I've just had something awful happen which I don't understand at all. I have some nice clean spice, and after a long day with a lot going on, I sat down to smoke.

I had earbuds in, and was listening to a song I like a lot. And it was beautiful, ravishing. As many hundreds of times as I have listened to it, I have never heard it sound like that -- as if an additional spatial dimension had opened up in audio, if that makes any sense. My room was a sort of minimized pastiche of how it actually looks; as if certain elements had been selected to set a stage for the music.

After a bit, I closed my eyes, the better to concentrate on the music. I opened them again a moment or two later, and was startled to see the lovely transcendent view of a moment ago completely changed, to a distinctive thing that I have seen before. You remember how old CRT monitors had all these exotic adjustments you could make pertaining to aspects of your display, like "skew" and "pincushion?" Well, this effect looks like reality has been skewed and pincushioned at the same time. In other words, parallelogrammed and sorta quilted around the edges. The deities in my paintings get a sort of pignosed effect and it's just kind of all ... snippy.

This only happens when a very ugly sound has occurred, like one of those cars with the bass riDICulously loud and rattling everything playing thug music, or someone yelling and cursing, or a leaf blower or woodchipper.

I paused the music and took out the earbuds, intending to say, "And you may ask yourself .. well, how did I get here?" (see Talking Heads, "Once In A Lifetime." )

But when I got the earbuds out, there was a horrible, terrible thing. It's so hard to describe this sound in any real terms -- it's not so much a sound as a vibration. It's like the sound of electrocution. Or like your head is in a microwave oven, an old and fucked-up one that makes creepy quantum sounds. Not entirely unlike the thug bass, but with no sense of relative distance or location in space. Like maybe the vibration of two tectonic plates grinding together with the crushing weight of continents. Or, have you ever heard someone plug in an electric guitar when the volume on the amp was already turned all the way up? ("Mine goes to eleven!" ) That humbuzz of speakers without a signal? Like that, but way off the hook.

I feel certain that it was external (to me) because when I finally had the presence of mind to cover my ears, it abated. When I took my hands away from my ears again, it was suddenly much intensified; it was vibrating the whole back of my head in a painful and nauseating way. It felt like lithotripsy on my brain. I seriously worried about my brain becoming detached from its brainstem because it was such a violent vibration, and even now the back of my head feels achey and jarred, like the time someone crashed into me while I was on my bike, and my head bounced on the asphalt. (that was years ago in case you're wondering.)

I remember finally being able to get up and look back at the window that had been at my back. Oddly enough, I remember thinking something like, "It's been weaponized!"

It was just friggin awful. Like the HAARP had been focused to a tight beam and sent through my window. I am fairly sure, as sure as I can be, that this was a real event that took place in empirical reality outside of myself. Unfortunately, there is no one awake in the house to corroborate it; except that my cat seems freaked out too, though he wasn't in the room at the time.

I think you were just very very high.

Oh, man! That explains everything! Now, why didn't I think of that?


<sigh> I suppose I should also explain that I don't actually think the "government" is "beeeeeeming" mind-control waves at me with the HAARP, right through my window.

The idea I'm trying to get across there is that the HAARP is a very large -- 33 acres, according to wikipedia -- very powerful transmitter, capable of generating signals that I think we can all agree are somewhere between "massive" and "gargantuan." It's meant as a metaphor.

This is a VERY loud, VERY low frequency sound that really couldn't be generated by anything ordinary in my immediate vicinity that I can think of. The only exception would be if someone nearby had an oscillator with sufficient power and adequate amplification. Hmmmm, there is an artists' warehouse not far away; trust-fund babies mostly; but you never know when one of them guys is gonna have a Tesla coil or some shit like that to impress the girls at parties.

Do you think that maybe the massively powerful psychedelic that you ingested may have something to do with the sound you heard?

Frankly, no. I was listening to music. I noticed the complete and significant change in my visuals first, before I took the earbuds out. Remember that this is an effect I have seen several times before, each time brought about by a jarring and unpleasant real sound in my environment.

Picture this: You know how people talk about a "carrier wave?" Assume that wave is a regular sine wave, a nice gentle curve. Now introduce interference, in the form of a square or sawtooth wave. (Are you old enough to have ever seen "interference" on a broadcast TV set?)

I am in my 40s, and have smoked DMT hundreds of times. You may not believe this, but even on acid I have never straight-up hallucinated something that wasn't there at all. I have seen real things around me altered and manifested in powerfully beautiful ways -- I have heard music transformed into something so awesome I can't really describe it -- I have communicated with Others in ways that don't involve words or speaking or visual cues -- but I have never heard or seen something that simply wasn't there.

Honestly, I don't usually get "very very high." When I do, it's obvious to me that that's what's going on. This wasn't like that.