Everything and nothing

Yesterday evening  I took the train into town to Lee’s and took LSD with he and Ian: collective wildness, hysteria, uncontrollable laughter at the television, mystification over the plots of two films, the last of which a sordid tale of a man who wants to murder his family, which he later does but only after numerous sexual encounters, five in a bed, etc., sex on the N. York metro...

We tried an after-image experiment with Lee’s camera flash unit and the results were different than what we’d expected. Because LSD increases the image retention capability of the retina, we’d assumed that the illuminated scene glimpsed during the flash would remain imprinted on our retinas, gradually fusing and changing. Instead we found that even in complete darkness everything was a riot of mind-generated colours, lights, and blossoming shapes, so much so that I couldn’t even see to move about and so ended up spreadeagled on the floor in my pleasure, much to Ian and Lee’s amusement.

I was a bit anxious lest I think myself into the same state of panic as a couple of weeks ago, with the same thought receding back into the very centre of my brain until all that remained was a black nothing. I had intimations that loss of control was imminent, and I had to fight these off to such an extent that at one point I was struggling to keep calm, at which point I persuaded Ian and Lee to tramp purposefully with me round the deserted sludgy streets of Watermouth, to King’s Road and back through the town centre. We passed an undertaker’s, the coffins piled up as we passed, surreal but real. Everything seemed very sordid. 

Back at Lee's we were endlessly fascinated by books of Escher prints, a book on the history of the Nazis and one on skinheads, but as the drug wore off we became less active and sank into long periods of subdued silence, lying on the bed or on the floor, our minds alive with “everything and nothing,” as Lee put it.

Coming down is a depressing and disillusioning experience; life seems hopeless.

Everything looks cheap and shabby. I felt very isolated and empty inside, utterly remote and alone in that black place inside my skull, and therein lies the panic and the fear. At these moments, my mind turns into a simple receptor unable to filter the unceasing bombardment of sights and sounds and information for even a second, and so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, like a drowning man must feel when he slips beneath the surface for the final time.

Not even shutting my eyes brought respite, for my brain was working at light speed and the thoughts and ideas crackled on and on, seemingly forever. It was quite an unpleasant sensation. To maintain an even keel and to keep my mind pinned down until the danger of it flying off at a tangent was passed, I pushed myself into single minded tasks, looking at pictures, reading books and talking about specific events or memories.

I went to bed at five thirty and woke up at half four this afternoon feeling wasted, but I have a tutorial with Dr. Harrison tomorrow and we're discussing Kafka’s The Trial, so I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening reading the book in bed.

The dangers of LSD are manifest and I feel uncertain about taking it in the future. I’m sure the fears I expressed above will never be far away, always lurking in some corner of my mind, ready to terrorise me.

“You can’t beat a good strong dose of normality,” said Lee when we’d woken up, and in a way he’s right.