God Awful Things

Hallucinogens are not for everyone, that’s for sure, and in formative years post college, I experimented (not planning on running for office ever so I don’t think I’m ruining my chances by posting this on the big ol’ internet).  In high school we would take lots of dramamine which would put you in a near dream state but still be awake, kind of like how I felt at sexual harassment prevention training today.  There weren’t really “visuals” in the LSD sense of the word, but in this confused state your brain would misinterpret information that was coming in.

I know in one study hall I kept hearing music that no one seemed to noticed, after asking the study hall monitor to turn down the music, she mad the international hand gesture for “you have headphones on”.. I remember a classmate announcing their desire for a cheese burger in the middle of chemistry as the though for some reason they were at lunch.  Or my friend Steve telling me that something on the lamp looked like a guitar strap, even though he knew it wasn’t a guitar strap.  Dramamine abuse, naturally, has its punishments, and that I called “Italian Dressing Ass”.  Use your imagination.

Some day I will tell you of the curse whilst I was in Georgia, but not today.

In college and afterwords I would try mushrooms, which I enjoyed, trying various amounts for light trips to some seriously psychological freak outs.  The last time I did them was as close as I ever came to having a bad trip, and though I was seriously unnerved at the time, as soon as it was over I was speechless with what I’d experienced… truly cosmic, man.

Never tried LSD, the thought of being messed up for so long freaks me out, I like my trips 4 hours or less (though the longest being 7).. This led me to the path of DMT, which is the strongest hallucinogen known to man, but also a very short trip (when smoked).. Whilst existing in most natural plants, trees, etc, it’s incredibly hard to find.  Well a friend of mine gave me some for my birthday one year, but I was too scared and never smoked it, nor did I have a glass pipe to smoke it out of, so now it sits wrapped in a piece of paper, probably melted into the paper, god only knows.

But all this time, I didn’t need drugs, I just needed a sensory deprivation chamber!

Over at Wired there’s an article where they took 19 people in a sensory deprivation room and they started trippin’ balls after just 15 minutes.

“This is a pretty robust finding,” wrote psychiatrist Paul Fletcher of the University of Cambridge, who studies psychosis but was not involved in the study. “It appears that, when confronted by lack of sensory patterns in our environment, we have a natural tendency to superimpose our own patterns.”

The findings support the hypothesis that hallucinations happen when the brain misidentifies the source of what it is experiencing, a concept the researchers call “faulty source monitoring.”

“This is the idea that hallucinations come about because we misidentify the source of our own thoughts,” psychologist Oliver Mason of the University College London wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “So basically something that actually is initiated within us gets misidentified as from the outside.” Mason and colleagues published their study in October in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease.

Coooooooooooooooooooooool.

Though participants had a panic button, none of them used it. After spending 15 minutes deprived of sight and sound, each person completed a test called the “Psychotomimetic States Inventory,” which measures psychosis-like experiences and was originally developed to study recreational drug users.

Among the nine participants who scored high on the first survey, five reported having hallucinations of faces during the sensory deprivation, and six reported seeing other objects or shapes that weren’t there. Four also noted an unusually heightened sense of smell, and two sensed an “evil presence” in the room. Almost all reported that they had “experienced something very special or important” during the experiment.

As expected, volunteers who were less prone to hallucinations experienced fewer perceptual distortions, but they still reported a variety of delusions and hallucinations.

Open the doors of perception... man.

Another reason to buy a house… so I can build my own Anechoic Chamber and trip balls… on my BRAIN!