I took a deep journey via high(er) dose ayahuasca analogue (ACRB + Syrian rue) with a close friend. We drank 2/3 of the target dose, waited an hour to get through the takeoff, then drank the rest. If I have a brave friend with me, we are able to share energy and both go deeper than if we drank alone.
On this occasion my intention was to fully let go and to face my deepest existential fears. The first cup and first hour passed relatively easy for me, and more difficult for my friend. After the second cup the takeoff felt harder for me, but I was able to stay with the experience with a blindfold on by breath work and focusing on trancing to music.
The music and darkness-induced trance carried me far. I passed through artwork never yet painted, through fractal tunnels and thunderstorms and met a predatory, shape shifting black jaguar/wolf/shadow entity who greeted me as a friend and ally. It knew I had been studying Buddhist philosophy and wanted to find the source of all creation. I can't say exactly what the predatory creature's message was, but then things went dark as this ally vanished into smoke.
I found myself trapped in a house of mirrors. Now I call it The House of Mirrors, and I realized this WAS the source. It is The Source. Everything I could see, all the reflections of myself, were images with the veil of life removed. I was seeing everything as I am. Only, the choice was clear. Do I want to be afraid of never escaping this House of Mirrors, or can I accept this reality, and perhaps even find a way out?
I began feeling my way through this labyrinth of mirrors. I was feeling hopeless and trapped when I realized that in this place language was visual. Out of the maze appeared before me a riddle in the guise of a floating leprechaun/gnome creature. It was the visual language of a riddle. It wasn't the word riddle, nor was it a leprechaun. It was the true memetic meaning to be a riddle. And in the moment I saw it and tried to understand it I understood that these riddles held the clues to escaping The House of Mirrors.
I could take my blindfold off, sit up, lay back down, put the blindfold back on, and I was still trapped in The House of Mirrors...
My voyager friend had to take a break from the blindfold before I felt like I was done trying to understand, and the experience eventually came to an end.
What made this experience unique to me was that once inside The Source, inside The House of Mirrors, the geometric patterns vanished, and time began passing by very fast (I had my blindfold on in a trance state for over 2 hours without break). It was just me, and a clear reflection of myself, illuminated by blue light against a black contrasted background. And then there was the riddle-leprechaun that jumped out in the mirror as if trying to wave cheerfully with glee "hey hey, look here!", leaving it up to me to decide what to do with the riddle. It was very much like a lucid dream. It felt less like a psychedelic journey, and much more like a lucid dream. Yet this was a relatively high dose...
I can't get over how radically unpredictable these experiences can be. This experience felt like it was overall very good, (left me with a wonderful afterglow, feeling great, etc), but it also felt like another of these "hard lessons" that Aya/DMT likes to teach. It's hard to interpret this readily. I've had plenty of dreams of feeling trapped, and I've had hyperslap experiences in which I've felt trapped in a difficult emotional space, but this was... Different.
This was very different.
.