SOLUTIO, or,
an insanely thorough
MDMA trip report, of such a great
length that the author hopes
any readers are not annoyed
and apologises in advance,
by Rewired.
Name of subject: rewired.
Date of Experience: 11/23/01.
Drug: MDMA (tested).
Names: changed.
Time: mostly measured in cigarettes, like breaktime at work.
Background: Subject has repeated experience with non-drug-induced states of consciousness during which he falls out of body and into another realm. He also periodically sees creatures he takes to be extraterrestrial and has gotten sucked into the eyeballs of four-year-olds he conciders may not be entirely human. (Subject is aware he is a fucking loon.) Subject was in the middle of bizarre experiences and feeling very depressed and enraged at the universe and himself (as from reading Jung, he was aware he might be projecting shadow traits onto objective reality).
Objective: to feel connected again, to not hate the world for a few hours, to have a working memory of the beauty, innocence, love, and all-encompassing virginity lost with childhood.
State of subject: initially anxious and resistent.
1. Calcinatio.
After what seemed to be an eternity, the four of us had finally gotten there. We crossed the parking lot together, walked through the front doors and went up the stairs. There were numbers of people walking around and I noticed immediately that it had that care-free type of atmosphere to it. After we paid our entrance fee at the table some guy had us empty our pockets before he patted us down. It seemed as if he was “just doing his job” and he didn’t really care what we might bring in. His actions were motions without substance.
After we all got in, I felt a bit awkward. I felt like the lost puppy I had been at the first rave at the end of October; the Scorpio rave, which they brought me to as an early birthday present. I stood close to the three of them feeling out-of-place and closed off, but my eyes bounced about the room. I was certainly more intrigued with this place than the first one I’d been to. This place felt much more alive, vibrant and exciting.
We spent some in the same general area in the crowd, talking over the loud music, spying the people and watching the DJ. I did my usual people-watching. Then someone said something or motioned to a doorway in the back, and expressed curiosity as to where it lead. Slightly bored in my current environment and seeking new territory, I meandered towards that direction with Sandra right beside me. Through the door we found another room, this one smaller and darker. Automatically you could tell the change in the atmosphere, and one was almost spooked at the drastic change in vibrations from one room to the next. In here, the DJ played his music at a lower volume and a slower tempo. Everyone seemed like zombies, and bored ones at that. We both unanimously agreed to exit the room immediately and travel back to the first one.
Once returning to our circle, the three of them wobbled and danced. I stood alone smoking cigarettes with my eyes intensely scanning the room’s sea of faces, afraid to do as much as bob my head or tap my feet. Sandra would come up to me periodically and ask if I still wanted to do it. Each time I paused, and followed with a cowardly shrug and a hesitant voice that managed to form the words, "yeah, but not yet."
2. Sublimatio.
After I decided I had coughed up enough courage, I turned to Sandra and told her that I was ready. It was time. Very casually, she said to shake her hand and not to be obvious about popping it in my mouth. She suggested that I act as if I was coughing or something. For some reason the sense of reality struck me right then, like a hard blow to the face. In the climax of the moment, I was suddenly dominated by the terror of the unknown. The confidence I’d coughed up in regard to the fact that I was ready was suddenly light-years beyond my grasp. I was absolutely terrified. I shook and shrugged, suddenly getting very nervous. I tried to act calm and casual as I told her that I’d just do it later. We hung around in the circle for a few short moments before she came up to me, took me by the hand, and told me to follow her. She led me through the doorway again and into a dark corner of that dark, dead room with the zombies and slow tempo.
I again noted how strange this all was. I felt as if the tables had turned in some way. For years I’d spent a good amount of my time trying to get people to open their mind to what I’d experienced, to get them to understand all I’d seen in all it’s indescribable wonder. Now, in order to heal myself and better myself; in order to remind myself of the better parts of life here I was, trying to get myself to accept her offer to open my mind to those wondrous things she’d experienced.
In that dark corner of that dark, dead room, we found a table and sat down. We got comfortable, lay down our jackets and she placed her fist in my open palm. She told me to be careful, because it was small and I’d hardly be able to feel it. I almost thought I had it, too, but she grabbed my hand with her other hand to steady it and again repeated that it was very, very small. It was indeed a very small pill, about the size of an aspirin tablet; maybe smaller. I could hardly feel it in my hand at all.
“Now pop it in your mouth and chew it, she said. It's gonna taste really bad.
I did as I was told. As I popped it in my mouth, I realized what the whole moment reminded me of. I remembered those times in my childhood when I had been sick for some time and had to finally face up to the fact that I needed to take some medicine to help me get better. I was forced to wonder if there was more than just the act of popping a pill that associated these two events. As I chewed on it, I suddenly found myself making a face - it tasted bitter. She gave me the bottle of water she’d been clutching near her and I took a few swigs in the attempts to kill the taste. She said it would take about half an hour for it to kick in, and that I shouldn’t think about it. It was hard to keep my mind off it, but we easily slipped into a conversation, and that helped me a little.
I felt this was important in some way. Though I was anxious about what was to come, it was as if I’d embraced a certain focused apathy. In the moment before I’d popped the pill into my mouth, I decided that if I had died or had a bad reaction to it, that would be okay. If I were to have a bad reaction to it, at least I would have faced the fear head on. If I were to die, at least I wouldn’t have died in fear. That’s all it had been - fear; not a lack of desire to take the pill. In all truthfulness, I’d been looking forward to this moment since they’d first began talking about it a few months back. It had just been so hard to convince myself that it wouldn’t drive me over the edge; that I wouldn’t have the kind of bad reaction I’d had with the green. From what I’d researched on the internet and heard about through those who experienced it, it was nearly impossible to get bad effects so long as you were intelligent about taking it. So I did the research and talked to users. I also ensured that the specific pill I was popping was tested, because I wanted to make sure that it was what I intended it to be. With all that taken care of, I had no excuses but irrational fear; that ever-present lump in my throat. I knew I wanted this. I knew I needed this. I wanted to feel peace. I wanted to force myself to feel the connection with people and the world and beauty that I knew I had lost. I wanted to push myself to experience it to the extreme so I’d have a working memory of it. So I would know the full extent of what I’d been missing in my faithful act of wallowing in my shit.
So I swallowed that lump in my throat, and a pill along with it.
After some time of talking, Sandra and I migrated yet again into the other room. I resumed my morbid stance, trying to clear my mind of all thoughts.
“Did you take it?” A voice asked to the side of me. It was Nadia.
I nodded sheepishly. “Wow,” she said to me, smiling. “You’re gonna feel great. This is going to be the best night of your life.”
“I hope so,” I told her, and perhaps myself.
I stared at the lights for awhile, just listening, watching and waiting. I tried to control my impatience and relax my anticipation by doing as she had suggested and simply not thinking about it. It seemed to do wonders, but I was still a little anxious. I decided I’d measure the time in cigarettes: I could smoke a cigarette in about five minutes, maybe ten minutes if I took it slow. Sandra said it should take roughly thirty minutes to kick in, so I figured by four or five cigarettes it should be hitting me. A few times I thought it was kicking in, too, but every time I eventually came to settle on the fact that it was just my imagination. I came to wonder after awhile whether it would kick in at all. It was a strange thought to cross my mind, and I realized how strange it was even as it came to me, but it was an idea that I found myself considering. That would be my luck. Perhaps I was just not wired up to experience this kind of thing.
By the third or fourth cigarette my left hand and wrist was feeling extra warm and fuzzy. I must have had a weird look on my face, because Sandra asked me if I was okay. I nodded. I told her about my hand and she said not to worry, because it had happened to her before. I dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, and then lit up my fifth cigarette.
Midway through the fifth cigarette, I was de-virginized.
I remember watching the smoke float out of my mouth. The lights seemed different; the sounds seemed different. At first, it was this tremendous warmth that struck me - and then, suddenly, something even more unprecedented occurred. I actually felt the tension lift up off of me like steam from a cup of coffee. I mean that literally, too - it actually felt as if the tension just rose off my skin like a light mist.
3. Coagulatio.
Me and my body were one. Immediately, I realized
this was not a dissociative experience; it was purely associative. I didn’t feel dissociated or extremely withdrawn as I did on the green; quite to the contrary, I was pleasantly connected with my body. I couldn’t even recall what pain felt like. My senses were acute, but soft and smooth. It was a high-frequency tingling numbness that flowed out from the center of me, as if my heart chakra had finally bee turned on and turned to just the right volume. I was at complete comfort with myself and with the world.
Nadia came up to me. “Are you rolling?”
You feel as if you’ve just been told the sweetest, most beautiful truth and was left in complete awe, entirely unable to respond with an equally generous gesture. Sandra grabbed my shoulder with one hand and massaged it. Our eye contact was fixed. I felt vulnerable but trusting the feeling. Trusting myself. Trusting her. Trusting the rhythm and riding the waves of this sacred ocean of emotion I’d been so elegantly placed in. I was trusting All of This.
Nadia’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, you’re rolling hard.”
4. Caudia Pavonis.
I suddenly felt like a carefree child again, entranced by a world full of pulsating warmth, caught in a giddy happiness that escalated with every passing moment. Nadia had grabbed my hand like the innocent child I had become and told me to come with her. She brought me over toward a horseshoe of chairs in the corner. I stood there, awed by my feelings, as she was talking with some guy. I saw the guy she was talking to out of the corner of my eyes, but I wasn’t really paying attention to anything in their direction. I could vaguely make out what she was saying to him:
“It’s his first time… he’s getting to his peak…”
She suddenly grabbed my hand again, guiding me over to a chair and instructing me to sit down, which I was already in the process of doing. This skinny, happy guy with four glow-sticks in each hand - one red, one yellow, one green, and one blue - came up to me, and leaned down for eye contact.
“Okay, I’ll tell ya what I want ya to do,” he said, “I want you to just lean back, watch the lights and listen to the music, okay?”
“Okay.” I said obediently.
Nadia placed her 3-D glasses over my eyes. She breathed into my ear: “This is going to be the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.”
I leaned back in the chair and listened to the beats as, through the glasses, I saw blurry quadruples of the lights he was waving in patterns before my face seem to flow with it. The flow of feeling I had, given waves by the music, intensified with the lights. They got faster and faster, rhythm building attune with the techno-beats. I felt no fear, no paranoia. Nothing negative or fearful as I would’ve expected. I felt quite to the contrary; the polar opposite of expectation: I felt pure beauty; pure bliss. At the end, everything merged as if in a spiritual orgasm. My body, the lights, the music - it all seemed to blur and melt into one climatic experience. I was overcome with a feeling of awe, of peace, of freedom and appreciation.
I cannot truly pin down the feelings flowing through me in that moment with words. It’s difficult to do the experience justice even now as I sit here writing this in forethought, and it was absolutely impossible to try and make mental notes of them then. Sadly, a person such as I has no context for such emotions. Conveying what I was feeling seemed impossible within the confines of conventional human communication, or in the very least within the confines of the words I presently have stored in mental file. It’s hard to explain the experience without placing someone in it, and you don’t realize what this means, unfortunately, until you’ve experienced it yourself.
When it was over, I took off the 3-D glasses. My eyes were blurry. I felt them rolling. I don’t know if my eyes were merely watering or if I was crying over the beauty, and it didn’t matter - I was just bubbling with pleasure. I felt the wet around my eyes roll down my cheeks, I felt the sweat on my forehead and the rest of the perspiration on my body comfortably coating my skin. My entire being, inside and out, was weeping in this glory.
Shortly thereafter, another guy - who, like all others, smiled in excitement when informed it was my “first time” - gave me what was called a “sea breeze.” He told me to sit down and put my head between my legs and then stand up quickly. I did so. Then he blew Vix vapor-rub in my eyes and then my mouth, which he told me to inhale. Although I don’t think I did it correctly, I still felt unbelievably light and refreshed.
Nadia saw me sitting there entranced. She told me to close my eyes, and I did. I listened to the music, and as I did so the pictures and patterns I always see dancing on my eyelids when I close my eyes took on a more beautiful slant. After I opened my eyes, she said for me to lean forward on my chair, and when I did she lifted up the back of my shirt and told me to lean back again. The cold metal of the chair on my back was intensely refreshing. Then Nadia grabbed my neck and placed it on her knee, with my arms wrapped around and clutching my legs, and proceeded to rub my back. Again, it was in tune with the music. The whole world seemed to be a colorful pattern, a rhythm, a beautiful design I had fallen into and was now a part of.
5. Rosa Alba.
You suddenly realize that everything has value. You want to say I love you, but you know it’s just the drug. You want to fill your being with everything, but you cannot be greedy in your coexisting amplified empathy. You are left with graciously accepting the gift of being able to experience your being in such a beautiful way. Unable to be greedy, your intensity shifts to the other extreme - you want to share, but there, too, you met with futility. I felt that when Nadia hugged me after the light show: no matter how tightly we held our bodies, it didn’t seem enough. As good as it felt, you almost wanted to merge with the person - with her, with him, with everybody in the fucking world. You wanted your soul to merge with theirs; to be in resonance with the high sensory experience. You wanted to share the most valuable thing, and that was this rolling, tingling energy you were feeling; this happy numbness.
Since you could not, in your empathy, demand more of this feeling, and you were not able to share it, you were suddenly stricken with the unbearable urge to give thanks. To show your incomprehensible appreciation for all of this. Again, there was futility. A hug wasn’t enough for the world; a sexual favor wasn’t enough for the world; the biggest, most sincere Thank You wasn’t enough for reality; the greatest gift I could stretch to conceive couldn’t be enough for the totality of existence. I was simply lost in my attempts to find some way to show my appreciation for that moment. I couldn’t say thank you enough to the world; I couldn’t express my gratitude to the guy for doing this, or my thanks to Nadia for asking him to do this for me. I said thank you so many times that, in forethought, it makes me sick. I think I said little else.
It wasn’t just a sensory overload, either. Not only was the mind acutely aware of what the body experienced, but the body experienced nothing but pleasure. One simply was entranced by everything; in spiritual love with all of life, intimately connected with your friend, the universe at large. The hidden relationships between all of existence were lifted from the shrouds of secrecy; the rigid scope of the mundane perception was ripped wide open and one was left bathed in the light of acute awareness overcome with bliss. You were deeply inspired by every moment, uncertain as to how you’d ever be able to adequately express this seething passion - but you were also unable to grovel in it even for a nanosecond, for along came more beauty to inspire you.
Everything is new in every moment. Everything is for the first time. Every moment you are a virgin to everything, for you no longer “own” all the preceding moments. They mean absolutely nothing in essence; it’s all about living in the Now. I wasn’t just going to be all right; it was all okay - present tense. There was no past to dwell on or future to anticipate. You were completely and comfortably in the Now. You were one with the experience of simply being and appreciating the privilege. Paranoia was still there, thoughts were still there, but that was all pushed into the background. That was all insignificant. They could stay there. Who needed them? They were reflections, over-analysis, preconceptions, definitions, associations. I didn’t need these, they were too constraining. I was living in the moment. It wasn’t about remembering or anticipating. It’s simply about being, and that’s more than enough. That’s more you could ever ask for. You are on an island in a river of graceful, raw emotion. It touches you, changes you, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. You are like an gleeful, innocent child again; naked and curious.
6. Solve et Coagula.
For awhile, I was just left to be on my own. Sometimes I could sit, other times I would walk around. I could feel the music. It was like the heartbeat of life itself, vibrations dancing through my body like phantom waves.
I hung with Nick for awhile. I had just been standing around when I looked to my side and saw him wobbling there. I began to talk to him, and began explaining to him how much I’d been missing; how much I’d been ignoring. We walked around and I saw glasses and glowing things for sale. Amidst them was a glowing, plastic Gray alien. I pointed to it and looked at Nick.
“They are everywhere,” I told him. I still smiled, though.
Eventually, Sandra came over as I was sitting on a chair nearby both Nick and Nadia. After looking her way for a few moments, I stood up and asked her if I could kiss her. She nodded, and in my mind I’d hoped this wouldn’t be too awkward. Touching her lips was an ecstatic experience. The connection her and I already had, the years we had been friends, got a sensual elevation; an elegant boost. I wanted to melt into her and this beauty between us.
I walked around a bit by myself, watching and feeling. I eventually found all of them, and reentered the little circle they had formed on the dance floor. My head bobbed, my feet moved - I was sure I looked ridiculous, but I didn’t care. Sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to dance; I so wanted to be a part of that, but I suppose things like this need baby steps. As we were all together again, in that circle, I suddenly wanted to go. I did not want to say anything, however, so I decided to try something else.
I looked at Nadia, whose eyes were closed as she danced. She stopped moving suddenly, and opened her eyes and blinked a bit. It seemed as if she suddenly felt the same way, though she would have no way of knowing since she wasn’t looking my way. We both then looked at Nick, and he seemed to quickly fall into the same feeling. Then we all looked at Sandra, who was dancing, with closed eyes as well. She stopped suddenly, looked down as if waking up and then looked up at us.
“You guys want to go?” She asked, her voice revealing that she hoped we felt the same.
We all nodded. That was very strange.
The fresh air was great. I could not stop smiling: I could not stop being happy. I curled up in a little ball in the cold, and couldn’t wipe that drug-induced grin off my face. We had lifesavers in the car, and Sandra handed me one. It was absolutely the best thing I ever tasted. I leaned back, relaxed, closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep.
Everything was so beautiful.
To think, too, that this whole event almost didn’t transpire due to another one of my habitual prejudgments fueled by fear...
[ 12 March 2003: Message edited by: rewiiired ]
[Fixed paragraph spacing -Splatt]
an insanely thorough
MDMA trip report, of such a great
length that the author hopes
any readers are not annoyed
and apologises in advance,
by Rewired.
Name of subject: rewired.
Date of Experience: 11/23/01.
Drug: MDMA (tested).
Names: changed.
Time: mostly measured in cigarettes, like breaktime at work.
Background: Subject has repeated experience with non-drug-induced states of consciousness during which he falls out of body and into another realm. He also periodically sees creatures he takes to be extraterrestrial and has gotten sucked into the eyeballs of four-year-olds he conciders may not be entirely human. (Subject is aware he is a fucking loon.) Subject was in the middle of bizarre experiences and feeling very depressed and enraged at the universe and himself (as from reading Jung, he was aware he might be projecting shadow traits onto objective reality).
Objective: to feel connected again, to not hate the world for a few hours, to have a working memory of the beauty, innocence, love, and all-encompassing virginity lost with childhood.
State of subject: initially anxious and resistent.
1. Calcinatio.
After what seemed to be an eternity, the four of us had finally gotten there. We crossed the parking lot together, walked through the front doors and went up the stairs. There were numbers of people walking around and I noticed immediately that it had that care-free type of atmosphere to it. After we paid our entrance fee at the table some guy had us empty our pockets before he patted us down. It seemed as if he was “just doing his job” and he didn’t really care what we might bring in. His actions were motions without substance.
After we all got in, I felt a bit awkward. I felt like the lost puppy I had been at the first rave at the end of October; the Scorpio rave, which they brought me to as an early birthday present. I stood close to the three of them feeling out-of-place and closed off, but my eyes bounced about the room. I was certainly more intrigued with this place than the first one I’d been to. This place felt much more alive, vibrant and exciting.
We spent some in the same general area in the crowd, talking over the loud music, spying the people and watching the DJ. I did my usual people-watching. Then someone said something or motioned to a doorway in the back, and expressed curiosity as to where it lead. Slightly bored in my current environment and seeking new territory, I meandered towards that direction with Sandra right beside me. Through the door we found another room, this one smaller and darker. Automatically you could tell the change in the atmosphere, and one was almost spooked at the drastic change in vibrations from one room to the next. In here, the DJ played his music at a lower volume and a slower tempo. Everyone seemed like zombies, and bored ones at that. We both unanimously agreed to exit the room immediately and travel back to the first one.
Once returning to our circle, the three of them wobbled and danced. I stood alone smoking cigarettes with my eyes intensely scanning the room’s sea of faces, afraid to do as much as bob my head or tap my feet. Sandra would come up to me periodically and ask if I still wanted to do it. Each time I paused, and followed with a cowardly shrug and a hesitant voice that managed to form the words, "yeah, but not yet."
2. Sublimatio.
After I decided I had coughed up enough courage, I turned to Sandra and told her that I was ready. It was time. Very casually, she said to shake her hand and not to be obvious about popping it in my mouth. She suggested that I act as if I was coughing or something. For some reason the sense of reality struck me right then, like a hard blow to the face. In the climax of the moment, I was suddenly dominated by the terror of the unknown. The confidence I’d coughed up in regard to the fact that I was ready was suddenly light-years beyond my grasp. I was absolutely terrified. I shook and shrugged, suddenly getting very nervous. I tried to act calm and casual as I told her that I’d just do it later. We hung around in the circle for a few short moments before she came up to me, took me by the hand, and told me to follow her. She led me through the doorway again and into a dark corner of that dark, dead room with the zombies and slow tempo.
I again noted how strange this all was. I felt as if the tables had turned in some way. For years I’d spent a good amount of my time trying to get people to open their mind to what I’d experienced, to get them to understand all I’d seen in all it’s indescribable wonder. Now, in order to heal myself and better myself; in order to remind myself of the better parts of life here I was, trying to get myself to accept her offer to open my mind to those wondrous things she’d experienced.
In that dark corner of that dark, dead room, we found a table and sat down. We got comfortable, lay down our jackets and she placed her fist in my open palm. She told me to be careful, because it was small and I’d hardly be able to feel it. I almost thought I had it, too, but she grabbed my hand with her other hand to steady it and again repeated that it was very, very small. It was indeed a very small pill, about the size of an aspirin tablet; maybe smaller. I could hardly feel it in my hand at all.
“Now pop it in your mouth and chew it, she said. It's gonna taste really bad.
I did as I was told. As I popped it in my mouth, I realized what the whole moment reminded me of. I remembered those times in my childhood when I had been sick for some time and had to finally face up to the fact that I needed to take some medicine to help me get better. I was forced to wonder if there was more than just the act of popping a pill that associated these two events. As I chewed on it, I suddenly found myself making a face - it tasted bitter. She gave me the bottle of water she’d been clutching near her and I took a few swigs in the attempts to kill the taste. She said it would take about half an hour for it to kick in, and that I shouldn’t think about it. It was hard to keep my mind off it, but we easily slipped into a conversation, and that helped me a little.
I felt this was important in some way. Though I was anxious about what was to come, it was as if I’d embraced a certain focused apathy. In the moment before I’d popped the pill into my mouth, I decided that if I had died or had a bad reaction to it, that would be okay. If I were to have a bad reaction to it, at least I would have faced the fear head on. If I were to die, at least I wouldn’t have died in fear. That’s all it had been - fear; not a lack of desire to take the pill. In all truthfulness, I’d been looking forward to this moment since they’d first began talking about it a few months back. It had just been so hard to convince myself that it wouldn’t drive me over the edge; that I wouldn’t have the kind of bad reaction I’d had with the green. From what I’d researched on the internet and heard about through those who experienced it, it was nearly impossible to get bad effects so long as you were intelligent about taking it. So I did the research and talked to users. I also ensured that the specific pill I was popping was tested, because I wanted to make sure that it was what I intended it to be. With all that taken care of, I had no excuses but irrational fear; that ever-present lump in my throat. I knew I wanted this. I knew I needed this. I wanted to feel peace. I wanted to force myself to feel the connection with people and the world and beauty that I knew I had lost. I wanted to push myself to experience it to the extreme so I’d have a working memory of it. So I would know the full extent of what I’d been missing in my faithful act of wallowing in my shit.
So I swallowed that lump in my throat, and a pill along with it.
After some time of talking, Sandra and I migrated yet again into the other room. I resumed my morbid stance, trying to clear my mind of all thoughts.
“Did you take it?” A voice asked to the side of me. It was Nadia.
I nodded sheepishly. “Wow,” she said to me, smiling. “You’re gonna feel great. This is going to be the best night of your life.”
“I hope so,” I told her, and perhaps myself.
I stared at the lights for awhile, just listening, watching and waiting. I tried to control my impatience and relax my anticipation by doing as she had suggested and simply not thinking about it. It seemed to do wonders, but I was still a little anxious. I decided I’d measure the time in cigarettes: I could smoke a cigarette in about five minutes, maybe ten minutes if I took it slow. Sandra said it should take roughly thirty minutes to kick in, so I figured by four or five cigarettes it should be hitting me. A few times I thought it was kicking in, too, but every time I eventually came to settle on the fact that it was just my imagination. I came to wonder after awhile whether it would kick in at all. It was a strange thought to cross my mind, and I realized how strange it was even as it came to me, but it was an idea that I found myself considering. That would be my luck. Perhaps I was just not wired up to experience this kind of thing.
By the third or fourth cigarette my left hand and wrist was feeling extra warm and fuzzy. I must have had a weird look on my face, because Sandra asked me if I was okay. I nodded. I told her about my hand and she said not to worry, because it had happened to her before. I dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, and then lit up my fifth cigarette.
Midway through the fifth cigarette, I was de-virginized.
I remember watching the smoke float out of my mouth. The lights seemed different; the sounds seemed different. At first, it was this tremendous warmth that struck me - and then, suddenly, something even more unprecedented occurred. I actually felt the tension lift up off of me like steam from a cup of coffee. I mean that literally, too - it actually felt as if the tension just rose off my skin like a light mist.
3. Coagulatio.
Me and my body were one. Immediately, I realized
this was not a dissociative experience; it was purely associative. I didn’t feel dissociated or extremely withdrawn as I did on the green; quite to the contrary, I was pleasantly connected with my body. I couldn’t even recall what pain felt like. My senses were acute, but soft and smooth. It was a high-frequency tingling numbness that flowed out from the center of me, as if my heart chakra had finally bee turned on and turned to just the right volume. I was at complete comfort with myself and with the world.
Nadia came up to me. “Are you rolling?”
You feel as if you’ve just been told the sweetest, most beautiful truth and was left in complete awe, entirely unable to respond with an equally generous gesture. Sandra grabbed my shoulder with one hand and massaged it. Our eye contact was fixed. I felt vulnerable but trusting the feeling. Trusting myself. Trusting her. Trusting the rhythm and riding the waves of this sacred ocean of emotion I’d been so elegantly placed in. I was trusting All of This.
Nadia’s eyes lit up. “Yeah, you’re rolling hard.”
4. Caudia Pavonis.
I suddenly felt like a carefree child again, entranced by a world full of pulsating warmth, caught in a giddy happiness that escalated with every passing moment. Nadia had grabbed my hand like the innocent child I had become and told me to come with her. She brought me over toward a horseshoe of chairs in the corner. I stood there, awed by my feelings, as she was talking with some guy. I saw the guy she was talking to out of the corner of my eyes, but I wasn’t really paying attention to anything in their direction. I could vaguely make out what she was saying to him:
“It’s his first time… he’s getting to his peak…”
She suddenly grabbed my hand again, guiding me over to a chair and instructing me to sit down, which I was already in the process of doing. This skinny, happy guy with four glow-sticks in each hand - one red, one yellow, one green, and one blue - came up to me, and leaned down for eye contact.
“Okay, I’ll tell ya what I want ya to do,” he said, “I want you to just lean back, watch the lights and listen to the music, okay?”
“Okay.” I said obediently.
Nadia placed her 3-D glasses over my eyes. She breathed into my ear: “This is going to be the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.”
I leaned back in the chair and listened to the beats as, through the glasses, I saw blurry quadruples of the lights he was waving in patterns before my face seem to flow with it. The flow of feeling I had, given waves by the music, intensified with the lights. They got faster and faster, rhythm building attune with the techno-beats. I felt no fear, no paranoia. Nothing negative or fearful as I would’ve expected. I felt quite to the contrary; the polar opposite of expectation: I felt pure beauty; pure bliss. At the end, everything merged as if in a spiritual orgasm. My body, the lights, the music - it all seemed to blur and melt into one climatic experience. I was overcome with a feeling of awe, of peace, of freedom and appreciation.
I cannot truly pin down the feelings flowing through me in that moment with words. It’s difficult to do the experience justice even now as I sit here writing this in forethought, and it was absolutely impossible to try and make mental notes of them then. Sadly, a person such as I has no context for such emotions. Conveying what I was feeling seemed impossible within the confines of conventional human communication, or in the very least within the confines of the words I presently have stored in mental file. It’s hard to explain the experience without placing someone in it, and you don’t realize what this means, unfortunately, until you’ve experienced it yourself.
When it was over, I took off the 3-D glasses. My eyes were blurry. I felt them rolling. I don’t know if my eyes were merely watering or if I was crying over the beauty, and it didn’t matter - I was just bubbling with pleasure. I felt the wet around my eyes roll down my cheeks, I felt the sweat on my forehead and the rest of the perspiration on my body comfortably coating my skin. My entire being, inside and out, was weeping in this glory.
Shortly thereafter, another guy - who, like all others, smiled in excitement when informed it was my “first time” - gave me what was called a “sea breeze.” He told me to sit down and put my head between my legs and then stand up quickly. I did so. Then he blew Vix vapor-rub in my eyes and then my mouth, which he told me to inhale. Although I don’t think I did it correctly, I still felt unbelievably light and refreshed.
Nadia saw me sitting there entranced. She told me to close my eyes, and I did. I listened to the music, and as I did so the pictures and patterns I always see dancing on my eyelids when I close my eyes took on a more beautiful slant. After I opened my eyes, she said for me to lean forward on my chair, and when I did she lifted up the back of my shirt and told me to lean back again. The cold metal of the chair on my back was intensely refreshing. Then Nadia grabbed my neck and placed it on her knee, with my arms wrapped around and clutching my legs, and proceeded to rub my back. Again, it was in tune with the music. The whole world seemed to be a colorful pattern, a rhythm, a beautiful design I had fallen into and was now a part of.
5. Rosa Alba.
You suddenly realize that everything has value. You want to say I love you, but you know it’s just the drug. You want to fill your being with everything, but you cannot be greedy in your coexisting amplified empathy. You are left with graciously accepting the gift of being able to experience your being in such a beautiful way. Unable to be greedy, your intensity shifts to the other extreme - you want to share, but there, too, you met with futility. I felt that when Nadia hugged me after the light show: no matter how tightly we held our bodies, it didn’t seem enough. As good as it felt, you almost wanted to merge with the person - with her, with him, with everybody in the fucking world. You wanted your soul to merge with theirs; to be in resonance with the high sensory experience. You wanted to share the most valuable thing, and that was this rolling, tingling energy you were feeling; this happy numbness.
Since you could not, in your empathy, demand more of this feeling, and you were not able to share it, you were suddenly stricken with the unbearable urge to give thanks. To show your incomprehensible appreciation for all of this. Again, there was futility. A hug wasn’t enough for the world; a sexual favor wasn’t enough for the world; the biggest, most sincere Thank You wasn’t enough for reality; the greatest gift I could stretch to conceive couldn’t be enough for the totality of existence. I was simply lost in my attempts to find some way to show my appreciation for that moment. I couldn’t say thank you enough to the world; I couldn’t express my gratitude to the guy for doing this, or my thanks to Nadia for asking him to do this for me. I said thank you so many times that, in forethought, it makes me sick. I think I said little else.
It wasn’t just a sensory overload, either. Not only was the mind acutely aware of what the body experienced, but the body experienced nothing but pleasure. One simply was entranced by everything; in spiritual love with all of life, intimately connected with your friend, the universe at large. The hidden relationships between all of existence were lifted from the shrouds of secrecy; the rigid scope of the mundane perception was ripped wide open and one was left bathed in the light of acute awareness overcome with bliss. You were deeply inspired by every moment, uncertain as to how you’d ever be able to adequately express this seething passion - but you were also unable to grovel in it even for a nanosecond, for along came more beauty to inspire you.
Everything is new in every moment. Everything is for the first time. Every moment you are a virgin to everything, for you no longer “own” all the preceding moments. They mean absolutely nothing in essence; it’s all about living in the Now. I wasn’t just going to be all right; it was all okay - present tense. There was no past to dwell on or future to anticipate. You were completely and comfortably in the Now. You were one with the experience of simply being and appreciating the privilege. Paranoia was still there, thoughts were still there, but that was all pushed into the background. That was all insignificant. They could stay there. Who needed them? They were reflections, over-analysis, preconceptions, definitions, associations. I didn’t need these, they were too constraining. I was living in the moment. It wasn’t about remembering or anticipating. It’s simply about being, and that’s more than enough. That’s more you could ever ask for. You are on an island in a river of graceful, raw emotion. It touches you, changes you, and you wouldn’t have it any other way. You are like an gleeful, innocent child again; naked and curious.
6. Solve et Coagula.
For awhile, I was just left to be on my own. Sometimes I could sit, other times I would walk around. I could feel the music. It was like the heartbeat of life itself, vibrations dancing through my body like phantom waves.
I hung with Nick for awhile. I had just been standing around when I looked to my side and saw him wobbling there. I began to talk to him, and began explaining to him how much I’d been missing; how much I’d been ignoring. We walked around and I saw glasses and glowing things for sale. Amidst them was a glowing, plastic Gray alien. I pointed to it and looked at Nick.
“They are everywhere,” I told him. I still smiled, though.
Eventually, Sandra came over as I was sitting on a chair nearby both Nick and Nadia. After looking her way for a few moments, I stood up and asked her if I could kiss her. She nodded, and in my mind I’d hoped this wouldn’t be too awkward. Touching her lips was an ecstatic experience. The connection her and I already had, the years we had been friends, got a sensual elevation; an elegant boost. I wanted to melt into her and this beauty between us.
I walked around a bit by myself, watching and feeling. I eventually found all of them, and reentered the little circle they had formed on the dance floor. My head bobbed, my feet moved - I was sure I looked ridiculous, but I didn’t care. Sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to dance; I so wanted to be a part of that, but I suppose things like this need baby steps. As we were all together again, in that circle, I suddenly wanted to go. I did not want to say anything, however, so I decided to try something else.
I looked at Nadia, whose eyes were closed as she danced. She stopped moving suddenly, and opened her eyes and blinked a bit. It seemed as if she suddenly felt the same way, though she would have no way of knowing since she wasn’t looking my way. We both then looked at Nick, and he seemed to quickly fall into the same feeling. Then we all looked at Sandra, who was dancing, with closed eyes as well. She stopped suddenly, looked down as if waking up and then looked up at us.
“You guys want to go?” She asked, her voice revealing that she hoped we felt the same.
We all nodded. That was very strange.
The fresh air was great. I could not stop smiling: I could not stop being happy. I curled up in a little ball in the cold, and couldn’t wipe that drug-induced grin off my face. We had lifesavers in the car, and Sandra handed me one. It was absolutely the best thing I ever tasted. I leaned back, relaxed, closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep.
Everything was so beautiful.
To think, too, that this whole event almost didn’t transpire due to another one of my habitual prejudgments fueled by fear...
[ 12 March 2003: Message edited by: rewiiired ]
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Thankyou for posting and sharing your experience. 
