true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
happen, or something wonderful was in store.
Dennis explained that he was unable to move about very well because of something having to do with the backward flow of time. The everincreasing
constraints on the set of possible futures had rendered him nearly immobile; only the mind, planning and computing, was free.
We finished boiling the ayahuasca. I ground the admixture plants and added them to the cooling brew. I moved the ayahuasca into the hut,
then the mushroom. With those things in place, we were ready to begin.
Dennis began narrating our countdown toward an Omega that none of us could really understand; we were completely transformed by the
expectation that we might witness the outbreak of the millennium. He said that time was appearing to slow down as we approached this point.
Prior to this, we had taken no hallucinogens for several days, so the effects we were experiencing were not arising from that source.
Something else was happening. As proof of this amazing assertion, he called our attention to the candle that I had set upon a small shelf
jutting from the wall of the hut. Unattended, its slight tilt had become slowly exaggerated so that now it hung at a crazy angle, defying gravity
because, he said, time was passing so slowly that we could not see that it was actually in the act of falling.
I walked closer to this apparition and bent toward the flame. The fire appeared still, absolutely frozen. My mind shot back to the moment
above the river when it too had seemed stilled forever. The flame was uncanny. As deeply as I cared to look into it I could see no movement
of particles or gas. I seemed to have my usual freedom of movement, but the world around me was coming to a crystalline and eerie halt.
It was Dennis who finally spoke: "A series of discreet energy levels must be broken through in order to bond this thing. It is part
mythology, part psychology, part applied physics. Who knows? We will make three attempts before we break out of the experimental mode."
We all drank the ayahuasca. The taste was sharp and astringent, like a sauce of leather and mole, but it faded quickly as the liquid went
churning through our guts. Dennis took only one more mushroom to help him hear the tone. The darkness outside was utter and we had no
clock; it seemed hours since Dave and Vanessa had left us. All was finally in readiness: the living mushroom, the harmine brew, and a
harmine smoking mixture, "just in case." After we each had about a half-cup of the ayahuasca infusion, we settled down to wait.
For the past several days, Dennis had been hearing the ESR tone that he deemed the sine qua non of what we were attempting. After about
fifteen minutes, he announced that he could hear it more clearly and that it was gathering strength. He felt prepared to attempt the experiment
at any time, he said.
We agreed that each time during the actual making of the sound we would extinguish the candle so that our minds would not be burdened by
the sight of any tryptamine-induced facial distortions that the odd yelling might cause. Years before, during peak episodes of DMT among our
old Berkeley gang, we had witnessed spasms of facial musculature that were completely hair-raising, invoking as they did the entities of
Tantric Buddhism—the bulging eyes, the impossibly long, rolling tongue, that sort of thing.
Dennis then sat up in his hammock. I put out the candle, and he sounded his first howl of hyper-carbolation. It was mechanical and loud, like a
bull roarer, and it ended with a convulsive spasm that traveled throughout his body and landed him out of his hammock and onto the floor.
We lit the candle again only long enough to determine that everyone wanted to continue, and we agreed that Dennis's next attempt should be
made from a sitting position on the floor of the hut. This was done. Again a long, whirring yodel ensued, strange and unexpectedly mechanical
each time it was sounded.
I suggested a break before the third attempt, but Dennis was quite agitated and eager to "bring it through," as he put it. We settled in for the
third yell, and when it came it was like the others but lasted
much longer and became much louder. Like an electric siren wailing over the still, jungle night, it went on and on, and when it finally died
away, that too was like the dying away of a siren. Then, in the absolute darkness of our Amazon hut, there was silence, the silence of the
transition from one world to another; the silence of the Ginnunga gap, that pivotal, yawning hesitation between one world age and the next of
Norse mythology.
In that gap came the sound of the cock crowing at the mission. Three times his call came, clear but from afar, seeming to confirm us as actors
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