titus
Rising Star
I had this experience with 4g subaeruginosa in silent darkness maybe two weeks ago but I've only just decided to actually try and put what I remember to paper. What follows is taken from my notebook, and are simply the main points I was able to recall. These are not necessarily in chronological order.
- Dark room, dark creature. It notices me. Dreamlike, not too vivid, but nonetheless quite 'there'. I leave quickly. I have no place there.
- It's as if a shift in energy has produced an entirely new set of chaotic attractors, points of localised meaning and form. A sudden sense of being in the presence of multiple 'others', which are purring and singing at the same time, strange alien voices fluttering up and down. Strong geometry, with multiple pillars – thin at the base, then expanding out like a wine-glass – flowing with pattern and colour (note here; even during the experience I couldn't quite make out the connection between these 'others' and the visions I was seeing. It was as if the auditory and tactile/spacial aspect was detached from the visual. This could be on the account of the whole episode being very 'unstable', i.e. form was not able to settle and produce coherent meaning). The entities were feminine, seemingly benign but mostly just neutral. They were simply acknowledging me.
- Then, descent. Crushing press of bodies, stinking flesh, blood. Thick, sharp metal shards, like an axe-head shattered into large pieces. Dull olive green. Red plaid shirts. Violent and accusatory men with sagging skin, wild eyes and short stubble. My head is being crushed by the rancid hoof of a predator. All of it is coming at me down a suffocatingly thin corridor, lit dark, dull red, the walls formed quite organically, like skin over flesh. No discrete entities, but simply a flood of images, and in this sense is very acid-like.
- Brief interlude as I break in on some kind of circus; two clowns welcome me exuberantly. Striped, frilled clothing. Limbs like slinkies. Faces were like that of no regular clown – very angular, alien. They are putting on a show, but the horror returns and concentrated meaning again fails and breaks down into flowing images.
- A dark-skinned woman, tribal appearance – bone through the nasal bridge, etc. She is chanting/wailing, staring straight at me with electrifying intensity; no blinking, her head and neck spasm periodically. Her head is massive. Around her is a cacophony of chaotic images. I can't make them out, but there is a sense that we are moving forward; I am facing the woman, who is moving forward. She is almost hovering; it feels like a slow moving roller-coaster moving backward.
Despite the fact that I spent only a small paragraph on the most horrific aspects of the trip, these in fact made up the majority of the experience. I simply don't remember much of this. It was, like a mentioned, a formless flow of images, and at this point I had been mentally battered enough that I was no longer capable of 'bringing myself' to the experience. Rather, it had begun to close in on me, and I was just trying to ride it out. There were these brief assemblings of meaning that I was accustomed to with mushrooms (i.e. visions of complex objects, autonomous entities, etc. that in this case took the form of the singing things and the circus), but they very quickly collapsed, as if swept away by a driving force. In retrospect, I think this was actually my own warped attention span; I realised once the trip had largely subsided that my dopamine circuitry was seriously tangled and wired for immediate-relief, no-effort activity as a result of spending a lot of time frying my brain on various media/brain-poisons. I began eating the food I had made for myself prior to the trip, and realised that for a long time, due to this warped attention, I had just been shoveling food into my mouth with very little thought to the food itself; I sat down and spent a long time slowly chewing, feeling the texture of the food, the subtleties in taste. It occurs to me now that doing something like watching youtube videos every day for hours on end is not very different at all from drinking heavily every day, or really just being addicted to any other drug. It just isn't generally seen that way. Which makes the very existence of these media forms seem all the more immoral and insulting – if an international, hyper-wealthy corporation began marketing heroin to billions worldwide, and deliberately trying to get as many people as possible hooked on the drug (with children being a not insubstantial part of their target market), this would raise more than a few hackles. But this is essentially what is being done, and a mind-boggling amount of money is being made. Nevermind that these very same corporations are also using their access to you to mine you for all your personal information for sale to persons unknown...
That was somewhat of a digression, but this was more or less what was bouncing around my head after I had had a warm bath to calm my nerves and take the intensity down a notch. Despite the pretty stomach-churning contents of the trip, these didn't really stay with me, and didn't make as big of a dent as I thought they would. It was more the focus on my own capability to focus that did. Any thoughts, comments, whathaveyous?
- Dark room, dark creature. It notices me. Dreamlike, not too vivid, but nonetheless quite 'there'. I leave quickly. I have no place there.
- It's as if a shift in energy has produced an entirely new set of chaotic attractors, points of localised meaning and form. A sudden sense of being in the presence of multiple 'others', which are purring and singing at the same time, strange alien voices fluttering up and down. Strong geometry, with multiple pillars – thin at the base, then expanding out like a wine-glass – flowing with pattern and colour (note here; even during the experience I couldn't quite make out the connection between these 'others' and the visions I was seeing. It was as if the auditory and tactile/spacial aspect was detached from the visual. This could be on the account of the whole episode being very 'unstable', i.e. form was not able to settle and produce coherent meaning). The entities were feminine, seemingly benign but mostly just neutral. They were simply acknowledging me.
- Then, descent. Crushing press of bodies, stinking flesh, blood. Thick, sharp metal shards, like an axe-head shattered into large pieces. Dull olive green. Red plaid shirts. Violent and accusatory men with sagging skin, wild eyes and short stubble. My head is being crushed by the rancid hoof of a predator. All of it is coming at me down a suffocatingly thin corridor, lit dark, dull red, the walls formed quite organically, like skin over flesh. No discrete entities, but simply a flood of images, and in this sense is very acid-like.
- Brief interlude as I break in on some kind of circus; two clowns welcome me exuberantly. Striped, frilled clothing. Limbs like slinkies. Faces were like that of no regular clown – very angular, alien. They are putting on a show, but the horror returns and concentrated meaning again fails and breaks down into flowing images.
- A dark-skinned woman, tribal appearance – bone through the nasal bridge, etc. She is chanting/wailing, staring straight at me with electrifying intensity; no blinking, her head and neck spasm periodically. Her head is massive. Around her is a cacophony of chaotic images. I can't make them out, but there is a sense that we are moving forward; I am facing the woman, who is moving forward. She is almost hovering; it feels like a slow moving roller-coaster moving backward.
Despite the fact that I spent only a small paragraph on the most horrific aspects of the trip, these in fact made up the majority of the experience. I simply don't remember much of this. It was, like a mentioned, a formless flow of images, and at this point I had been mentally battered enough that I was no longer capable of 'bringing myself' to the experience. Rather, it had begun to close in on me, and I was just trying to ride it out. There were these brief assemblings of meaning that I was accustomed to with mushrooms (i.e. visions of complex objects, autonomous entities, etc. that in this case took the form of the singing things and the circus), but they very quickly collapsed, as if swept away by a driving force. In retrospect, I think this was actually my own warped attention span; I realised once the trip had largely subsided that my dopamine circuitry was seriously tangled and wired for immediate-relief, no-effort activity as a result of spending a lot of time frying my brain on various media/brain-poisons. I began eating the food I had made for myself prior to the trip, and realised that for a long time, due to this warped attention, I had just been shoveling food into my mouth with very little thought to the food itself; I sat down and spent a long time slowly chewing, feeling the texture of the food, the subtleties in taste. It occurs to me now that doing something like watching youtube videos every day for hours on end is not very different at all from drinking heavily every day, or really just being addicted to any other drug. It just isn't generally seen that way. Which makes the very existence of these media forms seem all the more immoral and insulting – if an international, hyper-wealthy corporation began marketing heroin to billions worldwide, and deliberately trying to get as many people as possible hooked on the drug (with children being a not insubstantial part of their target market), this would raise more than a few hackles. But this is essentially what is being done, and a mind-boggling amount of money is being made. Nevermind that these very same corporations are also using their access to you to mine you for all your personal information for sale to persons unknown...
That was somewhat of a digression, but this was more or less what was bouncing around my head after I had had a warm bath to calm my nerves and take the intensity down a notch. Despite the pretty stomach-churning contents of the trip, these didn't really stay with me, and didn't make as big of a dent as I thought they would. It was more the focus on my own capability to focus that did. Any thoughts, comments, whathaveyous?
