My adventures with the Thought Police (or How I made it onto my own most wanted list)
Ch:1) Initiation
I woke up in the middle of the night. God only knew how I'd gone to sleep or what my mind had been up to while I'd been there. Fortunately god was perched on the end of my bed. Unfortunately he didn't seem to want to explain this to me. Or maybe he did and I just didn't get the explanation.
"You've really gone and done it now haven't you?" He told me.
I looked at him. He wasn't as impressive as I'd expected him to be. I mean you read the books, you see the movies, you've got this sorta vague mental image that was imprinted on you from an early age and developed as you grew up. Whether you believe in him or reckon he's some sorta myth you have an impression, hpothetically or literally, of something you expect him to be or not be as the case may or may be not.
I'd kinda figured clouds in there somewhere. And a truckload of light. If you'd asked me to draw him I'd have done something vaguely Michelangelo or maybe Terry Gilliam; a head and shoulders, possibly some arms, sticking out from a cloud. There'd definitely have to be some sort of special effects or pyrotechnics - lots of flashing lights and maybe a fanfare or two. Instead there was a little old man, in a raincoat. A real wizened looking bastard, with a subtle disconcerting humour emanating from a gaze which peeked out at me from the shadows cast by the ambient glow of the petrochemical refinery just down the road from me, filtering through the thin curtains of my bedroom.
There was a fear of him but it wasn't so much a fear of what he might do to me, rather it was the fear of the implications arising from the fact that he was here. The way some people seem to be fearful of the idea of seeing a ghost. There was nothing ghostly about him. He seemed quite real. To be fair, after the last 3 or 4 hours of my waking life, 'real' was fast becoming a whole different animal than the one which I'd hitherto been only too happy to accept.
It had started in the field. We'd come across thousands upon tens of thousands of magic mushrooms, growing in a field by the side of the road. We'd proceeded to the nearest corner shop and bought a couple of carrier bags each and then straight back to 'Mushie Heaven' as had been delivered upon us by some really generous and tripped out act of fate.
I was already coming up on a 'normal' trip. I'd eaten up to a couple of hundred of these tiny caps, several times already, over the course of the last month or so, just enough to get some vaguely trippy feelings and notions but nowhere near the full blown parapsychological apocalypse I unwittingly stood on the verge of, loosening my footing with every handfull of shrooms I threw in the bags.
I've never, before or since, been out picking mushrooms for as little time as it took two of us to fill four carrier bags right then. Less than an hour later I'd eaten another hundred or so and I stood, in the centre of the village, by the main road, awaiting my mate returning from his highly paranoid and suspicious older brother's flat with a deal of hash which I was not authorised to see going down.
The wall of the building I was leaning my back against had started bouncing. It was rythmically pushing me sharply forward. I was trying to pretend I wasn't tripping out my skull and the fact that this bouncing wall was making me laugh uncontrollably wasn't making my task any easier. As to what posessed the middle aged male occupant of the red ford fiesta that pulled up, to ask me directions, I can only speculate. Maybe the law of averages allows one, presumably qualified to drive an automobile at speed along the queens highway, to choose the tripping hippy, from a multitude of normal looking people, like himself (who even I'd have asked before me) currently crowding this busy little saturday afternoon village mainstreet. Regardless we both got the fright of our lives when presented with the awesome spectacle that was our thirty second interaction.
He drove off very fast, revving the shit out of first gear all the way to the lights. I continued laughing until my friend arrived. The pot hadn't been there but I was cleared entry to the house while they brewed up some of our shrooms and waited for the drop. Small price to pay for their hospitality, especially when one takes into consideration my recent elevation to the 'nouveu riche' eschelon of psychedelic ownership. I sat down in a room full of older guys, none of whom I knew very well personally, three of whom I'd rather not have known by reliable, corroborated reputation and the other two I could only speculate upon given the reputations of their associates.
I was handed a cup of hot 'mushie' orange juice. "Takes the slimy taste away." I was told. I sipped this and brought out a deck of cigarettes which turned out to be a costly mistake as 6 hands reached out to pilfer my nicotine stash. I took a back seat, answered a few questions about my existence which, as was common in situations like this, seemed to predominately consist of questions about who I knew. I answered these noncommitaly as I could.
Was a long time ago. I was tripping. I've no idea how long I was there, some sounds were put on the stereo and a couple of kittens came past me and had a brief play fight with my legs. It was all pretty normal with a subtle hint of purple haze. Probably between thirty minutes and an hour later I emerged into pitch black Scottish october. Little did I suspect that I had just completely missed the Twilight zone and stepped into somewhere even Rod Serling would have a hard time coming to terms with. The quantum universe began its attack on me by appearing perfectly normal. And thus the trap was set.
We were walking beside a canal, it was real dark and getting wierder by the minute. "are you out your head?" my companion asked. "I can't get back in it" I replied. Three questions were running, naked and screaming, through my mind, "Where are we?", "How did we get here?" and "Where do we go now?". I took a piss in the canal. My cock and bladder had ceased to communicate status updates to my brain or else my brain had stopped listening. I couldn't tell if I was still pissing or if it had stopped. I waited a couple of mins and then decided "fuck it" and manouvered the genital back inside the jeans.
"I think I've pissed myself." I told my companion, walking along a lamplit main road, some time later. I was having trouble remembering if I'd actually taken my cock out before I'd pissed by this point. "No you haven't," he told me "look." I looked down at my jeans which were faded to the point of being almost white. Sure enough there was no telltale dark stain. "Cool", I thought to myself "just the shrooms." I tried to ignore the squidgy, wet feeling in my pants, now that I'd established it was a hallucination but it wouldn't go away. In fact it started to get worse, eventually changing from a squidgy, damp sensation to a mushy, 'my balls have melted' kinda thing.
It got so bad that eventually It felt as if my whole lower abdomen had fallen apart, I could hear the sloshy splats of my organs falling out onto the sidewalk. I knew this was 'just the shrooms' but it completely sucked nonetheless. I couldn't make the feeling go away, my innards were caving in and it felt yucky. I decided to look back along the road where my guts felt like they should have ended up. My logic being that if my eyes saw they weren't lying there the rest of my central nervous system might be more prepared to buy into this. I turned round and looked at two hundred yards of entrails snaking out from my pants and extending back along the road I'd just walked down, glistening in the orange of the halogen steetlights. I let it go. There was just going to be no proving anything tonight.
Some time later and very suddenly, with no warning at all, I flew up about six or seven hundred feet in the air, in my first ever out of body experience. I looked down and could see my body, still walking along beside my friend. I took in the view and the faint 'whoosing' sound that seemed to have always been there but, for some inexplicable reason, gone unnoticed before. Very suddenly, with no warning at all, I fell back into my body, like a H.I.M.E.O.B.S. strike. "You coming up yet?" my companion asked. "I've just come back down." I told him.
I experienced my first ever Quantum Echo/DejaVu Meltdown as we climbed over a gate to look at some tartan grass. My friend wanted to look at the lights of the petrochemical refinery in the valley below us but I was more interested in the grass. I climbed over the gate, and ran over and stood in the middle of the field. Then I climbed over the gate and ran over and stood in the middle of the field. Then I climbed over the gate and ran over and stood in the middle of the field.
I looked at the gate, wondering why the fuck I was back here again, before climbing over and running into the middle of the field. I pushed the gate open, just for a change, then closed it again, on second thoughts I'd seen the field a couple of times already and it really didn't seem worth the effort. This QE/DVM shit was really annoying me. I tried to explain this to my companion but I couldn't really concentrate on anything long enough to describe it. I settled for "The gate is echoing at me and it's doing my head in, lets go."
Some inexplicable period of time, not earlier or later but rather sideways, after an initial shaky start, I was kinda getting into this tripping business. Some of the thoughts that were flitting about in my head were of the highest order of profound and the QE/DVM's, which were starting to make some kind of sense in relation to the lesser trip effect of 'trails' left behind moving objects, were beginning to grow on me. Those unaccustomed to the trip experience might know the sort of visual effect popularised by those late 60's and early 70's disco videos. You get that sorta 3d and in 'real' life with even a few dozen caps.
I found out years later that full hallucinations are rare with shrooms. Lucky me - I got the bonus prize! I saw everything from wierd little animals to ghostly apparitions floating around, coupled with some of the damndest tunes from annoying, icecream van, style 'alice and wonderland' kinda stuff to full blown symphonies in the best nicam stereo I'd ever borne witness to. "UFO" my mate told me, looking up. Sure enough, right there above us was a vessel, bigger than Independence Day and with more lights than Close Encounters.
Yup, all in all, I was enjoying this newfound experience. All that was about to change dramatically with something as benign and innocent sounding as a little rainfall. Suddenly the whole world became a very very dramatic and sinister place indeed. Rain freaks me out when I'm tripping. I found this out as the first spits began to drill their way through my consciousness like mind acid. I panicked. Rule no1 of a mushroom trip - do not panic.
No critique please, only require you to report typos and pucntuation.
