Round about the middle of my life

[P3nT4gR4m]

The Key of Silence

I woke up about one AM. This was encouraging. I must have been sleeping, only for about half an hour but it was half an hour of sweet oblivion I'd been denied access to for weeks. My neck was stiff. I seriously hoped these drugs weren't going to do any permanent damage. Knots of muscle can be unknotted right? I grabbed my cigarettes and left the room, walking down the corridor to where the people who were allowed lighters hung out. They weren't pleased to see me but thought better of trying to wrestle me back to bed without a smoke. My presence was grudgingly welcomed at the table where they played cards to decide who made the coffee or who checked on guests.

The nightshift tonight, as most nights, consisted of four bodies, two male and two female. Compared to the dayshift, which I figured to be about 8-10 at any given time, this was a skeleton crew. Inmates were fed and drugged, before being marched off to their kennels and laid to sleep for the night because if lunacy kicked off  in a chain reaction, which it did often through the course of your average day, these guys were not going to have an easy time of containing it. Of the females one was a nice mellow, laid back kinda girl and the other could be a real nippy bitch if you rubbed her up the wrong way. It didn't take much to rub her up the wrong way but she had a razor wit and a playful side which I found hard to resist pushing too far on the occasion that boredom would get a hold of me.

The little guy was possessed of a kind of 'calm little centre of the universe' attitude. He never ever said anything which struck me as particularly profound or wise in any sense other than the way he said it. His sentences were simple, even banal in some instances but there was a use of the eyes that conveyed a deeper insight.

The first time I met the big guy was when he was working dayshift. It was a matter of seconds after they brought me into this place and I realised a trap had been sprung. After being directed through an innocuous looking door, under the pretense that this was the way out, I became, momentarily, acutely aware of the  click of a 5-point high security locking system. I also became aware, sure as a starling knows his flock, that most of the people in this room were your garden variety crazie. There was however a small element of doubt remaining in this picture. I walked up to the big guy with the ID tag.

"Excuse me mate could you show me the way out?"

"It's over there." He told me, glancing toward a door on the other side of the room.

I walked over to the door, trying to ignore the crazies, who's almost audible vibe was one of expectant curiosity. There was a new chicken in the coop. Wierd looking barefoot creature with a mohican, in an armani suit. Feathers were rustling. Sure enough the door was locked. I made my way back to the big guy who hadn't moved but seemed to have been watching me the whole time.

"Can you unlock that for me please?"

"Can't do that Simon." The fucker knew my name. That was it then I was locked up.

"You mean you're not authorised or I'm being held here against my will?"

"You're not being held here.." He launched into the mental health equivalent of reading me my rights, a politically correct description of my incarceration, worded in such a way that the newly incarcerated lunatic won't get upset and start chewing his own or other peoples limbs off.

"I demand that you let me out of here."

His sardonicly patronising smirk was fast being replaced with a 'don't fuck with me' expression and accompanying body language.

"You think your tubby ass is going to intimidate me?" I growled, through bared teeth. "Let me out of here now!"

"Or what?" He was baiting me, feeling me out as a potential threat. He was still trying to gauge my neutral body language. I decided up the verbal ante.

"Open the door now or I'll kill you and take the keys from your mangled fucking corpse!"

He stared me down, waiting for a move.

"Boo!" I said, my face suddenly millimetres away from his. That made the fucker jump. Although I hadn't actually laid a finger on him I guess this was far enough as far as my captors were concerned. His accomplice, who I hadn't noticed flanking me, had me in an armlock almost as quick as I'd said boo. I was dragged across the main room, down a corridor leading off and into a single room with a bed in it.

They pulled me over to the bed, by this time my arm was killing me and I tried to go limp and sorta explain as calmly as I could that this was hurting like shit and wouldn they mind not twisting my wrist quite so fucking hard! They relaxed a bit, although by this time the little guy was practically sitting on me, just enough so I could turn my head and see over my shoulder. I couldn't help laughing when I saw a female nurse preparing a hypo full of what turned out to be twelve hours or so worth of liquid coma.

If there was a pits of despair I was in it. What was I doing there? Simple; I'd caught the demiurge with his pants down. Again. First time round he'd let me off with a warning but I wouldn't let it lie. I could have just as easy taken the hint - I never really saw anything, it was all a hallucination. I was deranged after all. There was one flaw with that explanation though and, like a little ulcer on the roof of my mouth that I couldn't stop poking with my tongue, I couldn't help thinking about what I'd seen. the paradigm still worked when I managed to crawl back to the state that passes for sanity in my fucked up little corner of the island and it kinda festered there, demanding my attention from a dark little hole in the back of my mind

What the hell was sanity anyway? This was something I was going to have to figure out if I wanted out of this place. Insane was the only way to appreciate sane for what it was. Just another crock of shit, taking the real world at face value. Sanity was obedience to the demiurge. Saying "I believe you're god" and kneeling before whichever graven image was thrown at you. "Sane people are asleep," I thought to myself, "and that's the way he wants it." Waking up was the real crime here but who's law was it? Demiurge tells us he's the top of the tree but I knew better than that. He was the jailor, just another slave to the all seeing eye. He's in the same boat as the rest of us but, until I had sorted out the alpha male issue, he was the one beating the drum on this slave ship and whipping the rest of us into rowing away without questioning the status quo. I had to turn the tables on this shithead but, since he basically has access to my innermost thoughts, it was going to take some real sneaky tactics to get this divine monkey off my back. I was going to have to bypass him and make contact with his superiors. How the fuck was I supposed to keep a god out of the loop?

My immediate predicament had to be dealt with first. I needed out of this maximum security twilight zone. That wasn't going to happen unless I could convince them I was sane again. Time to stop fighting and try get my head straight, just long enough to fool some shrink into signing a release form. My mind was coming back together. No thanks to the sedatives but at least I had a tenuous grip on the feeble paradigm of consensus reality once more. Not difficult when you're locked up with your own worst nightmares. Chains have a habit of bringing you right back down to earth. I just needed to hang onto it long enough to state the case for the defense.

I'd lived under those immutable laws for long enough. I knew what was and wasn't accepted. Indeed my present predicament was, in part, a result of my trying to convince a whole bunch of sleepwalkers that it wasn't like that, that what they were seeing was illusion. Naive and idealistic for sure, I mean what the fuck did I care what the herd were aware of? There was no one really needed convincing except myself. If humanity were happy idiots then who was I to bust their bubble and, more to the point, how was I supposed to bust it. Denial aint just a river in egypt, it's a design for life. Maybe the truth was too much for them to think about, let alone look for. Much easier to bury their heads in the proverbial sand of existentialism, materialism and consumerism. Human existence reduced to a - who can collect the most atoms - competition. Anything for a feeling of purpose right? Any reality, no matter how ridiculous, rather than have to face the ineffable void. This is the lie we tell ourselves.

I could understand how realistion of the void can leave one feeling cold, existence without the holy grail of meaning you've been searching for, for a lifetime, is a bitter pill to swallow but, once I got my head around it, instead of dressing in black and reading a whole bunch of angry Neitzche tracts on how shit it all is, I actually found myself enjoying the whole non-existent trip a lot more. It's kinda liberating to find out that nothing you do holds sway beyond the limits of your paradigm. No divine judgement, no tallying up points scored to decide on the fate of your immortal soul. No past, no future, just the non existent now and how you are enjoying it all. I made a conscious effort to chill out and talk calmly to people about the drivel spewing out the teevee and where I'd like to go on holiday. Just suck it up and chew the bullshit with my captors. "See? I'm just as fucked in the head a you morons." and "How about this weather?"

Somehow this all had to start with a late night cigarette in the company of the nightwatch. I figured my best bet was to shut up until spoken to. I wasn't spoken to. I never said anything beyond "Have you got a light?"
It was the most productive conversation I'd had with any of them since I arrived.

[Jenne]

Wow.  That was awesome.   Thank you for sharing that.

[East Coast Hustle]

interesting.

you got more coming?

[P3nT4gR4m]

interesting.

you got more coming?

Not sure. This just sorta popped out today. I'm totally inconsistent when it comes to writing - sometimes it happens and other times it doesn't. I do feel like it's a chapter and more have happened to me so potentially yes.

[East Coast Hustle]

you'd better, or we'll send Talufa by to have a talk with you.

[Messier Undertree]

Nice. Any more?

[P3nT4gR4m]

I've deleted the other bollix cos this next bit follows on from the first bit. Even completes it I think.

Daat's all folks

I woke up about midday, peeled the molten saliva gunge off my face and pillow and figured today was the day I was giving up the melleril. I had already ditched my lithium 'script as soon as my section had been up, that shit was killing me. Shame really, the Cobain trip sounded really nice but I hadn't found any friends there. There was depression, spending the best part of a year with the curtains drawn, plotting the course of my life between the opening titles of daytime TV shows and my staple diet of caffeine and nicotine. Once a fortnight I'd go outside and cash my giro then pick up more caffeine and nicotine.

Mild agoraphobia set in after a while, not full blown panic attack material, my hackles used to go up when I was around people. I get the same effect when, after a week or so kayaking in the wilderness, I come back to a population center. There's something about crowds which makes me want to shout "Shut the fuck up!" Strangely enough I never get that at gigs or festivals where people seem to be letting themselves go and creating a generally positive vibe, it's the overwhelmingly oppressive buzz of the herd, flocking about, that makes me feel like it's sucking me in at times. Alpha wave pollution or an allergic, defensive reaction to it.

I was self medicating with the occasional bit of pot and the fact that this seemed to be helping balance my rough with my smooth, coupled with the offer from the girl I was buying off to take it off my hands finally convinced me to peel the labels off the Thioridazine bottles and re-invent the barter economy.

The chick I'd picked up in the asylum and nicknamed Hecate had moved out at my suggestion. Lesson learned - don't allow a recovering alcoholic access to the drinks cabinet. My housemate was off to live happily ever after with a cute brunette and the lease was almost up on my three bedroom semi in the burbs. All in all the bottom was falling out of my pathetic little world but I was cool with that. I'd remembered the insanity paradigm. I'd reformulated my plan. I didn't know, in the aftermath of enlightenment, what were the implications thereof and how I should go about working this out but I did have a pretty clear idea about what I was going to do with my own little shell of microcosm. Enter the Mystic Ninja.

Just before I'd completely flipped out I'd invested a couple of hundred quid in a pile of books, mail order from an occult place down south. A few were about quaballah and I set about reading these on the strength  of a description on the back of one:

"an attempt to reduce, to diagrammatic form, every force and factor in the manifested Universe and the soul of man; to correlate them to one another and reveal them spread out, as a map, so that the relative positions of each unit can be seen and the relations between them traced."

This was what I needed - a map! Directions to the demiurge, attack routes, ambush points, everythng you always wanted to know about gods and how to kill them. The Mystic Ninja was my higher self, dressed up in a walking, talking monkey, whom I entitled 'Monkey'. Monkey was the machine that dreamt of being a ninja. Mystic ninja was the dream that dreamt a monkey. The quaballah was my key to understanding this paradigm. When the monkey became the mystic ninja the demiurge himself would be subsumed. It should go without saying that this was crazy talk and the key of silence which unlocked the gates of the asylum must be remembered lest I found myself within those prison walls again.

So the Mystic Ninja trained the monkey, mind and body, each honed to a razor edge. The monkey gave himself completely to this transformation, rising to every challenge thrown at him, aspiring to be one and the same as the ninja. Monkey's first faltering steps into the light saw him breaking out of the mindlock of depression and gaining a source of income. One state sponsored rehabilitation course later, he had secured gainful employment, managing the computer systems in a small factory.

Even during those times as he would become engrossed in the mundane muck of the material existence the Monkey always had the Ninja to aspire to and, as the years flew round the sun, he attained mastery of his passions, and his thoughts. His physical vessel was now possessed of buff abs and rippling pecs which gained frequent attention from female monkeys and the crystaline form of his newly reconstructed paradigm was shining like a silver pyramid in the midday sun.

The demiurge was trapped within this pardigm and rehabilitated subject to the will of the ninja. Victory was complete and they all lived happily ever after.

[P3nT4gR4m]

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.

[East Coast Hustle]

heh.

I remember the first time it rained when I was tripping.

that shit will FUCK you up if you're not ready for sudden unwanted kaleidoscopic vision.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Fuck. I'd forgotten I still had to finish this. Doesn't really make anything other than a typical trip story without part 2.

I vaguely remember stomping all the way home, fuelled by blind panic and the need to get safely tucked up in bed. I'd regressed to an infant who believed the closet monster wont get him if he pulls the covers right up over his head. I finally reached the front door of my house. Sanctuary. I opened the door and walked in, up the stairs, across the landing and into my room where, for some inexplicable reason my dad was sitting on the sofa watching my tv.

"Where you been?" he asks me

"Up at tam's. Not feeling well. Think it's something I ate." I replied

I climbed into bed, trying to ignore the Two Ronnies on tv who were in serious danger of letting the cat out the bag, singing, as they were, some hilarious number full of not so subtle references to how tripping I was.

"Don't you think you should take your coat and boots off?"

I looked down and the bed was covered in my blood. No, hold on, it was mud. Shit! I'd been out for hours, tramping through fields in the pissing rain. I had a brief fight with my coat which eventually conceded and melted off me somehow. I had less success with my boots. It's really hard to unwravel a knot when the whole concept of string has ceased to make any kind of sense to you. The laces seemed to be wriggling somehow. I left them on. "What did you have to eat?" Dad asked me. "Fucked if I know." I replied. I was going to make something up but I couldn't remember what kind of food would seem realistic in this situation so I gave up and passed out..


"You've really gone and done it now haven't you?" God told me. It was later. I'd kinda worked that out on my own, despite the fact that I had no idea how time worked anymore. Right now it seemed to be frozen. "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" I asked of my creator but he'd disappeared. There were voices outside my bedroom. Two paramedics were patiently and sympathetically explaining to my father (the earthly one) that I'd been eating magic mushrooms and accidentally swallowed a couple of deathcaps.

"JESUSFUCKINGSHIT I'M DEAD!"

My life flashed before me. I never got that expression before. How could seventeen whole years 'flash'. Surely in a period of time as short as a flash you could only sqeeze in a few frames of choice highlights? I wasn't in a period of time though. There was no such thing as time where I was. It was glaringly obvious from this dead perspective that time was some kind of trick I'd been playing on myself, a delusion. In point of fact my whole life as I saw it play out before me, over and over again, like a merry go round that was revolving so fast it made me feel dizzy, was nothing but an illusion.

I relived every moment I'd ever been privy too. It was so real, the illusion so complete that, just like when one is dreaming, I kept forgetting this was an illusion. Most of my life I just lived, the same way it had happened originally, completely oblivious to the fact that I'd done all this before. Maybe I hadn't, the whole thing was an illusion anyway. Maybe I'd never really done any of it before. There was no such thing as before or after, there was only now and I was looking at it.

Now and again I became aware of what was going on. I remembered the death. I was trapped in this constantly repeating seventeen year loop of life and somehow I had to get back to where I'd been. I couldn't remember where that was. I kept forgetting til the last moment and eating the shrooms and dying then being born and doing the whole thing all over again. I was a five year old kid, sitting on a merry go round in a playpark near where I used to live. I broke down in tears because I knew I had died but I couldn't remember when. This was heavy shit for me to take onboard when I was five.

Somehow I left the loop. Not by finding the right place or by managing to avoid the deathcaps and carrying on a different timeline, as I'd tried repeatedly to do, but rather by transcending the whole object that became my life, viewed from a distance.  'Viewed' is probably the wrong word in this context, since it implies something visual which this experience was not but it's the best I can come up with, given that I'm not aware of a word that defines the interpretation of a sense which is not defined by the five that human manifestation has to offer.

If i wasn't 'viewing' this existence I'd led then it definitely didn't 'look' kinda donut-shaped but again that's the best I can come up with. What I was seeing seemed to be the universe, stretched out over seventeen years, forming a donut. And there wasn't just one, my one, there were billions of these. I explored most of them, from millions of perspectives, from people to animals to plants to rocks. I was a star, burning for millions of years, before collapsing and forming a black hole. I was some wierd kinda fish thing, swimming around in the darkness of the bottom of an ocean, fuck knows where. I was towns and cities populated by every wierd alien species imaginable and some probably unimaginable. To do the things I did in that 'flash' would have taken billions and billions of years, maybe even an infinite ammount of time.

Every time I left a situation, a quantum possibility matrix, I remembered who I was 'really'. I'd carried enough of my ego into this timeless state to keep a hold of this, despite the fact that I now understood that there was, ultimately, only one singular point of view, imagining the whole shooting match. This was a void and one dreamer was dreaming everything. I was the dreamer dreaming my dream and every one and everything else, was the dreamer dreaming theirs. The notion of one true god suddenly made sense to me but since that god was me and everyone else I kinda figured that religion had gotten derailed somewhere along the line. Maybe it'd started from people who'd seen this but for the servitude thing I figured it was either people who'd gotten the wrong end of the stick or people who didn't understand what they'd been told that had kept the whole thing going. I'd been taught about the universe and how I fit in there by people who had no fucking idea what was going on.

I don't remember how I found my way back to my own tripping head but I did. Turned out I hadn't eaten deathcaps. Seems I'd just told myself this because somehow some part of me had figured it was a surefire way to slingshot me out of the 'real world' and into the quantum flux of the void. Maybe that part of me was god. Maybe it was something external but whatever it was I was thankful. Thankful for the whole shooting match. Every existence I will ever exist. Ateh, Malkuth, Ve Geburah, Ve Gedulah, Le Olam, Amen.

[LMNO]

heh.

I remember the first time it rained when I was tripping.

that shit will FUCK you up if you're not ready for sudden unwanted kaleidoscopic vision.

I remember the first time I had to take a shit while I was tripping hard.


That was an uncomfortable experience.

[East Coast Hustle]

yeah. I was never that thrilled when my anal contractions sync'd up perfectly with the pulsing of my visual hallucinations.

[Rev. St. Syn, KSC (Ret.)]

ITT

[P3nT4gR4m]

It was the middle of the night. I woke up in a room with two windows and a door. One of the windows looked out onto the dayroom which was cloaked in darkness at this hour, the window next to looked into the staff office. How had I gotten here? Was it a ghost or a trick of my own mind? How could something that wasn't there appear so real? How could I ever trust my senses again after this betrayal? These thoughts and more were running through my mind as I lay there in the darkness, looking at the light in the office.

As best I could remember it had started three months before. The girl in the nightclub. Long flowing red hair, piercing, almost hypnotic blue eyes. I remembered her taste, her smell, the sound of her voice, the way her naked body felt next to mine, the way she fucked. Oh jesus yes I remembered the way she fucked.

Flashback: I was naked and masturbating, alone in a derelict building... no ... she was real. Surely someone had to have seen her? One of my friends? Were my friends real? If my mind hadn't snapped already then these thoughts would have done the trick. What the fuck had happened? I remembered the nightclub, pumping music, flashing lights, chemicals assualting my central nervous system.

I'd seen her standing at the bar, gone over and said 'hi', lost myself in those eyes, that mile, her face. A phone number, hastily scrawled on my arm in eyeliner pencil. I'd called the next night, couldn't even remember her name. Just those eyes. "Hi. Remember me".

None of my friends had said anything to the contrary. Hope those sick bastards had a real good laugh on my tab. Surely they'd have drawn a line ... somewhere. Maybe when I took her out the first night? Or when I spent the first weekend at her place? Surely that was dangerous? I could have been anywhere for the love of fuck. When I moved in, then? They'd come to visit a couple of times and no one thought to say anything? They must have seen the state of me? Was there no compassion in their hearts? Were they even real?

Was anything real? I'd been alive for eighteen and a bit years. Had I hallucinated every fucking waking moment? How the hell was I ever supposed to know? For all I knew the bed I was presently lying in might not exist at all. This whole hospital, the people in it. Me.

I'd fallen in love with a ghost or a hallucination. I could remember when they'd found me, naked, huddled on the floor in a dingy decrepit corner of some building, scheduled for demolition. Nearby residents had phoned the police who'd subsequently kicked the door down and found me, filthy and malnourished. Three months I'd been there. I should have been dead. What had I been eating?

And the redhead? A figment of my imagination or, as I was beginning to suspect, some kind of ghost or vampire who lured young guys to their deaths by making the whole thing seem so real. The flat, the furnishings, the pets. She kept everything from rats to cats to dogs. Maybe they'd been real animals and I'd just incorporated them into my fantasies or she'd incorporated them into her mirage. Jesus, I'd been handling those rats, I probably had rabies by now.

I'd phoned her, dialled the smudged number from my arm and heard her, loud and clear, on the other end. We'd made a date, next friday night, met in the bus station in Falkirk. Friend of a friend had met me there too, just before she turned up, stood there chatting with me for 5 minutes. Had he seen her? No, he was gone before she got there.

We'd gone to my local, this chick was hot, I wanted to show her off. When you're eighteen bragging rights are damn near as important as the actual fucking itself. The usual crowd was in, friday nights would see most of us (maybe a hundred or so) splitting the night between two bars, waiting for the club to open. We'd ended up down there, Sat with my mates for a while before jumping onto the dance floor and doing something that much more closely resembled screwing than dancing in the traditional sense of the word.

Back to my place and late adolescent hormonal abundance made sure we both enjoyed a really sweet night. My folks woke me up in the morning to tell me they were going out but they never came into the bedroom, just knocked the door and shouted in. They never saw her. I'd walked her down to the bus stop, sucked face for a while and arranged to meet up next weekend.

None of it seemed weird. Only looking back did I get all those little hints, like the movie Sixth Sense, with Bruce Willis. She'd been a phantasm.

I'd moved in a couple of weeks later, as glad to be flying the nest at last as I was to be moving in with the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. This was where the "happy ever after" bit came in. Like, yeah, sure - eighteen years old you've done it all, right? But hey, I was young and in love and the world was just the happiest shiniest place ever imagined.

Then it started to get a bit peculiar...

There was a nagging feeling that something was going on beneath the surface. Something sinister, something not what it seemed. Who the hell was this woman, four years my senior, who sang to me in the dark with a voice like an angel? Who could touch my soul just by looking at me, those eyes, piercing, icy but, at the same time, warm and inviting. I started to think she wanted something from me. Was this the birth of insecurity? I became paranoid, conversations seemed loaded with almost hypnotic intent.

One night I was awoken to find the front door being kicked in and flashlights in my face. I took immediate stock of my surroundings. I was in a pile of clothes in a rotting corner of some boarded up room. One of the policemen shone his torch around the room, exposing decayed, fungus covered walls, a huge gaping hole in the ceiling and precious little else. Where the hell was I? Where was the girl? I could hear the other policeman, still shining his light in my face, asking me questions. The other guy was talking into the radio. I think I lost consciousness at this point.

They brought me here. I was injected with something and put in this room. Time passed, I couldn't tell how much, I driffted in and out of consciousness. At one point I heard the door opening and a woman in a nurses uniform asked me if I was awake. I mumbled an affirmation, she turned the light on and told me I had a visitor. She left the room and who should walk in but the redhead.

More boring shit that happened to me once upon a time. It didn't actually happen, per se, not in the sense that reality would record it but it did occur, as a false memory, in the sense that my brain recorded it. Imagine an hallucination but not one which is experienced in real time, rather it is remembered, the memory itself appearing no less real albeit for coexisting with the events which actually took place. I can remember either of them, relive the moments in my head.

It totally freaked me out at first because, when I first recalled this memory, it replaced the one I already had and I really thought this was what had happened. Nowadays I quite like it. It's fun to remember both chains of events, cos the real one was a doozy itself, full of actual hallucinations and visions and the usual kind of shit that accompanies a boys first psychotic break.

[Triple Zero]

some day i will read this thread too. and then i'll probably hand you some mittens.