Pareidolia

2

Illusions, hallucinations, patterns, insanity, inspiration, hidden knowledge

Having wandered into the heart of the darkness, beyond the reach of light, The Seeker’s hallucinations fill the void. The imagination manifests openly as the external world melts away. The mind imposes form and coherence upon whatever hint of reality the senses can find - a slither of Moon piercing the darkness becomes a snake that bites its own tail as a metaphor for consciousness; the distant shimmer of lights reflected on the sea at the horizon is a deceased loved one contacting him through morse code; the echo of his footsteps become poems about the future recited by ancient aliens. Free from the distractions of the manifest, The Seeker loses himself in mazes made by his own mind, and cares not whether they are hallucinations or visions of truth; that they appeared before him at all is reason enough to follow them deeper into the darkness - and, if the walls of the cave are in fact painted with his own hallucinations, then that is surely an invitation to carve myths and legends out of the present for future generations to discover.

The wall across from me looked like a patchwork made from the skin of different stretched out faces, stitched together with thread that looked like barbed wire, groaning with the same dim, tortured sentience, their weak voices muffled by the viscous gristle that escaped their mouths when they tried to speak. This time, I was very aware of the fact that I was hallucinating, which made me much more anxious, but also gave me the slight ability to maintain control - though horrific, I knew that these were just hallucinations, and I could distinguish the real from the imagined when I focused. The strangest thing about this - and this is pretty much impossible to explain - was that in a sense I was both hallucinating and not hallucinating at the same time: The couch was just a couch that looked like the couch always looked; but, at the same time, the couch was not just a couch, it was also something from a pornographic Resient Evil film directed by David Lynch. People asked me if I was okay, but I couldn't answer, and didn't want to look at them. The way their bodies moved was unnatural and disturbing, and their faces looked like ill-fitting masks. Someone handed me some kind of hot food, like a microwaved pie or something, and told me to try and eat it. The smell made me realise I was actually quite hungry, but, as soon as I bit down, the horrible feeling of a live human hand wriggling around in my mouth caused me to throw it to the ground in disgust. I did what I could to hide my terror behind my poker face, but my friends could tell I was freaking out. I decided the only thing I could do was hide in bed in the darkness and endure the hellish visions until they subsided, and just try to keep hold of the knowledge that none of it was real, and the nightmare would end at some point. I managed to communicate this to my friends, and someone helped me to my room and left me in the pits of hell.

Alone in the dark, I surrendered to the waking nightmare, trying my best to reassure myself that none of it was real and to treat it like a particularly immersive horror film. The visions were mostly grotesque, looming humanoid figures and fluttering, batlike creatures. Sinister garbled voices whispered, punctuated by bouts of strange laughter and occasional shrieks, similar to the strange voices I'd heard during sleep-paralysis. I learnt to tolerate the visual and auditory hallucinations; but the tactile sensations, though much less frequent, were infinitely more disturbing. The only way I could deal with them was to touch something I knew was there, like the pillow or the carpet, and focus on the small differences between the sensations of touching something real and being touched by phantoms. My saviour came when my hand came across a book in the darkness as I moved it along the carpet floor, trying to dispel some kind of unwanted sensation. I remembered reading phantom books earlier that day, and kept the book in my hand, turning my attention to it whenever the sensations got too much; though the room was pitch-black, I could recreate those hallucinatory books by flicking through the pages of the real one in the dark while pointing my face at it. After a while, I was able to dispel the horrible apparitions around me by opening the book and holding it in front of my face in the darkness, reading aloud the gibberish I saw to drown out the voices, like some kind of insane exorcism.

I either woke up or came to my senses the next morning, and spent a long time lying there reflecting on the surreal and vivid worlds I thrashed through all night. Someone had left a bottle of water next to the bed, and I managed to drink it without too much trouble. I was aware that I was very dehydrated and hungry, but didn't have the internal experience of either - I could feel that my lips were cracked and my mouth was dry, but had no craving for liquid, nor any sense of relief when I quenched my thirst, which I did simply because I knew I should; likewise, I could feel how empty my stomach was and hear it rumbling, but was indifferent to the thought of eating, only thinking that it was something I should deal with at some point. My vision was clearer but I was still hallucinating a bit. Marks on the wall crawled around like insects, zipping back to their position when I looked directly at them. The curtains billowed slightly in the wind even though the window was closed. My inattentive ADHD symptoms had also intensified to the point that I couldn't hold on to a thought for more than a few seconds without forgetting it. I realised I hadn't taken my Citalopram in a few days, but, every time I made moves to find it, I'd get distracted instantly and find myself staring at the ceiling lost in thought. If Vicky hadn't come in to get me in the early afternoon I probably would have stayed there all day, lost in the mazes of my mind. She had some news for me: William was there. He came straight over after being released from hospital - on Sunday afternoon, as he'd said in my vision.

William was in the lounge, along with a few of our other friends who had come by to see him. Though I still felt too alienated and disconnected to talk to the others, I was interested to hear from William. We talked about our trips for the rest of the evening, much to the annoyance of everyone around us. William said he had absolutely no memory of anything between getting back to the party and waking up in hospital the next day wondering what the fuck he'd done this time. Like me, he spent the rest of that day hallucinating vividly in bed, revisiting this dimension only when someone yanked him out of his dream. I told him about the hallucinatory conversation we had the previous night about when he’d be allowed out of hospital. He didn't remember the conversation specifically, but said that while he was in hospital he envisioned himself traversing Newmouth at supernatural speeds, and had stopped by Vicky's to talk to us. He said that he still felt out of it and a little shaken up from his experience, but that the hallucinatory effects of the datura had worn off. I was unsettled by this; even though I was now aware of where I was and who I was and what was real, I was still hallucinating. Objects mutated in my peripherals and seemed to tease and jeer at me, only to return to their original position when I caught them, where they’d stay still until I looked away again, but would still fill me with a powerful and disturbing sense that I was being watched. I had no control over my daydreams, which usually weren't quite hallucinations, but would completely steal me away from the moment if I let my guard down. The feeling of being snapped out of these daydreams was similar to the jump scares of vanishing objects that assailed me for the first day of my trip. By this point, it had been close to two days and three nights since I ate the flowers.

A few more people came over that night to have some drinks and get stoned. I existed like one of my hallucinations, sitting there silently staring into space. William was able to socialise normally for a while, but, after a few beers and some weed, he was completely inebriated and muttering gibberish. It looked more like being in a semi-conscious drunken blackout than a datura-type trance. But William was a heavy drinker and stoner, so there was definitely something more going on.

Later in the night, Vicky took me outside to talk. She was really upset, and tearfully told me about her terrifying night in hospital with William, and how she was worried about how much I'd changed since taking datura and whether I'd ever be the same. I tried to listen to her, but was too distracted; I could already feel dreams creeping into my consciousness from the edges, and, having remembered I had Zopiclone, was anxious to return to that world. I placated her by promising not to take datura again, saying whatever I could think of to shake her off and return to the dream world.

Though I didn't think much of it at the time, in hindsight, this callousness was probably the most disturbing after-effect of my trip. Growing up in a household with a terminally-ill brother and parents who were almost constantly maxed-out on stress trying to keep him alive, I became hyper-aware of the emotions of those around me, tuning in to the subtle tells of my family members' mental states in order to know when I needed to be invisible and when my presence would be helpful. I gradually started to feel other people's emotions as if they were my own so I could tell when a family member was ready to snap at the next sound or needed someone to break the harrowing silence. This isn't to say I was a good person on the whole - I still acted selfishly and impulsively a lot of the time; but, when I was face-to-face with someone, it was almost impossible for me not to feel their emotions. Presently, I was sitting with Vicky - the person I cared about the most in my life at that point - watching her cry and tell me how much she cared about me. But I didn't really feel anything. Everything just felt so distant and unreal. This was probably the result of spending the last few days existing in worlds and interacting with people and creatures that, while seeming just as real as this one, turned out to be imaginary. I guess that by detaching myself emotionally from the nightmare world the previous night, I had detached myself from this world too, like it was just a thin, insignificant layer atop endless other layers, none of which truly mattered, but hinted at something beyond that did. I ate some pasta that Vicky cooked me and took a Zopiclone in front of her so she'd leave me alone, then went back to my room and returned to the other worlds.

The next day, Vicky gave me some money to skate into town and buy us some party pills. My psychosis was at about the same level as the previous day - distracting and occasionally disturbing, but basically manageable. I was pretty much numb emotionally - I got no joy out of skating, had no interest in taking party pills with Vicky, and only really agreed to do this errand so people would stop worrying about me and leave me with my thoughts. The only real feelings I had were to do with my growing obsession with this new internal world. William stayed on the couch the night before, and told me he’d also been having intense and detailed dreams since his trip. The only concern I had for the waking world at that point was taking enough care of my corpse to keep it alive as a vessel to dream from.

At the head shop, I talked to the owner, Mitch, about my datura trip and the dream experiences that followed. He showed me a few herbs he was selling that were meant to enhance dreams - wormwood, mugwort, and calea zacatechichi - and recommended a few books about the entheogenic side of things. I decided to spend my share of the party pill money on either a book or some dream herbs. After a while, Mitch cut me a deal for a big bag of mugwort and a much smaller bag of calea extract, and reluctantly let me borrow one of the books he was selling called Plants of the Gods - an encyclopaedia of various botanical hallucinogens with their history of use in both ancient cultures and modern countercultures. On the way back home, I stopped by this new age-type bookstore to try find some of the books he mentioned. The only one I could find was the Carlos Castenada one, so I shoplifted it along with another book about lucid dreaming.

My psychosis persisted at this level for about a week. I slept with the bag of mugwort under my pillow every night, and smoked calea when my sleep was interrupted. I learnt to lucid dream with some regularity by setting an alarm on my phone that would go off every few hours during the day, at which point I'd stop whatever I was doing - usually fuck all - and question whether or not I was dreaming, the intention being to ingrain this habit to the extent that the alarms would start going off in my dreams. Even if I woke up early, I'd stay in bed till the late afternoon, smoking calea, reading about dreams, and taking Zopiclone to go back to sleep.

In my upright waking hours, I hung around the house with whoever happened to be there, interacting very little. I assumed that William got kicked out of his parents' house after his datura trip, because he'd started sleeping in the lounge every night. Vicky's mental health started to deteriorate; she now had an unhinged William as an uninvited tennant, a bunch of stoners treating her house as their own, and her best friend had seemingly lost his mind on datura, and was haunting the household like a phantom. At night, when everyone else had left or gone to sleep, me and William smoked weed to induce controlled datura flashbacks. We dissected our vivid dreams, creating theories about the mechanics of that realm. We both agreed that in the dream world, air is more liquid and water is more solid than in the waking world, which explains the resistance when you try to run or punch in a dream, and also how you can fly. When we found ourselves unable to explain something, we consulted either Plants of the Gods or The Teachings of Don Juan as oracles, flipping to a random page and interpreting whatever it revealed. Though me and William both suspected that there was something sacred about hallucinogens, this was the first we'd heard about their shamanic or indigenous use. We'd all heard about artists and musicians like Pink Floyd and The Doors who had used psychedelics to expand their minds, but we mostly just saw them as the wildest ride a drug can take you on. In our particularly susceptible headspace, having external validation of our suspicion that there was something sacred about hallucinogens was enough to tip William and I over the edge.

During one of our late night psychotic episodes, William and I somehow concluded that we needed to have a mescaline trip to counteract our datura trip. William said he knew a house a few suburbs away that had two San Pedro cacti that were at both least seven foot tall. The next day, when a bunch of the stoners were over, William mentioned this, and we all agreed to have a mescaline trip as a group sometime in the next two weeks, when most of them were set to move down south to start University.

A few days later, these vague plans solidified. I was sitting on the balcony in the sun, sometime in the afternoon. I'd grown used to my post-datura psychosis and general malaise and dissociation, but I thought the full-blown hallucinations had subsided - until, malnourished, weary, and completely abstracted, I watched a shadowy human figure dressed in baggy, frayed black clothing traverse the backyard, stop, glance at me, then continue along and melt into the fence on the other side. The mescaline trip rescue fantasy was so burnt into my mind that it was as much of a given as gravity, and I decided then that we needed to make it happen.

That day, Vicky, William, and Tommy were hanging out at the house. I went inside and told them it was time to get the cactus. William and Tommy were both keen for the mission, so we got a knife from the kitchen and found an old gym bag and a camping pack. Vicky stopped me as we were leaving and told me we couldn't cook it there. I said okay and we set off.

Out of the wealthy stoners, Tommy was the quietest and most unphased by things. I used to joke that I could imagine him killing someone if it was less effort than letting them live. He also came from a relatively liberal and intellectual background, so was able to put up with William and I rambling on about our borderline psychotic philosophies, while also contributing when he felt like it.