Hey everyone! I've not posted here in what is probably years now. Everything's good with me and I've just been very busy making the life I want to live. I still occasionally trip but nothing like i used to and it's usually on LSD rather than DMT for various reasons.
Apologies in advance for this long read, There's a subject here that for a long time was a source of a lot of confusion for me and I'm surprised I never see anyone speak or write about this in regards to LSD so I'd love to hear from other people who've maybe seen it too.
To give a bit of backstory which I feel needs to be explained to put the rest of this in context I just want to start out with saying that I've experienced complete obliteration and things that are so out there that words can't begin to describe, These things had a dramatic effect on my life, caused me to completely change the road I was going down and sort of re find who I am and what I live for.
It's funny how these incredibly out there experiences shake things up dramatically and yet they can be so very difficult to integrate into how you live your life from there on, the distance between here and there is so great that it's hard to understand how those very grand insights / experiences to life here as these apes we inhabit.
I first did LSD at parties when I was living out in Sweden, I had already smoked DMT at this point and had some pretty crazy experiences. At these parties when I took LSD, I was always underwhelmed by the strength of the experience and generally just found it a little dysphoric being on the edge of something but never quite getting there. I eventually made friends with someone there who gave me a bunch of tabs to take home with me.
I was tired of having these underwhelming experiences and I wanted to see what all the fuss over LSD was about so I thought taking two of these tabs would be a good way to have a moderate experience. Later as I became better friends with the person who gave me these, I found out that him and his friend had laid these tabs themselves and they were dosed at between 220 - 250 per tab depending on how close to the centre of the sheet they were and these were supposedly ones they'd saved for themselves from the centre of the sheet.
I'm kind of glad I went into this unknowingly as it all was just fine until I suddenly exploded and spent an unknown amount of time just drifting through wiggly, liquid looking fractals that drifted downwards and to the right. at some point, some part of myself became self aware to some degree and wondered why it was that I was experiencing what I was seeing and I began drifting back.
As I continued to drift I eventually found myself in complete blackness and out of the blackness came an incredibly ugly goblin looking face wearing a green hat not too similar from the one luigi and mario wear haha.. It had a long pointy nose, a huge forehead and these small crazed looking eyes. I thought to myself ''What is that?!'' and from somewhere inside myself came the voice ''That's me'' and suddenly I was back in the room, back in my body, back in ''me''
I found this incredibly difficult to deal with and I spent the rest of the experience trying to find things to distract myself. I painted, I smoked hash, I lay down listening to music and of course I continued to trip but everything after this point is irrelevant compared to what had happened leading up to the moment I re opened my eyes as ''me'' again.
I spent some time after this quite unhappy and I just could not process what had happened at all, It's funny that I'd experienced much more intense things than this on DMT and yet this somehow struck me on some very weird level.
Over the next months I continued to smoke DMT quite regularly and also taking LSD, I experienced Ego death many times over this period which are amazing and I've written about this in the past (you can check in my profile if you'd like) But in regards to what I'm talking about now, there was only one experience that in retrospect is related to this:
I can't remember the combination of what I'd taken (me and the above friend tripped pretty heavily during this time with lots of strange combinations) but I remember again, everything being black and me having no awareness of self at all really, slowly my self awareness came back and I realised I was looking at an image that was so incredibly familiar and it has this weird eerie feeling to it. But before I could take in what I was seeing, curtains were drawn around it and an external voice expressed something like ''Teehee, we're not going to let you see this now, you'll have to find it yourself!'' I thought this was quite funny and mentioned it to my friend but again, didn't place too much importance on it compared to the ego deaths I'd been experiencing.
I eventually had what some people here refer to as an ''end of the line'' experience on DMT and it completely shattered my world. I realised the life I was living was not one of my own decision but one of reaction to a variety of factors external to myself. I decided that I wanted to learn who I really am and live the life I really want and this involved going back to England and living with the people I love most.
Fast forward a bunch of time and I met my girlfriend who I've been together with four years now, I truly feel that I found my soul mate and we've worked hard on making the life we want to live. I introduced her to psychedelics and she's found a great deal of healing in them.
So the following happened a bunch of times in a variety of ways with a variety of reactions to it but I'll pick one in particular that stands out:
Me, my girlfriend and a friend of ours were in our apartment and we were tripping on LSD and making music together. At some point our friend said that it was getting too intense for him and we decided that it'd be better to listen to someone else's music as it's more coherent. As we're sitting there in silence, all of us drifting away to the music, Suddenly the buzzer for our apartment buzzes and this snaps us all out of it instantly in an incredibly jarring manner. we all worry about who it is that's buzzing and who will answer when we pick up the phone to the buzzer, worrying that for some reason it might be the police. I decide to just go and answer it as ignoring it didn't feel like an option as we'd just have spent the rest of the night freaking out over who it could have been. It turned out to be someone we knew asking if we wanted any Weed haha! We all couldn't believe it as this never happens and he'd mistakenly buzzed our house instead of someone else's.
The trip continued but a feeling lingered and just wouldn't go away, at some point I felt drawn to a painting of a spiral I'd painted and I sort of half stared and half defocused while I looked at it. All the patterns and the colours drifting around the room start getting sucked into the spiral and my heart began to race. I knew something significant was happening and I was terrified but by the time I felt like I wanted to turn away I'd reached an event horizon of sort and couldn't. The colours and patterns were replace with a uniform lavender colour and upon the purple an image began to form. I recognised it well and I felt like I'd made the biggest mistake of my life, I just wished I'd turned away when I'd had the chance. I honestly felt like I'd ruined my life somehow and I couldn't stand whatever this image represented. This image represented ME somehow and it was terrifying. I just sat down feeling like a broken shell of a person and despaired in silence. Slowly I started seeing another angle to all of this, I caught a glimpse of what was beyond this thing and suddenly the feeling of despair was replaced with laughter, I realised the reflection of me I was seeing wasn't me at all and yet somehow it's deeply rooted in me as me, an idea of me. I ended off that night feeling so happy and optimistic about what the future has in store for me / us and felt really inspired to find my place in this world.
Since I first saw this image, I now see it every single time I trip and the longer I spent looking at it the more I begin to understand it and yet I still feel mystified to some degree by it. It's one of the most bizarre things I've seen even though I've seen such strange things on DMT. If there's one thing that's relevant in regards to the psychedelic experience and the life I live sober then it's that.
I have my thoughts on feelings on what this all is / means but I'm not sure I should just outright say, I feel like in a way it's something that needs to be discovered oneself or maybe it's not, I'm not entirely sure so would love to hear other peoples thoughts on it, I hear / see so much reference to it in art and music and yet never see anyone write about it.
It's incredibly difficult for me to describe the image, It's related to my description of the goblin face I mentioned earlier in this post but it's more abstract. I can see its features, the green of its hat, a glimpse of its crazed eyes or pointy nose. but it's like I'm look at it from inside it and seeing it from thousands of mirrors reflecting on themselves.