true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
I awakened Ev and she sleepily confirmed the colors around the candle, but it communicated nothing to her of what it communicated to me.
She rolled over, and when I returned from going outside, she was snoring softly. As I climbed back into my hammock, I counted heads and
noted that everyone was present and asleep. I lay awake a long time, thinking. All seemed still.
As breakfast unfolded the following morning, the sixth of March, it became clear that the restful sleep I had imagined we had all shared had
been anything but that. From Dennis, still disorganized but expansive, comments emerged that he had, or imagined he had, a very active night.
Upon close questioning, it came out that he was completely convinced that sometime during the night he had arisen and dressed and then had
a series of nocturnal adventures. These involved going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the chorro over a mile away, then
returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of the mission, then making his way back across the pasture and returning
to his hammock, strung among all the others. The thought of him wandering around during the night on those trails, without his glasses,
falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy, perhaps howling and otherwise paleolithically comporting himself, was too much for me. It was a
breech of the collective cool. Even though I was 90 percent
certain that it had never really happened, I was determined to eliminate all possibility of such rambles in the future.
Dennis's story was the classic description of a shamanic night journey. He said that he had gone to the chorro and had meditated in the mission
cemetery we had visited before. He had begun to return to camp when he confronted a particularly large Inga tree near where the path skirted
the edge of the mission. On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian
shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point in his
ascent, something that he called "the vortex" opened ahead of him—a swirling, enormous doorway into time. He could see the Cyclopean
megaliths of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and
marble-faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt. And yet farther into the turbulent maw of the vortex, he saw
mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man—titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us, the arcane machineries of
sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these
gibbering abysses, touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon-consuming time, rushed down upon him. He fainted, and time—who
can say how much time—passed by him.
He next found himself in the pasture a few hundred feet from his newly discovered axis mundi. If he fell from the tree, it did not seem to have
hurt him. Amazement, exaltation, fear, and confusion were all present in his thoughts. The continuum seemed to be shredding and ripping
itself to pieces before his eyes, time and space swirling the artifacts of twenty-thousand years of human striving into a vortex of apocalyptic
contradictions. In that state of fear and exultation, at the depth of the revelation of humanity's destiny among the stars, Dennis returned to our
camp and noiselessly returned to his hammock, or awakened there from a dream of the same thing.
Twenty-four hours had passed since the attempt to hyper-carbolate human DNA. It was apparent that Dennis was not pulling out of the
induced state of shamanic excitement as quickly as we
had hoped. This was too long to be considered a normal reaction to mushrooms or ayahuasca. Two choices presented themselves to explain
the situation:
The first was the position that Vanessa and Dave leaned toward, and it said that the strain of the journey and the recent psilo-cybin tripping
had contributed to activate a shamanic archetype in Dennis that had been latent all along. This was now overt and carrying a strong
transference potential to which I was succumbing by being unable to recognize my brother's condition as a potentially pathological state. This
was the source of much of our differences of opinion on how to proceed.
A second explanation, the one Ev and I leaned toward, took a biochemical rather than a psychological approach. It said that Dennis, through
his unusual diet of alkaloids and the experiment he performed, had inhibited some enzyme system that would normally return one from the
heights of a hallucinogenic trip, but in this case had somehow become inoperative. The most likely candidate for this would be the monoamine
oxidase (or MAO) system, which is responsible for rendering many hallucinogens into inoperative byproducts. The phenomenon of
irreversible MAO inhibition is known to occur with some drugs and is a condition that takes nearly two weeks to correct itself. Though the
compounds in Banisteriopsis caapi are known to usually reverse their MAO inhibition in four to six hours, as subsequent events show, this
explanation was doubtless some part of the story, since Dennis was to be in the grip of his shamanic ravings for nearly two weeks.
After years of thought, my own explanation continues to lean heavily on the second idea for an operational explanation. I do not believe that
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