It had been seven days and five hours since Giles had experienced his first full-frontal encounter with the most powerful hallucinogenic substance known to man. To say he was still shaken, would be cutting it mild. To aver that he’d never known anything like it before would be to wield a lumbering cliché. To announce that it was the most earth-shattering, mind-altering, spirit-enhancing, psyche-expanding, consciousness-raising, all-out brain-explosion he’d ever experienced would be starting to approach the ground-zero epicentre of the cognitive blast that was his DMT journey.
*** *** ***
A week later, Giles and Craig stepped out of a Starbucks in central London, weaved their way past Bilingsgate Market, turned left on Canon street and walked down the Embankment. They sat on a stone bench overlooking the river Thames and stared in silence at the blot on the landscape that was the London Eye, plastered as it was like a mechanical circular band-aid against the grey and orange mackerel-cloud sky. It was a warm summer evening and the sun had disappeared over the horizon. The Houses of Parliament were clearly visible to their right with hordes of tourists posing under the Big Ben thrusting triumphantly into the twilight sky. To their left they could discern the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral as it sat on Ludgate hill—Christopher Wren’s stupendous architectural masterpiece commissioned after the great fire of London in the 17th Century.
Craig was one of those bleached-clean, tumbled-dried, holier-than-thou yuppies who got a buzz from fresh air and sparkling water. He was on a steady diet of granola bars and Lucozade. He liked to think he was into the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle. But the sex was mostly self-gratification; the drugs were off-the-counter aspirin; and the rock ‘n’ roll… well, let’s just say ambient lounge would be closer to the mark.
Giles on the other hand was one of those dyed-in-the wool experience-junkies. If there was an experience that was far-out, then he was interested. If it was off-beat he was keen; and if it was quirky, then, the quirkier the better. He had the weather-beaten, jaded look of an alligator that had seen too many water-lilies in its time. His scraggly beard made him look more like a yeoman sailor than a latter-day hippy.
But Giles and Craig were very different in their outlook to life and their personal beliefs. They had been friends since childhood and were both comfortable in each other’s company, though they were opposites in many ways: Craig was the play-it-safe, weekends-at-home, do-it-yourself, ambitious go-getter – climber of corporate ladders, slider-upper of greasy poles; and rider of gravy trains. Giles on the other hand was the adventurous sort—the sort that hitches his fortunes to the wind, and sets sail to foreign destinations and exotic lands at the drop of a hat. He was a teller of tales, a taker of risks, and as footloose and fancy free as they come.
Giles had just returned to London, from what had now turned out, over the years, to be an annual pilgrimage to that mecca of madness, that cynosure of addicts, that melting pot of junkies, newbies, freakies, and squeaky cleans—Amsterdam.
“What’s all this sound and fury you’ve been making about your DMT experience?” Craig asked inquisitively. “Anyone would think this was the first time you’ve had a novel psychedelic experience.”
Giles took a sip of warm coffee and stared ahead. “Many potheads, stone-trippers, miscellaneous psychonauts, and LSD-veterans will be sceptical about how different a DMT trip can be from an acid trip. But here’s the deal, Craig: take your run-of-the-mill 12-hour LSD trip, compress it to 3 minutes, and multiply the intensity by a thousand. That’s what a DMT trip is like.”
“That’s far out, bro! Are you sure that stuff is safe!” Craig exclaimed.
“Many misconceptions about DMT, or Dimethyltryptamine, abound.” Giles explained. “Just to clarify, DMT is not an artificial chemical created in a lab by some Frankensteinian chemist. It is a naturally occurring compound found in trace amounts in almost all animals and plants. Structurally, it is similar to compounds like Serotonin: a neuro-transmitter in the brain that produces feelings of well-being and happiness—and psilocybin: the active hallucinogenic compound in magic mushrooms.”
“Who’d use crazy stuff like that?” Craig wondered, incredulously.
“Well,” Giles said, matter-of-factly, “For generations, Amazonian tribes have been consuming DMT in Ayahuasca, a shamanistic brew or religious sacrament used for divinatory and healing purposes.”
“Is that what you tried? – Ah-you-ask-ka…?” Craig asked, trying to twist his tongue around the obscure word.
Giles shook his head. “Ayahuasca packs are available in most head shops in Amsterdam. I was not overly eager to try it mainly because it involves many hours of brewing and has to be taken in combination with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor that allows the DMT from the plant to be absorbed by the body. There is also every likelihood of experiencing intense vomiting and occasional diarrhoea—not very enticing prospects when one is looking for a psychedelic experience; the expression, ‘to shit one’s brains out,’ takes on a whole different meaning!”
Psychedelics were not new to Giles. He had first experienced the hallucinatory effects of THC, or Tetrahydrocannabinol, when he took a strong dose of super skunk and several tokes of Moroccan Gold hash as a college student. Since then, he’d known the effects of mescaline, magic mushrooms, LSD, Ketamine, Salvia, LSA, and various amphetamines and metamphetamines. And he had tried all the pharmaceutical junk: morphine, diamorphine, cyclizine, codeine, temazepam, nitrazepam, phenobarbitone, sodium amytal, dextropropo xyphene, and methadone. They were never abused, but always done in controlled environments where mood, set, and setting were of paramount importance. He felt this was necessary, because he believed in never underestimating the power, potency, and potentially dangerous effects of hallucinogenic substances.
A gang of noisy Japanese tourists made their way behind them. They clicked pictures of the Tower Bridge in the distance and made their way resolutely to get closer shots in the fading light. By this point in the conversation, Craig’s interest was sufficiently piqued. “So tell me about this DMT experience. Gosh, get to the point already!”
Giles turned to his friend and said, “You know quite well, Craig, that I’m no stranger to the effects of mind-altering, psychotropic substances and if you want to hear what I went through then you must know it is not the wide-eyed reaction of a newbie pyschonaut or fledgling shroomer.”
Giles was one of those godless souls who had no use for any conception of the divine and had no religious inclinations whatsoever; he didn’t have a superstitious bone in his body; and he had no mystical bent or spiritual leaning of any sort. Indeed, his friends saw him as rational, logical, and sceptical. He believed in science and the scientific method and had no truck with talk of ghosts and little patience for murmurs about spirits or aliens (though he was quite open to the possibility of extra-terrestrial life being discovered at some point in the future.)
Craig was eager to hear the story and the look of impatience was writ large across his face. “Did you always want to do DMT?” He asked.
“Well, I had always wanted to experience the effects of DMT after watching numerous documentaries and reading copious amounts of literature on the substance. But I never could get access to it. Not for want of trying—I hasten to add. Almost every time I’d been to Amsterdam, DMT was high on my list of things to do. But in its pure extracted form DMT has been illegal.”
“So what changed this time?”
“Ah, fortunately, this time we met an Ayahuasca aficionado who offered us the opportunity to try DMT at his house. To cut a long story short, that evening I found myself in the house of one Izzy Van Druyan, psychonaut par excellence and ahimsa-ist extraordinaire, whose burning ambition in life was to produce dried mangoes for sale.”
“Weren’t you afraid of going to a strange guy’s house?”
“I was with a couple of acquaintances, which made all the difference, I guess. But anyway, the prospect of experiencing DMT was much too enticing to refuse. So anyway, there we were in a studio apartment in a residential area of Amsterdam. It was 10:00pm. A single bed, a Salvadore Dali painting, and a laptop were all that adorned the room. We sat in a circle on the floor as Izzy prepared the DMT hits. He placed some denatured, inactive hemp leaves in a pipe, added the DMT, announced he was ready and asked who’d like to go first. As the more experienced user of hallucinogens in the group all eyes fell on me.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“Oh, I was apprehensive, no doubt. But I knew I’d do it. Nothing would have prevented me from trying it. So I ensconced myself on some cushions, made sure I could fall back on something soft and indicated to Izzy that he was ready. Gentle ambient music played in the background. Five pairs of anxious eyes stared at me as I brought the pipe to my mouth and took the first toke. My lungs filled with smoke. I exhaled after a few seconds. As I took the second toke things started to happen in quick succession. My muscles constricted and my body became warm all over, as if to say, ‘This shit’s going down—get ready for something truly powerful’.”
*** *** ***
For Giles everything after that point was a mental bungee jump into the unknown, because after the second toke he had no control over what his brain did. A ringing sound filled his head. Electric colours the likes of which he had never seen flashed in front of him. Bolts of electric red, streaks of violent purple, a flash of intense green… he had never seen colours like this—not even on acid. It would be wrong to say he saw colours. For the first time in his life he experienced colours. He had no time to analyse any of this. His rational, conscious brain was rapidly, almost instantaneously slipping away.
Izzy had been seated in front of him with his legs crossed in the lotus position. Now, he appeared fragmented. He saw eight throbbing, pulsating Izzys divided equally into a semi-circle. Colours exploded all around him. He was no longer conscious of anyone or anything in the room. His brain was as if it was at a football game, a mental asylum, and a fairground all at once. The overdose of stimuli and the intensity of everything was too great. A couple of seconds after he took that second toke, he found himself closing his eyes and gently falling back on to the cushion.
Immediately, he was in another world. These are oft-employed phrases used by trippers since the 60s: Far-out, trippy, spaced-out, out of this world… these clichés are no longer of any use to describe where he was five seconds into his trip. The pen falters, the lexicon fails, and the keyboard refuses to yield any real description of what he was experiencing. Even those who prided themselves on their writing would be compelled to raise their hands in abject surrender and admit that the language to describe the mental landscape Giles was in has not been invented yet.
It’s as futile as explaining colours to a person born blind. You could spend a lifetime talking about rainbows, and wavelengths, and spectrums and spectrograms… but until a blind person sees colour it will be an absolutely meaningless concept to him.
It reminded him of a novel by Daniel Galouye who once wrote an extraordinary sci-fi book called Dark Universe about the survivors of a post-apocalyptic world who live underground for generations in absolute darkness and lose all ability to see and have no conception of colour
After Giles had closed his eyes, he was instantly transported to a fractal, psychedelic landscape of pure light and mesmerising colours. The odd thing about this space was that even though it was flooded with strobe effects, pulsating illuminations, flashing lights, and exploding colours, he could not discern any shadows. Black didn’t exist. He felt like he was at the centre of the universe observing at an intuitive level all of creation in its entirety; he felt he was able to grasp all matter, time, space, and energy in a single moment. He had an intuitive feeling of everything being connected to everything else; it was a non-rational understanding of what quantum physicists call non-locality and quantum entanglement. He felt a mild sense of euphoria as he tried to make sense of where he was. He could faintly discern the music from the room in the background of his consciousness, but all comprehension of the other individuals in the room was lost. He had no knowledge of his body. All conception of time ceased. All that existed was the present. He was caught in the eternal now. All awareness of self ceased. He was experiencing what neuroscientists have called ‘ego death.’ But he wasn’t scared. If anything, it was exhilarating.
Soon the fractal world began to resolve itself and he found himself standing in this undulating geometric landscape. The sound of his breathing was amplified in this ethereal landscape. He emitted a hollow cough, and its sound changed to colour and rushed through the corridors and passageways of this fractal world.
Thence forth, all sound became light and colour. The music became shades of orange and swept around and twirled about. Neuroscientists have termed this experience synaesthesia—a cross wiring of the senses where people claim to hear colour and taste musical notes. Giles was seeing sound.
He was intensely conscious of being in another dimension. It might sound corny to call it an alien dimension. But if by dimension we mean Cartesian coordinates that allow one to identify objects in space, then this place he now inhabited in his mind could not be described as dream space and could not be identified by everyday perception. It was not of this world or anything he had ever experienced whilst tripping on any other hallucinogen. The realness and reality of it was overwhelming. It was tangible and palpable. It was almost as if the DMT molecule had unlocked the brain’s capacity to access a transcendental reality.
String theory physicists talk about extra dimensions being curled up at the very basic infinitesimally small Planck length scale. If it were humanly possible to conceive what it might be like to inhabit this space then that’s what he felt he was experiencing. If it were ever humanly possible to experience the reality of comprehending what it must be like to live in extra dimensions, then that’s what he was experiencing. He was overwhelmed by a feeling of something greater than myself—the word ‘numinous’ in the English lexicon came closest to describing the sensation, but it had too many associations with ‘God’—something that was anathema to him.
Suddenly, he was conscious of another intelligence besides himself. It wouldn’t make too much sense to quiz Giles on that because the conscious him, or whatever made him him was not there. So, to rephrase the above sentence and correct for the perils of metacognition: The raw abstract disembodied floating intelligence that he thought was himself was suddenly aware of another disembodied consciousness.
He didn’t see anything that he could identify as being sentient. But suddenly, he was confronted by something that had been scotch-taped to his memory and super-glued to his subsequent waking self. He was aware of being in a colourful, light-filled, infinitely-fractaled, multi-dimensional landscape.
In this landscape he encountered (ludicrous as it sounds) what can only be described as a one-dimensional king and queen made of fractal patterns, geometric shapes, and abstractions that he could not describe. He could only describe them as photonic beings—intelligent sentient patterns of light.
They had an intangible mathematicalness about them—an ineffable, otherworldly, almost logarithmic quality to their being. He didn’t see them as king and queen. But he had the most vivid—almost telepathic—understanding that they were a king and queen. They spoke no words, but managed to convey the sensation of their kingness and queeness.
He looked at them, they looked at him. Then, together, they offered him what looked like a platter with a visual manifestation of absolutely incomprehensible, outlandish, bizarre, cryptic ideas and abstract concepts. It was much too incomprehensible for him—far beyond his understanding. He resisted and stepped backwards and they disappeared—or rather, they melted into the fabric of the undulating viciously vibrantly colourful landscape.
*** *** ***
In the darkness, a barge drifted past them slowly as they stared ahead in silence. Craig was lost for words. And Giles was still more confused and bewildered than he had ever been in his life. “A lot more happened after that, which I have not clearly comprehended and cannot put into words,” he finally said. “I will need to enter that mental landscape once again to get a deeper understanding!”
“But… but… what happened then?” Craig asked. “How did you return?”
“Towards the end of my trip the music seemed to slow down; the vivid landscape seemed to freeze; I experienced a whizzing, whirring sound (much like an audio tape stuck). I was suddenly aware of myself. ‘Here he am,’ I said to myself; though who said that to whom is still a question that’s open to neuroscientific and psychological debate. I was aware of being back to this reality. I was conscious of where I was. I opened my eyes and saw everyone else in the room. They were eager to know what it was like. I was sorry to disappoint them, because all I could say to them was, ‘I have nothing to say because there is nothing in the English language that would allow me to describe what I just experienced. I cannot make any analogy or offer any description. I am shaken and at an utter loss for words.’ The information overload was too much. The sensations I felt were ineffable. And the experiences I had had were rapidly melting away from my waking conscious memory centres.”
“Were you alright, though?” Craig asked, with a touch of concern in his voice.
“Physiologically I was fine.” Giles replied. “With each passing second I was coming back to full wakefulness and within a few minutes I was back to normal. I asked them how long I was out. Turns out I was gone for just a few minutes. I had experienced what seemed to me the passage of years of time and sensory input in the space of a few minutes. No wonder I was at a loss to put it all into words.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing much… I gave up my place to the next DMT tripper and sat by the window ledge contemplating what I had been through. Dr Rick Strassman, probably the only western scientist who knows more about DMT than anyone else, looks at the brain as a receiver of information. Under regular neurochemical conditions, our brain is tuned in to channel normal. After two tokes, our brain is tuned in to channel DMT—a new, unimaginable, and vastly different type of reality. I truly felt as if I had been grabbed by the scruff of my neck and flung down the rabbit hole to another reality. I kept shaking my head at how deeply I was affected. To this day, I’m still shaking my head in disbelief…”
