true hallucinations.htm - Shroomery

true hallucinations.htm
certain that this had in fact occurred—but for a much longer time than we had anticipated. In fact, I still believe that our only error throughout
this entire experiment and the events following it has been our inability to correctly predict the duration of the process. I believe that our
understanding of the mechanics of the process, aside from its duration, has been correct, though still incomplete. Time is still, in other words,
the crux of this matter. At times my brothers free associations consisted of incidents which I had experienced more than a year previously and
more than ten thousand miles from where Dennis was then living—incidents about which I had spoken to no one.
Dennis seemed to possess the ability to hear my mind working during the period immediately after the experiment. I illustrate by recalling an
incident when I was sitting outside of our jungle hut listening to his free association, having noticed a few moments before that his muscles
were almost rigid with the enormous physical energy associated with some types of schizophrenia. I worried that he might at some future time
resist my efforts to keep him from wandering away on the archetypal errands that constantly motivated him to try to leave our immediate
living area. It occurred to me that with such strength he could easily injure me or perhaps escape. While mulling over this disturbing
possibility for the first time, I noticed that Dennis had left his hammock and was standing in the doorway of the hut; in a perfect imitation of
our father's voice, he consoled me with the spoken thought that "Dennis is a good lad and would never do a thing like that."
Another incident occurred seven days after the reversal began, on March 12. Dennis announced that at eleven o'clock that night
the "good shit" would appear. This was a reference to a kind of psilocybin-enriched hashish that Dennis claimed he had encountered a few
months before leaving the States, but which would be impossible to find in the Amazon. This prediction of a material transmutation is not so
odd when the alchemical concerns and ideas that led us into this experiment are recalled. After all, we had been reading and discussing
alchemical ideas ever since I had discovered Jung's Psychology and Alchemy, at age fourteen. It had seemed to us then that in the projection
of the phantasms of the unconscious onto matter, the alchemists were achieving a kind of psychedelic state of understanding. And, after all,
isn't the alchemical faith really a faith that the world is made of language? That poetry can somehow be the final arbiter of authentic being?
After this conversation, Ev and I returned through rainy darkness to the forest house for the night and Dennis stayed at the river house with
Vanessa and Dave, where he had moved by this time. As was our custom, we smoked a bit of our Santa Marta Gold before turning in. During
this process, a small fragment fell, still burning, from the pipe. As I picked it up to return it to the pipe, the characteristic odor of Asian hashish
was very noticeable. I examined the pipe's bowl very carefully and, though no change in the physical appearance of the smoking mixture had
occurred, it was now definitely, to my own satisfaction and to that of skeptical Ev, behaving exactly like hashish—a luxury absolutely
unknown in the Amazon in 1971.
This phenomenon persisted for about five minutes and then slowly faded, returning to the rational continuum of normal behavior for materials.
It is to be regretted that this transmutation occurred with a substance where any skeptic will be at ease in venting his or her scorn. We are all
familiar with the facile view that "pot-heads can't think straight," but to anyone who has in-depth involvement with these two substances the
difference is unmistakable. This experience contained a number of parallels to the Nijuli movement among the Lawangan people of Borneo,
who in the early 1920s promulgated ideas centering around the claim that a piece of resin had suddenly become longer through the influence
of a flute played nearby, and that the lengthening of the resin foreshadowed human immortality.
Equally absurd and even more inexplicable was an incident that occurred on the morning of the fifth day, or the ninth of March. Dennis was
sitting and raving to no one in particular with the normal camp life going on around him. I was sitting near the cooking fire sharpening the
expedition's buck knife. I listened while Dennis raved, scanning his ramblings for a hint of a message. Suddenly I stopped my work.
"Are you my tailor?" He demanded, in a strong English accent.
That seemed familiar to me from somewhere.
"All these reflections. See. It's me. Uh, but where is my tailor, my silly? Look, look at you, cor, why you've got my knickers on!"
I blushed deeply. I looked at the ground and said nothing. I felt very boxed in. Dennis was imitating the conversation that I had had with my
English friend in Nepal, after I had come looking for her and had returned with her delirious to my room during our LSD and DMT trip more
than a year before! This crazy conversation, which I had never discussed with anyone save her, was now booming out over our Amazon
clearing in the mad voice of my brother.
It was hardly the sort of situation in which I wanted to exalt my brother's prowess as a telepath. I said nothing and waited, squirming, for his
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