I just want to type this up to try and crystallize what remains in my memory of this latest experience, my third major dmt experience. I've had one "breakthrough", i suppose that's what it was -- my understanding of the term is that your more or less normal consensus reality has been replaced by something completely other, that is, you go to this hyperspace, a completely different space, and the previous world is gone for the moment. That breakthrough, if it was, was very intense, but it wasn't really a place I would want to return to, specifically. It seemed cheap and pointless, though fun. I wound up in a series of cubic rooms, blank white rooms where different pop-culture icons buzzed and bounced, danced or just stood there being badasses... Some I recognized; there was a smurf in one corner, maybe not your average smurf though. He seemed like he was standing on a sidewalk turning tricks, or had something not-so-nice up his sleeve. There were aliens and robots and random cartoon characters, all looking very toy-like, shiny plastic-ey 3d computer-imaged folks. Everything was very high-speed, i was trying to take in the whole scene and every being was paying attention to me, though i have no real recollection of myself existing as anything other than an observer with some ability to exercise will and movement. I was able to flip myself into a number of other rooms, all cubic and pretty much the same kind of stuff going on in every room. Then I found myself outside of this structure, and i met Santa Claus in person. He was very digitized, maybe 2d, kind of short and squat. turns out we had been in his house up at the north pole, which was a very small house in the shape of Frosty the snowman's head. Pretty sure this was all inside a snow-globe too, that i found myself holding in my hand.. then opened eyes.. that last part's cliche, i'm not sure if that was actually part of the trip or just my skewed memory imposing a different past reality.
That was the breakthrough, or i thought so, not sure if it qualifies. Seemed like some crazy brain-candy, or a portal to another world, a section specifically for action figures and cartoons, cheap pointless beings I felt.
The more recent two major trips I've taken have been different. I tried to stop short of a breakthrough... actually was trying to take a dose equivalent to the North Pole trip, but remain open-eyed and in this world here (but don't ask me what that means). I follow the Zen tradition largely, and have had a few experiences of satori, awakening, whatever word you'd like, in the past year. This feeling, for me so far, generally fades away within hours or days. This is what I'm really interested in... 'enlightenment'...however, I had never experienced this waking-up while under the influence of dmt, or if I had, i had not recognized it as such. Taking some lower dosage hits of spice over the past couple days, I had come to believe that dmt could possibly provide me with a glimpse into a much deeper level of enlightenment, if i could just keep my eyes open (i guess it seemed like i could maintain a sense of reality much easier if I didn't slip into some closed-eye field of beauteous infinity or whatever. I know, Samadhi is samadhi, right? but then again you hear that enlightenment can be endlessly expanded and deepened. So this time I was just trying to be awake and aware and to see deeper (and be deeper) in what really is.
Looking back now, I'm not sure why i thought i could trust this intense drug to show me what's real. i suppose i didn't exactly. Who am I to say what's real anyway? and how would i know what was real, and what real was? (Tricking myself with semantics and ideas of un-knowing brings me much freedom, sometimes.)
Anyway, I had been on a couple hits of acid for several hours as well, but the dmt seemed to eclipse that totally, as far as I knew. It was morning and raining slightly, everything was green and yearning for the water. After some hesitant moments about whether I should smoke the remaining spice or wait for it, I noticed a really nice spot and decided to go for it there. I was naked, dirty, and tired, and sat down in half-lotus on some soft, damp ground under a little mossy tree, on the bank of a rocky creek-bed. This is in the Ozarks, if anyone knows the kind of terrain. Well, I took a big old hit and felt the body change and the subtle spatial shifting thing, and then started becoming more aware of the multiplicity of life around me. Plants and insects were my companions, but some critters i could not seem to mentally verify the existence of. When you sit down naked in a bed of life, things are going to be buzzing and feeding, you're instantly very involved in the ecosystem. I became distracted left and right, by things real and otherwise probably, not that i could say which was which. Some things seemed definitely illusory, like when I was focusing on the geometric , sharply angular patterns formed by the opposite creek-bank. that seemed not-real, so I looked elsewhere.
The most insanely mind-blowing moment, it now seems, was when I glanced at a patch of mossy growth at my feet, then closed my eyes for seemingly just an instant. When I opened them again, this mossy patch was still in my view, but it was a different color, more brown instead of green, and the texture or the specific plant form had changed. I was like "whoops!". Slipped into an alternate world, was the implication. I closed my eyes a time or two again, and the mossy patch changed subtly each time. The idea that naturally came along with this was that each time I closed and opened my eyes, the cosmos had shifted slightly, subtly, and universally. Larger things were still in place, i felt, but details had been switched around seemingly at random. This is a staggering notion to me, and makes me feel very uneasy... this was the classic "whoops" moment that I've experienced in each of these three big dmt trips... I get the feeling I've done something wrong, basically altered the entire universe irrevocably, or am about to. This was the only time i'd actually done the wrong thing, though -- I didn't mean to shift universes, i was just opening and closing my eyes. Anyway, i have no idea if i managed to get the universe back to where i started or not, since i couldn't say for sure what the starting point was now. I figured it probably wasn't that important, hopefully, and i didn't know how to "fix" it anyway, so i just moved on. But now I'm back in the right cosmos, huh? Maybe? Good old what's-its-name cosmos. Anyway, it's probably an even trade. I'll maybe keep my eyes open for anything that seems kind of -- funny...
There was a guide, or visitor, who was marginally present, taking the form of a friend of mine (I forget which one though). This "guide" really did nothing but observe me, seemingly looking out for me, being friendly and unobtrusive, not pushing me in any direction but occasionally making a gesture toward some object or area, inviting possibilities. But all these possibilities seemed like further distractions. Portals seemed to appear -- I vaguely recall some kind of selection of doorways in the earthen bank opposite me, but these doors didn't appeal to me. I didn't want to go anywhere, fly through hyperspace or be led on a tour or anything, I wanted to be satisfied with where i was. But I wasn't; there was possibly some ego-death but it didn't feel like what I'm familiar with as an awakening. Rather than Buddha, I felt like a confused and increasingly frustrated little kid in a very odd candy store. Um,, the portals -- there was one that seemed to be shimmering in the bowl of my pipe, where I'd left a partial hit of spice. Looking closer, I saw a colony of tiny worm-like folks inhabiting the bowl, getting along nicely with the dmt. Figured that probably wasn't real, but i didn't know. Anyhow, i didn't care to mess with the pipe after i saw that. Another portal seemed to be my empty jar of water nearby, which would only serve me as a portal if it had contained water, and I had drunk some. I voiced my desire amidst all this confusion: "what I really want is... water." And then a big drop of rain fell to the ground on my left. 'Water', i thought, but no, it was a big wet grub that had fallen to the ground from the tree, or maybe a drop of leaf-runoff that fell on top of this writhing grub...
Eventually i became pretty much totally frustrated. This just wasn't what i was going for. Assuming that I would know what i was going for if i found it... I said "I'm moving now", to all the critters who had gotten themselves nicely established around me, and to myself and whatever else might be listening. i stood up and stretched, and it was a big event. Brushed mud off my ass, but i couldn't tell if it was really mud, or shit, or my flesh crumbling away. Borders of myself were less defined than normal, then, but my ego remained basically there, or my role anyway, the role of a confused and dissatisfied little kid experimenting with a strange spicey space.
Other stuff I remember: at one point I looked at my forearm, and the hairs had grown a long patch of faint brownish moldiness of some kind. These subtleties really get me... was the moldiness a hallucination? had I unknowingly brushed my arm on something weird? Was this a mold-entity that existed only in the realm of dmt, or in a realm accessed by dmt? Was it just a shift in my consciousness brought on by the spice, which allowed me to see this normally invisible or just overlooked life-form? Subtle things like this, that seem to ride the fence between reality and insanity, they make me cringe a little bit.
Also there was a moment toward the end of the trip where a jumble of images and things seemed to present themselves to me in rapid succession, too quick for me to really act on. This is part of the pattern of my trips apparently, things speeding up for a moment and then some kind of apex, which involves me confronting a single being or discovering a key of some kind to access the "next level", some unimagineable video-game style personal power-up that will either take me to an entirely different place, or cause me to instantly evolve into.. something. These moments always feel cheesy, and the choice is scary, and i bypass them. In this particular case, the ultimate magical apex-object I came to happened to be a slick, shiny, pile of caramel-colored barf, which I envisioned myself vomiting easily into my hands and manipulating somehow to activate something-or-other. It would have been a neat, plastic barf-key. But I immediately rejected that notion, thinking, 'nah, i don't think i'll barf in my hands and activate the power of the barf-key'.
Maybe I was wrong. just didn't seem like what i wanted to do.
peace.