May 20, 2023 02:55 AM
(This post was last modified: May 20, 2023 03:26 AM by Magical Realist.)
"In 2017, I travelled to the Amazon jungle to take part in an ayahuasca retreat. I hadn’t done psychedelics for 20 years, and that last time I’d had a bad trip which had left me traumatised. Why would I ever want to try psychedelics again? Although I’d healed a lot from that youthful bad experience, I still felt I had healing to do at a deeper level. And I thought that psychedelic therapy, guided by trained facilitators in a safe space, might help me. I chose the retreat centre very carefully, and set off. The retreat was a positive, if sometimes scary experience. By the final day I felt my heart was deeply open and connected to the other participants.
It was when I was back in Iquitos, this noisy, dirty city in Peru, that things started to go wrong. It felt as if my heart froze shut. I was suddenly profoundly disconnected from my surroundings and from other people, to the extent that they seemed unreal. Now all the trauma from my bad trip of 20 years before was flooding back – not on the retreat, as I expected, but after it. I hadn’t expected that at all. It was scary. How long would the disorientation last? Days? Weeks? Years? Forever?
I set off the next day for the Galápagos Islands, where I’d planned to stay for a week. During the two-day journey there, I started to doubt if I was in normal reality. I began to suspect that I was either in a dream of my own construction or trapped in some kind of fake reality constructed by someone else. Could I be in a coma or some afterlife limbo state?
These eery feelings intensified over the next couple of days. On the ferry to the Galápagos, I thought I was on Charon’s ferry, crossing the river Styx to the land of the dead. I checked in to a hotel in the Galápagos, and sat on the balcony. Below me, three seals lay on deckchairs, like overweight tourists, and bellowed sickeningly, while little black iguanas waddled grotesquely around them. This isn’t real, I thought. How do I wake up? When I got texts from loved ones, I thought my subconscious was constructing them. I felt profoundly alone in this fake reality.
How do you know if you’re dreaming? It’s an old philosophical conundrum that goes back to René Descartes. He noted that we could be in a dream, or an imaginary universe constructed by an evil demon, and we’d have no way of proving otherwise. Like Descartes, all I knew for sure was that I was conscious.
A friend back in London realised that I wasn’t well, and suggested, by text, that I should come home. I agreed. I thought I might wake up if I travelled ‘back to London’ in my dream. It took three days and four flights, and all that time, travelling alone in an altered state, I thought I was in a fake reality – I was constructing the plane, the air stewards, the sky with my mind. Somehow, I managed to negotiate it all calmly and arrive back without freaking out or getting locked up. My friend was waiting for me at the airport. It was like the last scene of the film Inception (2010), where the hero meets his family in the airport but isn’t sure if he’s still dreaming. In the end, he decides to go with it. I also decided to go with it, to treat appearances as real.
For two weeks, my friends took care of me. They made sure I ate properly (I’d forgotten to eat for three days) and helped me cross the road (I still wasn’t sure what was real). It was a scary but also a beautiful time, because my heart was still incredibly open, although my rationality was not functioning very well. After two weeks, I was back in this material reality and life carried on more or less as before...."
Contin'd here
https://psyche.co/ideas/a-spiritual-emer...e-the-wave
It was when I was back in Iquitos, this noisy, dirty city in Peru, that things started to go wrong. It felt as if my heart froze shut. I was suddenly profoundly disconnected from my surroundings and from other people, to the extent that they seemed unreal. Now all the trauma from my bad trip of 20 years before was flooding back – not on the retreat, as I expected, but after it. I hadn’t expected that at all. It was scary. How long would the disorientation last? Days? Weeks? Years? Forever?
I set off the next day for the Galápagos Islands, where I’d planned to stay for a week. During the two-day journey there, I started to doubt if I was in normal reality. I began to suspect that I was either in a dream of my own construction or trapped in some kind of fake reality constructed by someone else. Could I be in a coma or some afterlife limbo state?
These eery feelings intensified over the next couple of days. On the ferry to the Galápagos, I thought I was on Charon’s ferry, crossing the river Styx to the land of the dead. I checked in to a hotel in the Galápagos, and sat on the balcony. Below me, three seals lay on deckchairs, like overweight tourists, and bellowed sickeningly, while little black iguanas waddled grotesquely around them. This isn’t real, I thought. How do I wake up? When I got texts from loved ones, I thought my subconscious was constructing them. I felt profoundly alone in this fake reality.
How do you know if you’re dreaming? It’s an old philosophical conundrum that goes back to René Descartes. He noted that we could be in a dream, or an imaginary universe constructed by an evil demon, and we’d have no way of proving otherwise. Like Descartes, all I knew for sure was that I was conscious.
A friend back in London realised that I wasn’t well, and suggested, by text, that I should come home. I agreed. I thought I might wake up if I travelled ‘back to London’ in my dream. It took three days and four flights, and all that time, travelling alone in an altered state, I thought I was in a fake reality – I was constructing the plane, the air stewards, the sky with my mind. Somehow, I managed to negotiate it all calmly and arrive back without freaking out or getting locked up. My friend was waiting for me at the airport. It was like the last scene of the film Inception (2010), where the hero meets his family in the airport but isn’t sure if he’s still dreaming. In the end, he decides to go with it. I also decided to go with it, to treat appearances as real.
For two weeks, my friends took care of me. They made sure I ate properly (I’d forgotten to eat for three days) and helped me cross the road (I still wasn’t sure what was real). It was a scary but also a beautiful time, because my heart was still incredibly open, although my rationality was not functioning very well. After two weeks, I was back in this material reality and life carried on more or less as before...."
Contin'd here
https://psyche.co/ideas/a-spiritual-emer...e-the-wave
