My Experiences With Psychoactive Substance - Part One - Ayahuasca - Disposition

This post includes discussion about the use of psychoactive substances. Please do not take my statements on dosage, effect, benefits, or any other quality of a drug as directions or suggestions. The use of psychoactive substances presents immediate and long-term risks every time they are ingested.

It was a warm weeknight in midwestern suburbia. Everything was quiet up and down the street at around 11 pm when my friend, T (that's what we'll call him), came in the back door like we had arranged. I'd been swimming earlier that day with a friend, and then I came back to my parent's house to relax for the night when I got a call from T saying he found a cup of ayahuasca tea that he had left at a friend's house. Little did I know that in a few hours, this small red solo cup of a strange amazonian brew was going to change the course of my life.

As I mentioned in my introduction post, I had just recently been put on drug testing by the local government for two years, and I was looking for highs that couldn't show up on a test. I was headed down a very bad path at this point in my life, battling with depression and social anxiety, and by 15, I was very forward (at least in my own mind) about being able to use drugs to escape reality. Luckily, I lived in an area and had a family that didn't have worse drug problems present, because I think I easily could have ended up an opiate addict or something in a different timeline. By the time I had been arrested and put on hair testing, I had tried alcohol, cannabis, and adderall (amphetamine), but after I attempted to try and appreciate any sort of "high" from adderall I decided I liked it more as a study drug.

I don't really keep up with T anymore and we never got extremely close, which is too bad really, because I never got to talk to him more about how he discovered the psychedelic world and how it all came to him. I do know that when he was about 16, he and his friends learned about a website called erowid.org, which he also clued me in on. This site became my best friend for months, and is certainly still a highly regarded colleague of mine. Erowid is one of the best and most unbiased sources for information about all sorts of altered states of mind. It's a huge database of tons of information, from the chemical name of xanax, to the Abrahamic perspectives on fasting. I would highly recommend spending some time there if you're interested! Because of this website, I was immediately able to bridge some sort of connection between different altered states, something I never even realized had been talked about. I quickly found out that not only were psychedelic drugs some of the most commonly used "untestable" substances, but they also had a significant history in helping a lot of people deal with the issues I was dealing with.

However, I was in high school... And LSD and mushrooms don't make it into America's public school systems (haha, just kidding, but I didn't know that yet). I figured I wasn't going to come across my chance to try a psychedelic for years until T told me that there are several psychdelics that can be procured from the internet. He didn't even mention the research chemical market that was much more open and a little bit safer at this time. Although it can still be found on the web, getting Mimosa hostilis root bark by the Kg (high DMT content) was as easy as ordering it off Amazon.com back then. So I began to read all about ingesting orally activated DMT for weeks.

I want to interject here to clarify that many people call any form of oral DMT, "ayahuasca". That could include eating an MAOI followed by powder/crystalline DMT, which would not include a tea at all (it's often called "pharmahuasca"). Many people are also very offended not only by the westernization that surrounds ayahuasca usage, but some even specifically see "ayahuasca" only in one traditional form that contains B. caapi (the vine of the souls) and P. viridis. (chacruna). There are minor psychoactive alkaloids in different plants, so I suppose there is some scientific evidence for differentiating as well. For these reasons, I try to always refer to it as oral DMT or orally activated DMT just to be clear. I believe what I did in this first experience was a brew made strictly from Mimosa hostilis root bark if you're curious.

Well just as I started spending time looking into whether I wanted to order that or something else to my parent's house, T remembered that he and his friends did some experimenting months before and they had some tea left over. A couple of days later, I got that call from him and decided it was the right night.

When I was very young, I was a Catholic. My family raised me that way, and until I was around 10 years old, I believed in most or all of the teachings of the religion. At some point, the glaring holes in the doctrine started becoming more and more apparent, to the point where I suddenly became godless. I went through the typical broad rejection of religion after this, and spent a lot of time watching atheism videos and exploring that culture. Before long, it became clear that there were conceptions of god that were really different from the Abrahamic ideas of God. After a few years though, I was quite bored with the subject, after settling on the fact that whatever god-like being(s) that might exist sure doesn't care about me or affect my life. I was past skeptical, fully cynical, and pretty much disinterested with supernatural phenomena and spirituality.

Stumbling upon DMT had me open back up to this realm due to the overwhelming amount of supernatural and spiritual/religious associations with it. I'd heard about vision quests, I'd heard about LSD religions, I'd heard about communicating with otherworldly beings and learning mystical information, but this time, there was actually depth to people's experiences. Not to say those other things I named are phony or don't have depth (at this point there was no way I would have even understood all the things these experiences entail), but what I read about ayahuasca experiences made it sound like "the real thing". People were having intensely mystical experiences with nearly every dose, not just taking a hit of acid and enjoying a Phish show.

The point of elaborating on my religious beliefs is to just give a little context to my thoughts throughout this experience. From what I've read (this might be changing with the shift in oral DMT usage), oral DMT is most often used with spiritual or religious intentions. It's very much associated with tribal and new-age belief systems, both of which I rejected and still do to a certain degree (I'm factionless, remember?). South American tribes used it for healing, communicating with the spirit world for a variety of reasons, for hunting and war rituals, and several other uses that I'm sure have been lost to the prehistoric ages. New-agers often expect to find some degree of spiritual enlightenment from the experience. I didn't know what I was looking for, and unless I had taken the leap of faith, I probably never would have. I was looking to squeeze something out of life since it seemed to have nothing to offer me for so long. I was only 16, but I'd felt like I'd already ran through all the exciting and meaningful things that people do in life, at least in my imagination if not for real. They all seemed useless and full of imaginary value that misled humans assigned them. I knew somewhere in my mind that if anything was going to change my mind about my life and the world, it would be this strange amazonian tea.

Of course, with my anti-religious mindset, I went against many recommendations I'd seen online, including the thousands of years of tradition regarding purifying the body and mind prior to the ingestion that was often cited, and did basically no preparation for the experience. Many of these suggestions have both pharmacological and spiritual intentions. It's said that you're supposed to do fasts for some time before using it, leading up to a full 24 hours or more before you take it. Well I saw this as a fail-safe for ingesting as much psychoactive material as possible, and decided that with my fast metabolism, eating breakfast and a light lunch would be fine if I waited until late that night to dose. They say that when not fasting, one should eat lightly. I read how many shamans would only eat rice and chicken, unseasoned. Low fat, low/no sugar, low salt, low/no spices, and possibly vegan was the most common diet I saw. I couldn't be farther from this being an average junk food eating American. And of course, the mental preparations were completely lost on me. I hadn't consciously meditated for an hour of my life, and saw little value in the act. Not every form of mental preparation I've seen is strictly meditation, but they all include self-evaluation, awareness, and general reflection of one's life and perspectives, but I was very unaware in so many ways and had spent plenty of time reflecting on the worst parts of myself, so I definitely skipped this step.

There are many people out there (I have met some) who would be disgusted or even scold me for my treatment of this sacred plant. Hell, I had nothing to do with the preparation itself. Normally there's some sort of connection there, but I just had a friend who forgot it in a closet for months. As much as hippies want to believe in the karmic side of things like this, I can say with certainty that even a spoiled, upper-middle class, self-centered, white boy can metaphorically spit on thousands of years of tradition, but DMT will still just see you as a sack of conscious molecules and do its job accordingly.

So here we were, sitting in my room with a small cup of smelly brown liquid and a bag of Syrian Rue seeds. For those who are inexperienced, DMT is not readily available to your body through digestion. The stomach produces enzymes called monoamine oxidases (MAO's) that break down substances like DMT. Plants like Syrian Rue have monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI's) that make it perfectly simple to dose DMT by mouth.

WARNING: MAOI'S ARE DANGEROUS WHEN COMBINED WITH SSRI'S (COMMON PHARMACEUTICALS) PLEASE BE CAREFUL

So I wrapped up about 5 grams of Syrian Rue in little makeshift toilet paper parachutes, to avoid having to taste the disgusting seeds. About 20 minutes later, a little before 11:30, I drank the tea down. After this we sat and talked for a little while. T asked me if I wanted to take a walk around outside because that's how he often enjoyed starting trips, so around midnight we left out the back door and walked out onto the greens of the nearby golf course. About the time I set foot on the driving range, my stomach started turning, as is common with oral DMT. A few minutes later, my head starts swimming, and actually hurting a little bit. I get more nauseous and tell T that some strange things are happening. he asks if we need to head inside or sit down, but I think I'm alright. I start feeling my head get lighter and lighter and my stomach hurts more and more. The dull pain in my head swells into a full blown migraine (something I've never gotten). I close my eyes and I see bright swirling purples and blues that begin to form into random patterns. I open my eyes somewhat in disbelief, never before having closed-eyed visuals like that. I tell T that things are beginning to feel weird. I close my eyes again, and suddenly I see a skull form out of the nether and these swirling, boxy, voodoo-like patterns behind it with the pain in my head pounding.

Then all of a sudden, the pain starts fading along with the nausea, and more strangely, the hallucinations. I'm now standing with T out on the green feeling very confused and sober, although a little relieved that those uncomfortable feelings subsided. I'd been nervous about dealing with the vomiting that is just expected with this kind of experience. I explained to him what had just happened and he seemed more confused than me, and suggested we go inside. We head back in, sit down on the couch, and turn on the TV. As an old episode of Family Guy comes on about halfway through, I'm a little distracted with the experience I wasn't having. I go and talk to my sister and her friend about what I attempted to do that night, and they were both more shocked than I expected they would be, not quite understanding the gravity of a 16 year old experimenting with what is arguably the strongest psychoactive substance in existence. I told them that it seemed like nothing was going to happen because the tea was expected to have possibly gone bad anyway. But there were two things that really struck me from the conversation: My sister's friend explaining how him and his friend were dying to try DMT because you could supposedly communicate with aliens, and him saying that it was "about to kick my ass".

I laughed if off and went back out into the other room to sit with T and watch Family Guy. Still mulling over the strange sequence of events that just took place, I sat quietly, hardly watching. About 5 minutes later, past 12:30 now, I begin to feel my eyelids get extremely heavy. I quickly bend to their will and very clearly see a hallway with yellowish stone walls and no floor or ceiling, just darkness. I open my eyes, amazed to see the room in front of my still appear normal even though I just saw this vision as clearly as a lucid dream. I close my eyes again, and there's something floating in the same hallway I just saw that just looks like a thick, gold, horizontal line at the moment. I feel like I need to lay down. I open my eyes, still everything appears normal. T is sitting across from me on the other couch watching Family Guy and looking fairly sleepy. I lean over, and lay down across the couch, closing my eyes. Immediately, I see the object turn in a similar orientation to how I just turned sideways and laid down, but in a mirrored fashion. As it turned towards me, I could begin to make out that I was looking at what appeared to be an Egyptian sarcophagus, although with my travels in the middle east, I could sort of tell that it didn't look like the same styles I'd seen before. It was definitely freshly made too, almost entirely bright gleaming gold, and inlaid with a deep green trim that danced around the whole coffin. Upon realizing what I was looking at, I started observing it, and immediately my vision was zooming into parts of it, and I could see that the green trim was actually lines of very tiny numbers, that were inscribed all over, no doubt some kind of pattern or message. As I begin to feel very confused about what I'm seeing, I also wonder what's inside of this unique sarcophagus that I've been presented with. Almost on queue, it slowly creaks open, and I see nothing inside. not even a floor to it for a body to lay on. Just the golden sides, and emptiness.

So at this point I'm sufficiently freaked out. So far, I've felt nothing but some pain and discomfort, but no "trippy" feelings or whatever I thought I was expecting. As far as hallucinations, they'd been so simple and strange, I wasn't sure if I was just tired and letting my mind wander, and secretly I had hoped this was true, because all I had seen were fairly morbid things (skulls and coffins...). A thought creeps into my unconscious mind that maybe there really are otherworldly spirits or beings that communicate through this chemical, and they've already foreseen my death on this night.

I open my eyes and everything still appears normal. I decide that I need to go to my room, maybe to relax, or just reflect on what I'd just witnessed. I told T, who assumed I was just tired here at one in the morning, and got up to head down the hallway.

But after just a few steps, it's apparent that everything is not normal. In fact it started to feel like I was the only normal thing present, as my hallway starts to twist and turn in front of me, elongating as well. Gravity bends to the hallway's shape, and I'm pulled from side to side as I stumble towards my door. I open the door to my room, and I'm greeted with the music I left on earlier, a playlist I left on repeat earlier that was playing 7 or 8 songs by Muse. I leave the light off, give in to my legs that can barely hold me up now, and collapse onto my bed. I'm feeling a lot more confused and lost than I was a few minutes ago, when suddenly I notice that the song that was on was one I had been practicing on drums for weeks, Stockholm Syndrome (highly recommended if you haven't heard it). I knew the feel of this song forwards and backwards, so it was very apparent when I noticed that the song was playing twice as fast as it normally does. I told myself that my iPod must be bugging or something because there was no way this was possible, it was even pitch adjusted. Spoiler alert: I was already tripping much harder than I could have guessed.

This is where things get really weird, really fast. I honestly don't have a clear memory from front to back of what happened, so expect this explanation to get more and more abstract. The music was playing twice as fast as the 1000 times I'd heard these songs before, and the hallucinations started rolling in, ushering in a trance-like state that kept my waking mind from making clear choices. Whenever I could break free of this spell, and look around, I would check my clock, which, much to my horror, was moving slower and slower. Time was slowly (if it's possible for time to do things slowly) fading away from my existence, and the implications of a mortal in the third dimension becoming timeless was absolutely terrifying. At first it took a couple minutes for a minute to pass, which wasn't the strangest thing, I always felt that way while I was at school. Then it took five minutes for a minute to pass. Then ten, then twenty, and somewhere between then and taking an hour for each minute, I essentially lost consciousness to the drug.

In between my anxiety about these physical impossibilities and having meditative states forced over me like a blindfold, wild hallucinations were teasing me. I would close my eyes for a few seconds and spend several minutes in all sorts of strange places, some rather mundane, some unrealistic, and some were completely alien. I blink and I'm in a dark room with no borders on top of a large purple orb. Looking around me, I see that there are similar purple orbs equidistant from each other that stretch off into infinity in every direction. This particular place retroactively sits in my mind as Indra's Net since I learned about this mythology more recently. Indeed, the picture on the wikipedia page looks eerily like the place I visited. I blink and I suddenly feel like I'm in a Metal Gear game, hiding from demonic enemies that seem to be telepathically linked to my thoughts.

As time loses meaning, and I begin to be taken out of my body repeatedly, I consequently lost almost any sense of chronology with these events. There were essentially three parts to this experience that I can clearly say happened first, second, and third, but quite a bit happened in each of those periods of time. In this first period, I was becoming rapidly unaware of what was happening, though I was still mostly conscious. Even though it began to feel like I was experiencing hours of closed-eye visuals or unconsciousness, my clock indicated that none of these bouts lasted more than a minute or two. Although I'm not sure of order, the visions definitely were ramping up in intensity. They kept getting more frightening, and reality shredding. In fact, at one point, I remembered opening my eyes, seeing only in monochrome, and jagged line divided my vision in two diagonally, quickly ripping reality at the seams. The two large fragments of what I saw in front of me (my bed and walls) fell apart in front of a black backdrop, and with my eyes wide open, I was essentially blind, seeing only darkness.

I remember visiting a temple of sorts a few times, or at least the winding corridors of one. It was old and empty, the halls curving up, down, left, and right, obviously conforming to the landscape it was set in that was breaking through the yellow stone in form of trees, vines, dirt, and water. I never found much wandering through it, although it reminded me a lot of the Chozo Ruin from Metroid Prime. I loved this game when I played it as a kid, but never really delved into the lore behind the story that I found extremely interesting after this experience. The Chozo were a race of humanoids from another planet. One group of them split and went to another planet to hopefully return to the ancient Chozo spirituality that had been lost over thousands of years. They went to this new planet, abandoned almost all of their technology, living very close to the land, and then ultimately transcended their mortal forms. Obviously this lore was inspired by lots of modern spiritual movements, something I never even knew about until I went and read into it.

I can't stress enough how realistic all of these hallucinations were. The difference between things I saw with my eyes closed and open became almost indistinguishable. Every form of synesthesia crept in, disorienting my senses, leaving me unable to discern what was real and what wasn't. I was tasting shapes, seeing smells, hearing sights, and being utterly baffled by how impossible it all felt. Suddenly I was actually able to see around my room. Everything was illuminated by a glowing ribbon of gold that floated through the air all around me. I'm not even positive my eyes were open, judging by the was I remember feeling this with all of my senses. For some reason this sight really triggered my thoughts about time and my situation. I believed in some way that the gold ribbon was some sort of representation of time that was actually there all the time, but simply out of sight for humans and our limited sensory perception. Since I had broken my place in the timeline somehow, and time was freezing, I was now able to see this hanging in front of me.

I'm not sure exactly what happened in between then and this next part, but this is really a climactic time in the experience. This experience breaks down into 3 sections in my mind, the first effects and recognition of it was the first section. Time's eventual pause and the following event make up the start of the second section. As I came to fully understand how hard I was tripping, the scary stories that we're all told about psychedelics began to manifest in my head. People jump out windows, they go crazy for the rest of their lives, they say things to their parents that they shouldn't, etc. Well, I'm already somewhat certain that time slowing down to this point was an indication of what would soon be an extended bout of insanity, so I've immediately begun picturing the many thousands of ways I could accidentally harm myself. The images of my demise became lifelike in my mind. My imagination was breaking into my actual senses and it became hard to know whether or not I was still lying on my bed. The scenes developed into a situation where I was far past the type of unconsciousness I was in now, to fully believing my mindless body might be walking around searching for a way to put itself out of the misery the mind had chosen to place it in.

I started to see and feel flashing gruesome images of myself committing suicide or simply dying. I fell into a pit of spikes and was impaled. I was beaten to death by people I'd pissed off. I overdosed on pharmaceuticals. I was hit by a car in the street. Torn apart by animals. I felt all of this and much more as I was lying on my bed crying. Then, as time's slowing progression was reaching its asymptotic limit, I spoke words out loud as one final vision displayed itself for me: "I wouldn't even know if I had a gun to my head right now and pulled the trigger". As the word "trigger" came out, I saw myself standing in a white room, pistol pressed to the side of my head, also uttering the word as my finger squeezed. The gunpowder blew, and the bullet slowly tore through my skull and then brain, exiting the other side in a bloody, gory mess; a tragedy that I don't think I could ever possibly witness as intimately again in my life.

Everything went to black immediately. I don't just mean the scenery now, there was nothing. If I could ever "imagine" death (an impossibility I don't have time to get into), this was it. Eternal darkness, with no consciousness, feeling, or anything. It's strange that I feel so bound to sharing the story and using the right words when there were times like this that essentially didn't even happen. As I just said, this was eternal darkness. I died and I am gone forever.

But then at some point (or was it instantly? Or was it billions of years later?) I was there again. No consciousness, only sensory input. It wasn't really I because I wasn't even really there to experience the senses. Although I've now had the better part of a decade to look into what happened to me, these subjects are very hard to talk about and clearly communicate, but if I understand correctly, I was experiencing one of the most extreme forms of ego death imaginable. This was a concept I had only briefly been acquainted with in my all-too-short study of this drug. My descriptions may become a bit hard to understand, slightly contradicting, or just written totally wrong in this section, because this was seriously the most inhuman experience I have endured to this day. Throughout this whole section, until I regained full awareness of myself, there was no thought. Senses came in completely blended together, and I was escorted to different places in space and time to take in what was on display, but I can't stress enough how alien everything felt. Even the "self" I was now associated with was by no means human, but did seem physical, but also defied any law of physicality.

So what was my ego-less, body-less, self doing now? My senses slowly faded back in (no thoughts attached), and I found my "self" floating through the vast expanse of space. I felt like a cloud of some sort. Ethereal but still physically there. I floated aimlessly and thoughtlessly for eons (although time was still stopped I believe so maybe it was only for a moment). This is always the most mind-boggling part of the trip when I talk with people about it. When you smoke cannabis the first few times, you might notice that the past hour felt super long. When you take a decent dose of LSD or mushrooms, it might feel like the trip lasted a whole day. A strong dose and maybe it feels like a few days or a week. Take a strong dose of ayahuasca and apparently it can feel like millenia. I don't even believe myself anymore when I say it, I just say it because I know my brain believed it, and how much farther does reality go than that?

After endlessly floating through the cosmos, I began to feel myself fading into a new place. There was gold light, airy clouds, and cool blue skies, but no ground. I felt a powerful and benevolent figure around me and remember having some sort of communion with it. After another timeless expanse, I faded from this place into its counterpart, where I felt trapped in stone and fire. I saw shadows of demonic figures on the walls, and felt the presence of raw evil. I felt like I was here for ages as well, before once again finding my"self" floating in space.

After another few eons of drifting, I remember feeling all of the sensations I was barely having slowly peter out until there was just white space everywhere. Pure silence and stillness. Eventually, I was greeted out of nowhere (which is exactly where I was) by a large orb right in front of me. It was the darkest thing I've ever seen, and somehow appeared denser than anything I'd ever observed. It sat in front of me swirling and rippling gently for what felt like years as I stared deeply into it. This strange event slowly faded away again as I went for the ride of my life through things I still can't quite believe humans can experience.

Honestly, the bulk of the experience for what I believe was the next hour or two is pretty much completely erased from my memory. I only really remember sensations and feelings and a few glimpses of wild psychedelic landscapes. I flew through a dark jungle at night and saw the big cats prowling. I was squeezed through the roots and stems of plants. I walked through a city that was made of pure energy, nothing physical. I saw civilizations rise and fall. I lived in a closet of a room in some sort of techy dystopian future. I communed with otherworldly beings whose presences alone brought enlightenment. I felt as though I experienced every feeling and every thing there was to experience. While I have found that my bewildered state made me underestimate the range of experiences the universe has to offer, I definitely did go through profound depths and life-changing highs emotionally, and everything in between.

Suddenly I heard a voice. A voice that was saying my name. I heard waves crashing, and felt my body again. My actual body, not the ones my consciousness had been getting dropped into at random. I felt like I was lying on a wooden raft, and felt the sun on me while the ocean rocked me gently. The door opened and I looked up to see T coming to check up on me. I looked around, and I was back in my room, lying face down on my bed. The walls were breathing deeply, and the edges of everything were shaky and hard to define. My sheets on my bed were sweeping inward and outward like the waves I had just felt.

T asked how I was doing and I told him I was ok, I thought. I certainly didn't feel ok most of the night or even really then, but upon seeing that reality hadn't totally shattered and that I had some memory of how I got to where I was, I guess my social instinct took over and said I was fine. T could tell I was acting a little strange (probably just gawking at the bed or walls at 4/5 am) and asked if the ayahuasca had worked. "Ooooooh yeah...." I said. He was immediately apologetic. He had assumed that when I left him it was because I was tired and didn't feel anything. He fell asleep on the couch and had just woken up to his alarm he had set to leave early in the morning. I can't say I'm too upset with him though, because being left alone probably made for a much more profoundly introspective trip.

So here we are at the third stage of this experience where I was suddenly jerked back to the real world and made conscious again. I closed my eyes and was back on the raft, feeling the sun on my back and the ocean misting on me. T put on some Shpongle, a band I was not familiar with. If I had to say so, there's not much better music to listen to during strong psychedelic trips, I'm am still a huge fan of theirs now. This song, aptly titled D.M.T., really helped me recompose a lot of the fragmented feelings I had just gone through. I was amazed at how well the song matched the tone of different parts of my experience. I remember feeling calmed and like there was some force empathizing with me and showing me that I wasn't the only one who had journeyed to these places. As I recounted the night, I could see the memories of what happened slipping from me already. I had told myself there was no way I could forget even a second when everything I saw was so mind-bending and interesting, but here I was, already unable to come up with a composed thought. As I searched my brain, I became fully cognizant of things that had changed. I had different beliefs about life, people, politics, and spirituality. I had completely abandoned the pain I felt from my girl troubles. I felt like I was alive for the first day in my life. But why? I couldn't even remember what exactly had changed those feelings!

After awhile of choosing some songs to play for me, T said he had to leave and get home before his parents were up and made sure I was ok to be left on my own. At this point, I felt like I was on a couple hits of acid, though I had no idea what that was like at the time. I sat in my room for the next couple hours feeling quite shaken up and confused, still getting startled by moving shadows on the walls. I eventually heard my family waking up and moving around and was nervous about confronting them. I felt like I had died and was reborn, something much more powerful than a near death experience (in my humble opinion), but I couldn't share it with them. Who was I now anyway? What did I do to myself? How would I reintegrate myself as a new person? Where did all of these new existential questions come from??? I opened a box full of wonder about the world and myself that I still can't shut.

The visual distortion from the trip persisted for a couple of days or more, but I never really lost a part of my sight that I gained during the trip. I can't exactly put my finger on what it is, but nothing has looked the same since. In fact, all of my senses feel different, though sight is probably the most dominant for humans, and the one I really notice. I remember wondering shortly after regaining consciousness how long it would be until I felt normal again. I remember asking myself how I would feel about what happened and who I was after the drug had completely left me. But I never really felt like I came all the way back down. It's so strange how we can really only move forward. Once something is a part of you, it leaves it's mark even once it's gone. This is true on a neural level with how our brains grow. So don't mess with drugs kids they may make you high forever! (please refer to the note at the beginning of this post)

Well it took me nearly a year of coming back to writing this, but it's something I've wanted to do since the night I went through it almost a decade ago. I'm not actually done, though I'm not sure when I'll write the follow-up post to this. This was mostly intended to be a flat, front-to-back explanation of what I went through. I'm hoping to piece together another post that explains how the experience really changed my thinking, emotions, and philosophies. That will be hard, because I don't really fully understand how I got the way I was or am (do any of us really?), but maybe taking the time to focus on it will help me sort that out a little too.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I'm happy to answer any questions about this strange time I had, or just talk about it. I'm hoping that documenting and sharing experiences like this will open a new door for open and safe discussion about drug use and altered states of consciousness. I hope this post is eye-opening for at least someone on the potential of these powerful psychedelics. I hope all your trips can be as healing and therapeutic as this one was for me!