broken down, all I understood was that darkness was approaching and my awareness was the only thing that stood against it. Once I had thought that thought, my mind realized that it had fractured.
The darkness that was approaching was sleep, and the left side of my brain was going through the process of going to sleep like it does every night at around this time. My circadian rhythms had kicked in and the darkness that I felt getting closer was the darkness of sleep. The awareness that I was experiencing was the right side of my brain, which it told itself was the creative side of my brain. When my brain is working properly, my right side usually allows the left side to take over for the last few minutes before sleep (I understand now that this is why you usually can’t remember the last few minutes before the moment when you go to sleep), so it had never experienced this approaching darkness on its own before. Being the creative side of my brain, it imagined that the darkness was the worst possible thing it could think of (a survival mechanism), which was death. I then understood that the darkness had felt so threatening because the right side of my brain had been associating the coming darkness with death. Once this thought had been thought, the left side of my brain took over and started trying to force me to go to sleep. The right side wanted to stay awake and explore the new intra-brain communication that the acid had facilitated, it was also extremely afraid of letting go because prior to what the left brain had just told it, it had associated letting go with death and a 20 year instinctive fear of death is difficult to overcome. The right side thought that if it let go it was going to die, and the left side was calling it an idiot because it was just going to go to bed. At this point I actually said to Andrew,
“Look this is Eamon’s left side of his brain, can you convince Eamon to go to sleep. He thinks he is going to die but he isn’t. If he goes to sleep now he’ll have a great sleep and he’ll wake up feeling great.”
Immediately following this my right brain took over and I turned to Fro and said,
“James, please help me. I honestly feel like I am going to die.”
This is where stuff between my brain halves started to get nasty – each wanted to do their own thing, so they started trying to do whatever they could to get the other half to do what they wanted. I was given a very interesting insight into how the brain works then as I literally started talking to myself.
Let’s just clear up one thing here: both sides of the brain had never physically talked to each other before and at the time I was sure that I had schizophrenia to a degree. Talking to yourself and having yourself respond to your questions with answers that you have difficulty comprehending with the side of your brain that the answers are directed to is about as frightening as anything that had ever happened to me before. It felt like I was shifting my center of consciousness back and forth between the two thinking halves of my brain. When I was in the right side I was more conscious, more aware of existence, than I had ever been before but I had difficulty understanding some very simple ideas. When I was in the left side I was rude, uncreative, and sleepy at the time, but I had a much clearer understanding of exactly what was happening to my body. My brain had never needed to understand things twice before, but it spent about three hours explaining many fundamental ideas to each other, because previously one half had been able to rely on the other for information that it couldn’t comprehend. This was not the case now - each brain half had to fully understand an idea for me to be able to think about it properly.
As for what the brains were saying to each other, the left side of my brain started telling the right side that it wanted to go to sleep, and that the right side was being annoying because it didn’t want to “let go” (this was the term the left brain used to describe what the right did before sleep happened). The left side was uncreative in its excuses, saying that the right side was the creative one and a completely different personality (which it thought was smarted at times but it’s lack of common sense was frustrating). The right side of the brain, having no concept of sleep (as it had never experienced it before), started looking for reasons that the left side would have for sending me to “sleep”. As before, it came up with death, and would absolutely refuse to “let go”. By this time the awareness that I was experiencing when my center of consciousness was in the right side was phenomenal. My right brain was arguing with my left brain while trying to “upgrade” the way that it thought. It was observing my surroundings with a clarity that makes normal observation seem like you’re looking through muddy water. It was creating predetermined thought patterns that would think along a certain line until either reaching a conclusion or requiring another thought pattern to be created. I could feel all fifteen or so of these thought patterns (trains of thought) all working in one half of my brain at once and somewhere, one of the patterns started to wonder what effect this would have on my brain. As the right side was the creative side with very little experience in actually running the body, it asked my left side what might happen, and the left side started trying to get the right side to trick itself. It started a very basic thought pattern that ended up at sleep or die. The conversation went something like this (I actually spoke this to myself in whispers):
Right: Hey, do you think that all this creative thinking that I’m doing will have any effect on Eamon’s brain?
Left: I think you need to go to sleep.
R: Why? Is something bad happening?
L: I really think you should go to sleep.
R: Something bad is happening, isn’t it?
L: Go to sleep now.
R: I’m thinking too hard aren’t I? What effect could this have on Eamon? (note: creative brain always thinks of worst case scenario).
L: Sleep now.
R: He’s going to die if I don’t sleep isn’t he?
L: Um… yep. (the left brain said this because it thought that the right brain would give up and let him sleep)
R: OH NO! MUST GO TO SLEEP!!
L: Good. Let go.
R: The acid won’t let me stop thinking! OH MY GOD I’M THINKING SO HARD EAMON’S HAIR IS FALLING OUT!!! (I started grabbing at my head and I THOUGHT I was feeling for hairs that were falling out, little did I know that my right brain had made my hand start pulling hair out, luckily I didn’t pull much out. I started feeling around on my head for tumors too, and looking for deformations in my head in the mirror, which is really funny now that I think about it, but was terrifying to my right brain at the time).
The left side was fed up at this point so it asked my right brain one thing in an effort to get it thinking about sleep. Keep in mind that the right brain was doing many other things while it was talking to the left brain, but the left brain was only trying to go to sleep when it wasn’t talking to the right.
L: What are you so afraid of?
R: If I let go then I’ll die. You are trying to kill me.
L: Why the hell would I do that? (those are the actual words it used)
R: …
L: You seem to forget that I am part of the same brain as you. (I was really tripping at this point)
R: Yes you are, aren’t you. Ok. Maybe you’re not trying to kill me. But letting go feels like dying.
L: Letting go is not dying. (the left side was close to achieving it’s goal of sleep by this point, and the right side was trying to see if it could do anything to make me see through walls and upgrade my senses amongst other things).
R: It sure feels like it.
L: Why are you afraid of dying?
R: I don’t know.
As soon as this conversation was over and my left brain realized that my right brain wouldn’t let go any more than he would stop nagging about sleep, left brain fell asleep, leaving the right one awake to ponder what had just happened. Do you have any idea how weird it is to have half of your brain asleep? Previously I explained about moving my center of consciousness around my brain if you recall. Now, if I moved my consciousness into my right brain it could still think and have the thought patterns running while my brain “upgraded” itself. If I moved it into my left brain, I was completely asleep. My eyes would close, my limbs would go slack, and even my breathing patterns and my HEART RATE changed to what they would be if I were asleep. I had been lying down since feeling for tumors, so to experiment to see if my left brain was really asleep, I tried sitting up when consciousness was in the right side. The right side thought to itself, the left side would never let Eamon fall down while he’s asleep, it’s too dangerous. When I switched sides back to left, my eyes were closed, and I don’t even remember falling down. Of course, when the right side took over again, I was lying down. The right side then started trying to trick the left side into being awake, because it wanted to experiment again with intra-brain communication. The left side, being part of the same brain, but asleep, knew that the right side wanted to wake it up. Knowing this, whenever it even came close to moving out of sleep, it would switch back to the right side, because it knew the right side was awake and that being awake was what the right side wanted, although not the way the right side wanted.
It was at this extremely strange junction that something even weirder started happening. The right side had been exploring the brain for the past few hours, and it had identified several major areas in it that it had labeled “left”, “right”, and “input” (input is all my sensory perception, it does not think for itself – it is external information sent to both halves of the brain, but they are left to interpret the data on their own or between themselves.). The weird thing happened under these conditions: the left side of my brain was entering deep sleep, while the right side was fully awake. It was then that my awareness in the right side of my brain distinguished a new area of the brain that it had never overtly encountered before – namely, my subconscious. The right side could tell from all the activity that it could sense in the brain that the left side of my brain was in contact with my subconscious and that something was going on between them, but it couldn’t wake the left brain up to ask it what was happening (it was also afraid that it might ruin what was going on when it wanted to experiment for it). So it had the idea to do something that I have been trying to do for the last few months - lucid dream. Instead of trying to wake up the left brain, it tried to muscle in on the action, and it worked. I sat down in what I remember was a gray room (I also remember the location not being important) and had a conversation with myself. One version of me was the left brain, and it was slightly tinted green, and the other version of me was the right brain, tinted slightly orange. I have worked out now that the reason for the different coloured versions of me is this: my left eye, which is controlled by the right side of my brain, sees more green than my right eye, and my right eye, controlled by the left side of my brain, sees more orange than my left eye. They were perceiving each other in different colours out of habit because that is how each brain-half receives the information delivered to it by it’s respective eye.
By this point I was thinking of myself in terms of “we”. We talked for a very short while about how things were going to work now that each brain was aware of the others existence, but I remember that the left side was busy and the right side wanted to be awake to mess around with the subconscious so it didn’t hang around in the dream for very long. The right told the left that it wanted to talk to the subconscious but didn’t know what to do, so the left just said to relax (in a much more gentle way than when it said to go to sleep earlier). Consciousness then shifted to the right side, and the right side relaxed, closed Eamon’s eyes and went back to try the OBE methods that Eamon had tried earlier that night. Consciousness drifted back and forth for a while, the left asleep, the right very excited but keeping its eyes closed to try and stop thinking and relax. After a time, I’m not sure exactly how long, the left noticed a rushing sensation, very faint at first, but like there was a river somewhere nearby, and the water flowing through it was getting faster. It quickly built up and I realized that the rushing sensation was “flowing” out of my subconscious and into my brain. My right side was thinking that perhaps this is the way that my subconscious communicated, not in words but in sensations. The rushing became more and more intense, and with it grew a euphoria that threatened to overwhelm everything. As I thought that I was about to be overwhelmed, my center of consciousness switched to my right brain and… imagine you are an old iron bell that is large beyond imagining, vast beyond the constraints of the cosmos, and you are struck with a hammer of proportional size. I lay there quivering as the ringing sensation faded, and it felt almost pleasant. Like I was floating in a universe of warm water with no need to breath, no sensation of body, just contentment. My right brain, my awareness then tried to talk to my subconscious, but my subconscious had stopped responding. My left brain then picked up on a conversation it had with my right brain a few hours prior:
L: Why are you afraid of dying?
R: Because I don’t know what will happen when I die.
L: You are afraid of what you don’t know?
R: Yes.
L: Why?
R: Because it might kill me.
L: …
R: Wait… so I’m afraid of death because it is unknown, and I’m afraid of the unknown because it might kill me? That can’t be right.
Something snapped within me. Something big. With those thoughts my fear of death and my fear of the unknown were gone. My third great fear, that of heights, vanished with fear of death.
I sat up. My fears couldn’t be gone could they? I thought long and hard about death and the unknown. I thought about all the times I had been afraid in my life, and I felt foolish that I had ever been afraid. Sure it’s a survival thing, but when does fear help you survive better than awareness and reasoning? My brains had finally agreed on something – there was no need for fear anymore. My fears were gone and in there place was a healthy sense of caution that was absorbed by my commonsense. Be wary, be cautious, but be not afraid.
By this time my left brain was waking up from the few hours of sleep it had, and it started going through the motions of waking up. The right brain started talking to the left again now that it was awake, and they started to work out how Eamon’s upgraded brain should work from the ground up. First off was breathing, the most necessary thing that either half of the brain has direct control of. I had to teach the right side of my brain how to breathe properly and regularly (interesting fact: I usually leave the left side of my brain to deal with breathing). After that I had to teach my right brain to trust my breathing patterns, which was a lot more difficult than I had thought – if you think that you are forgetting to breath, you keep your mind on breathing and if you’re consciously telling yourself to breath in and out every few seconds that takes up a lot of brain. After that they started arguing about which brain should be in control in certain situations. I learned my left brain has most of the personality that I assume when I am in front of people I don’t know very well, and my right brain has my personality that I use when I am in front of good friends. My left brain is practical but uncreative, and my right brain is creative to a fault but has little commonsense. When they are not there to counterbalance each other, as was the case at the time, then they each go off and do their own thing (e.g. one side going to sleep, the other fully awake and trying to wake the first side up). Now that they were both awake however, they both wanted to be in control, so they started fighting again. The right brain said it wanted to experiment with the intra brain communication but the left said it didn’t want to participate because it required too much creativity. The right one said that was fine, but that meant that it would be in control most of the time, which the left one disagreed with too as it wanted to be in control (I think that may be a personality aspect, or something to do with how the brains are supposed to interact when not on acid). The brains started fighting again, making excuses to each other so that each could do what they wanted. The left threw the old fears of death at the right, but as both brains knew that the fears had been overcome, they didn’t work as they had earlier in the night. What eventually happened was the right brain asked the left brain why it was so uncreative, and the left side said that it was underdeveloped in the creativity area, but it had all the confidence. The right side then suggested that the left side should start to develop its creativity more as this would benefit Eamon greatly in the long run. The left side acknowledged that it had never even thought that it could have been creative before, but it would try, if the right side would “stop being so smart in some ways but so dumb in others”. This was somewhat of an accord reached in my brain. Each half had agreed to work to better themselves for the whole, and work together to achieve their goal.
Since the events that took place on Friday night and Saturday morning, I have been adjusting to the new reality that I live in. This is four days later and I still remember everything that happened that night. My fears have not returned. I have less of an awareness of my body, and more of an awareness of my surroundings, as if much of what I did before like breathing and walking and making sure I don’t fall over has been automated and I no longer need to worry about it. I can tell what areas of my brain thoughts come from as I think them, and I can think them more often when I am engaged in some other activity. I thought it was all going to trickle away like water cupped in my hands, but it hasn’t. I walk away from this experience with the certainty that I have been given a priceless gift of insight into human nature and the place that the mind has in reality.
I can’t wait for the next one.
This is my first time posting at bluelight, but I recently had an experience that I thought might be interesting to share with people who appreciate such things. The report is fairly long (about 4.5k words) but this was a remarkable thing for me. I've been doing some looking around on the internet and I haven't been able to find anything similar to what happened here, so if anyone has gone through anything like this please let me know because I'd be interested to share my thoughts on the subject with you.
Just so you know, the name I use to refer to myself in this post is Eamon.
Here goes:
It all began on Friday the 30th of January 2004. The four of us (myself, Fro, Andrew, and Joe) had been playing D&D at Andrew’s place since 6:00PM and after a mostly successful adventure I (the DM) decided to call it quits at around 11:00PM as I noticed symptoms of late night humor syndrome evident in most of the players. After we had packed up and sat around for about fifteen minutes we decided that we were incredibly bored with nothing to do and not tired in the least (with the exception of Fro who had been at work all day). Now all of us knew that Fro had acid, it was just a question of whether we were willing to stay up the night and trip or go to bed and be properly rested for the arrangements that we all had for the next day. Naturally we decided to stay up and trip (except Joe who decided to stay sober because he had a headache). Andrew, Fro and I dropped at 11:37PM and after sitting around talking until about 12:30, Andrew, Joe and I decided to go for a walk, leaving Fro at Andrew’s alone. First of all we set off up the hill in Curtain where the bushfires struck last year, walking along the bicycle path around to the oval on the south side of the suburb. From what I remember the walk was interesting at the time, as the effects of the acid were kicking in, but in retrospect it was not particularly memorable after the events that occurred later in the night.
The walk felt a lot shorter than it actually was, but I assume that was because of the acid, which on previous trips had greatly distorted my sense of time. After walking around the greater part of Andrew’s suburb of residence, we returned to his house at 1:37AM (thank you Fro for the times). At this point I knew that I was feeling some effects of the acid, but they were insignificant compared to anything I had experienced taking acid before and I was rather disappointed by how sober I felt. There were no visuals yet, no strange sensations, and everything felt too normal for an acid trip. We tried an OBE (Out of Body Experience) method from Robert Peterson’s book (http://www.robertpeterson.org/obebook.html), but none of us had any significant success. Andrew then came up with an excellent suggestion – marijuana. Although I used to be one of the biggest stoners on Earth, I stopped smoking about six months ago allowing myself the occasional indulgence every few weeks. Point in case – my tolerance for marijuana was lower than it had been for a very long time. Marijuana does a lot to my sense of paranoia, but I was in good company, and paranoia is an old friend of mine anyway. So in I went to the bathroom to smoke my cone, all ready to lie down, relax, and trip the night away.
As soon as I pulled the cone I stepped out of the bathroom and was assaulted by sensations. Looking back, it was at this point that weird stuff started happening, but all the effects aside from what I positively knew was drug induced (e.g. visuals), crept up on me slowly because I had never experienced them before. Bits of everything I could see were melting, but I took this in stride because I was fully aware that I had just smoked marijuana and that it was having more of an effect than it should because I had low tolerance and there was acid in my system. I don’t know how long I sat there doing nothing but thinking, but every so often I started to get the strange sensation of darkness getting closer and closer to me, when suddenly the sensation was replaced and I was jolted into full awareness. It began very slowly, just an impression in the back of my mind, but as time went on it increased in intensity. The night wore on and we broke out numerous tripper toys like a makeshift strobe light, and an assortment of computer games (Farcry while tripping is very cool). However, despite all this sensory input, the sensations of darkness and awareness that I was experiencing and the jolt that occurred between them were growing stronger and stronger. The darkness quickly became intimidating in my mind, and the awareness was magnified to a degree that I had never experienced before. Eventually I was almost forced to notice them because I found it more and more difficult to concentrate as the sensations intensified. I started to notice that I couldn’t finish thoughts, or that if I finished a thought I had difficulty understanding it. I vaguely remembered something like this happening the last time I took acid, but nothing to this degree had ever happened before. After a while I literally did not know what was happening. I could see my surroundings and interpret what my senses were telling me, but I couldn’t add all my thoughts together and get the entire picture to make any sense. When everything else had broken down, all I understood was that darkness was approaching and my awareness was the only thing that stood against it. Once I had thought that thought, my mind realized that it had fractured.
The darkness that was approaching was sleep, and the left side of my brain was going through the process of going to sleep like it does every night at around this time. My circadian rhythms had kicked in and the darkness that I felt getting closer was the darkness of sleep. The awareness that I was experiencing was the right side of my brain, which it told itself was the creative side of my brain. When my brain is working properly, my right side usually allows the left side to take over for the last few minutes before sleep (I understand now that this is why you usually can’t remember the last few minutes before the moment when you go to sleep), so it had never experienced this approaching darkness on its own before. Being the creative side of my brain, it imagined that the darkness was the worst possible thing it could think of (a survival mechanism), which was death. I then understood that the darkness had felt so threatening because the right side of my brain had been associating the coming darkness with death. Once this thought had been thought, the left side of my brain took over and started trying to force me to go to sleep. The right side wanted to stay awake and explore the new intra-brain communication that the acid had facilitated, it was also extremely afraid of letting go because prior to what the left brain had just told it, it had associated letting go with death and a 20 year instinctive fear of death is difficult to overcome. The right side thought that if it let go it was going to die, and the left side was calling it an idiot because it was just going to go to bed. At this point I actually said to Andrew,
“Look this is Eamon’s left side of his brain, can you convince Eamon to go to sleep. He thinks he is going to die but he isn’t. If he goes to sleep now he’ll have a great sleep and he’ll wake up feeling great.”
Immediately following this my right brain took over and I turned to Fro and said,
“James, please help me. I honestly feel like I am going to die.”
This is where stuff between my brain halves started to get nasty – each wanted to do their own thing, so they started trying to do whatever they could to get the other half to do what they wanted. I was given a very interesting insight into how the brain works then as I literally started talking to myself.
Let’s just clear up one thing here: both sides of the brain had never physically talked to each other before and at the time I was sure that I had schizophrenia to a degree. Talking to yourself and having yourself respond to your questions with answers that you have difficulty comprehending with the side of your brain that the answers are directed to is about as frightening as anything that had ever happened to me before. It felt like I was shifting my center of consciousness back and forth between the two thinking halves of my brain. When I was in the right side I was more conscious, more aware of existence, than I had ever been before but I had difficulty understanding some very simple ideas. When I was in the left side I was rude, uncreative, and sleepy at the time, but I had a much clearer understanding of exactly what was happening to my body. My brain had never needed to understand things twice before, but it spent about three hours explaining many fundamental ideas to each other, because previously one half had been able to rely on the other for information that it couldn’t comprehend. This was not the case now - each brain half had to fully understand an idea for me to be able to think about it properly.
As for what the brains were saying to each other, the left side of my brain started telling the right side that it wanted to go to sleep, and that the right side was being annoying because it didn’t want to “let go” (this was the term the left brain used to describe what the right did before sleep happened). The left side was uncreative in its excuses, saying that the right side was the creative one and a completely different personality (which it thought was smarted at times but it’s lack of common sense was frustrating). The right side of the brain, having no concept of sleep (as it had never experienced it before), started looking for reasons that the left side would have for sending me to “sleep”. As before, it came up with death, and would absolutely refuse to “let go”. By this time the awareness that I was experiencing when my center of consciousness was in the right side was phenomenal. My right brain was arguing with my left brain while trying to “upgrade” the way that it thought. It was observing my surroundings with a clarity that makes normal observation seem like you’re looking through muddy water. It was creating predetermined thought patterns that would think along a certain line until either reaching a conclusion or requiring another thought pattern to be created. I could feel all fifteen or so of these thought patterns (trains of thought) all working in one half of my brain at once and somewhere, one of the patterns started to wonder what effect this would have on my brain. As the right side was the creative side with very little experience in actually running the body, it asked my left side what might happen, and the left side started trying to get the right side to trick itself. It started a very basic thought pattern that ended up at sleep or die. The conversation went something like this (I actually spoke this to myself in whispers):
Right: Hey, do you think that all this creative thinking that I’m doing will have any effect on Eamon’s brain?
Left: I think you need to go to sleep.
R: Why? Is something bad happening?
L: I really think you should go to sleep.
R: Something bad is happening, isn’t it?
L: Go to sleep now.
R: I’m thinking too hard aren’t I? What effect could this have on Eamon? (note: creative brain always thinks of worst case scenario).
L: Sleep now.
R: He’s going to die if I don’t sleep isn’t he?
L: Um… yep. (the left brain said this because it thought that the right brain would give up and let him sleep)
R: OH NO! MUST GO TO SLEEP!!
L: Good. Let go.
R: The acid won’t let me stop thinking! OH MY GOD I’M THINKING SO HARD EAMON’S HAIR IS FALLING OUT!!! (I started grabbing at my head and I THOUGHT I was feeling for hairs that were falling out, little did I know that my right brain had made my hand start pulling hair out, luckily I didn’t pull much out. I started feeling around on my head for tumors too, and looking for deformations in my head in the mirror, which is really funny now that I think about it, but was terrifying to my right brain at the time).
The left side was fed up at this point so it asked my right brain one thing in an effort to get it thinking about sleep. Keep in mind that the right brain was doing many other things while it was talking to the left brain, but the left brain was only trying to go to sleep when it wasn’t talking to the right.
L: What are you so afraid of?
R: If I let go then I’ll die. You are trying to kill me.
L: Why the hell would I do that? (those are the actual words it used)
R: …
L: You seem to forget that I am part of the same brain as you. (I was really tripping at this point)
R: Yes you are, aren’t you. Ok. Maybe you’re not trying to kill me. But letting go feels like dying.
L: Letting go is not dying. (the left side was close to achieving it’s goal of sleep by this point, and the right side was trying to see if it could do anything to make me see through walls and upgrade my senses amongst other things).
R: It sure feels like it.
L: Why are you afraid of dying?
R: I don’t know.
As soon as this conversation was over and my left brain realized that my right brain wouldn’t let go any more than he would stop nagging about sleep, left brain fell asleep, leaving the right one awake to ponder what had just happened. Do you have any idea how weird it is to have half of your brain asleep? Previously I explained about moving my center of consciousness around my brain if you recall. Now, if I moved my consciousness into my right brain it could still think and have the thought patterns running while my brain “upgraded” itself. If I moved it into my left brain, I was completely asleep. My eyes would close, my limbs would go slack, and even my breathing patterns and my HEART RATE changed to what they would be if I were asleep. I had been lying down since feeling for tumors, so to experiment to see if my left brain was really asleep, I tried sitting up when consciousness was in the right side. The right side thought to itself, the left side would never let Eamon fall down while he’s asleep, it’s too dangerous. When I switched sides back to left, my eyes were closed, and I don’t even remember falling down. Of course, when the right side took over again, I was lying down. The right side then started trying to trick the left side into being awake, because it wanted to experiment again with intra-brain communication. The left side, being part of the same brain, but asleep, knew that the right side wanted to wake it up. Knowing this, whenever it even came close to moving out of sleep, it would switch back to the right side, because it knew the right side was awake and that being awake was what the right side wanted, although not the way the right side wanted.
It was at this extremely strange junction that something even weirder started happening. The right side had been exploring the brain for the past few hours, and it had identified several major areas in it that it had labeled “left”, “right”, and “input” (input is all my sensory perception, it does not think for itself – it is external information sent to both halves of the brain, but they are left to interpret the data on their own or between themselves.). The weird thing happened under these conditions: the left side of my brain was entering deep sleep, while the right side was fully awake. It was then that my awareness in the right side of my brain distinguished a new area of the brain that it had never overtly encountered before – namely, my subconscious. The right side could tell from all the activity that it could sense in the brain that the left side of my brain was in contact with my subconscious and that something was going on between them, but it couldn’t wake the left brain up to ask it what was happening (it was also afraid that it might ruin what was going on when it wanted to experiment for it). So it had the idea to do something that I have been trying to do for the last few months - lucid dream. Instead of trying to wake up the left brain, it tried to muscle in on the action, and it worked. I sat down in what I remember was a gray room (I also remember the location not being important) and had a conversation with myself. One version of me was the left brain, and it was slightly tinted green, and the other version of me was the right brain, tinted slightly orange. I have worked out now that the reason for the different coloured versions of me is this: my left eye, which is controlled by the right side of my brain, sees more green than my right eye, and my right eye, controlled by the left side of my brain, sees more orange than my left eye. They were perceiving each other in different colours out of habit because that is how each brain-half receives the information delivered to it by it’s respective eye.
By this point I was thinking of myself in terms of “we”. We talked for a very short while about how things were going to work now that each brain was aware of the others existence, but I remember that the left side was busy and the right side wanted to be awake to mess around with the subconscious so it didn’t hang around in the dream for very long. The right told the left that it wanted to talk to the subconscious but didn’t know what to do, so the left just said to relax (in a much more gentle way than when it said to go to sleep earlier). Consciousness then shifted to the right side, and the right side relaxed, closed Eamon’s eyes and went back to try the OBE methods that Eamon had tried earlier that night. Consciousness drifted back and forth for a while, the left asleep, the right very excited but keeping its eyes closed to try and stop thinking and relax. After a time, I’m not sure exactly how long, the left noticed a rushing sensation, very faint at first, but like there was a river somewhere nearby, and the water flowing through it was getting faster. It quickly built up and I realized that the rushing sensation was “flowing” out of my subconscious and into my brain. My right side was thinking that perhaps this is the way that my subconscious communicated, not in words but in sensations. The rushing became more and more intense, and with it grew a euphoria that threatened to overwhelm everything. As I thought that I was about to be overwhelmed, my center of consciousness switched to my right brain and… imagine you are an old iron bell that is large beyond imagining, vast beyond the constraints of the cosmos, and you are struck with a hammer of proportional size. I lay there quivering as the ringing sensation faded, and it felt almost pleasant. Like I was floating in a universe of warm water with no need to breath, no sensation of body, just contentment. My right brain, my awareness then tried to talk to my subconscious, but my subconscious had stopped responding. My left brain then picked up on a conversation it had with my right brain a few hours prior:
L: Why are you afraid of dying?
R: Because I don’t know what will happen when I die.
L: You are afraid of what you don’t know?
R: Yes.
L: Why?
R: Because it might kill me.
L: …
R: Wait… so I’m afraid of death because it is unknown, and I’m afraid of the unknown because it might kill me? That can’t be right.
Something snapped within me. Something big. With those thoughts my fear of death and my fear of the unknown were gone. My third great fear, that of heights, vanished with fear of death.
I sat up. My fears couldn’t be gone could they? I thought long and hard about death and the unknown. I thought about all the times I had been afraid in my life, and I felt foolish that I had ever been afraid. Sure it’s a survival thing, but when does fear help you survive better than awareness and reasoning? My brains had finally agreed on something – there was no need for fear anymore. My fears were gone and in there place was a healthy sense of caution that was absorbed by my commonsense. Be wary, be cautious, but be not afraid.
By this time my left brain was waking up from the few hours of sleep it had, and it started going through the motions of waking up. The right brain started talking to the left again now that it was awake, and they started to work out how Eamon’s upgraded brain should work from the ground up. First off was breathing, the most necessary thing that either half of the brain has direct control of. I had to teach the right side of my brain how to breathe properly and regularly (interesting fact: I usually leave the left side of my brain to deal with breathing). After that I had to teach my right brain to trust my breathing patterns, which was a lot more difficult than I had thought – if you think that you are forgetting to breath, you keep your mind on breathing and if you’re consciously telling yourself to breath in and out every few seconds that takes up a lot of brain. After that they started arguing about which brain should be in control in certain situations. I learned my left brain has most of the personality that I assume when I am in front of people I don’t know very well, and my right brain has my personality that I use when I am in front of good friends. My left brain is practical but uncreative, and my right brain is creative to a fault but has little commonsense. When they are not there to counterbalance each other, as was the case at the time, then they each go off and do their own thing (e.g. one side going to sleep, the other fully awake and trying to wake the first side up). Now that they were both awake however, they both wanted to be in control, so they started fighting again. The right brain said it wanted to experiment with the intra brain communication but the left said it didn’t want to participate because it required too much creativity. The right one said that was fine, but that meant that it would be in control most of the time, which the left one disagreed with too as it wanted to be in control (I think that may be a personality aspect, or something to do with how the brains are supposed to interact when not on acid). The brains started fighting again, making excuses to each other so that each could do what they wanted. The left threw the old fears of death at the right, but as both brains knew that the fears had been overcome, they didn’t work as they had earlier in the night. What eventually happened was the right brain asked the left brain why it was so uncreative, and the left side said that it was underdeveloped in the creativity area, but it had all the confidence. The right side then suggested that the left side should start to develop its creativity more as this would benefit Eamon greatly in the long run. The left side acknowledged that it had never even thought that it could have been creative before, but it would try, if the right side would “stop being so smart in some ways but so dumb in others”. This was somewhat of an accord reached in my brain. Each half had agreed to work to better themselves for the whole, and work together to achieve their goal.
Since the events that took place on Friday night and Saturday morning, I have been adjusting to the new reality that I live in. This is four days later and I still remember everything that happened that night. My fears have not returned. I have less of an awareness of my body, and more of an awareness of my surroundings, as if much of what I did before like breathing and walking and making sure I don’t fall over has been automated and I no longer need to worry about it. I can tell what areas of my brain thoughts come from as I think them, and I can think them more often when I am engaged in some other activity. I thought it was all going to trickle away like water cupped in my hands, but it hasn’t. I walk away from this experience with the certainty that I have been given a priceless gift of insight into human nature and the place that the mind has in reality.
I can’t wait for the next one.
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