What’s real, and what’s hallucination?

Back in ’64, one of my hippie friends imported a case of DMT ampules from (I think it was Sandoz Labs in) Switzerland and offered them for sale at a dollar a pop. Little glass vials containing perhaps about 1cc of liquid, they had narrow necks, and you were supposed to break the top off to get to the liquid, which was to be drawn into a syringe and injected. I bought two.

I had tried smoking a crystalline version of DMT, which was nicknamed “the businessman’s high” because, since it only lasted about five minutes, you could presumably do it during your lunch hour. The nickname was funny, but it seemed wildly implausible because it was hard to imagine anyone in real life returning immediately to anything after the five-minute “trip”, which was also not euphoric at all.

It was an exploration into unknown lands, and there was no guarantee that the natives would be friendly. You didn’t do DMT for fun, you did it because you were an explorer. Because the trips were exhausting, you also didn’t do them often. After having had “reality” shattered into shards, your brain needs some time to reassemble it so you can resume what you formerly assumed was real life. What we call reality is, it turns out, just an illusion evolution has worked out to produce survival.

But it had been a while since I had last sat on a park bench in Seattle and done the huff-and-puff routine for a DMT joint, and time had restored enough composure and curiosity for me to want to try it again, this time in spades. The ampule injections, I was told, lasted about 20 minutes, and you didn’t dare inject yourself because you wouldn’t have time to pull the needle out before you fell over. What hippie could resist such a scenario?

Descriptions of psychedelic experiences always seem like self-parodies to those who have experienced them. They’re represented as surreal versions of real life, dismissed and depicted as hallucinations by the non-cognoscenti of the media. The problem is that there cannot be any depiction or any description that is close to being meaningful because words and pictures are boundaries … useless in a boundless universe.

So what happened between the time I fell onto the couch in my friend’s house and when I reassembled “the world” 20 minutes later? I can’t tell you, although I tried at the time. Everyone wanted to know, but the closest thing I could come up with was to say I had just returned to this paltry existence in a hippie pad below the as-yet-unfinished Interstate 5 freeway after having lived numerous lifetimes somewhere else in the universe. The exact number I wasn’t able to say because counting seemed utterly irrelevant.

I can tell you this though: in the last minute or so, as my brain struggled to pull the survival kit back together, everyone was wearing a mask. The mundane world would call this a “hallucination”, but it wasn’t. The masks were colorful, vivid and glaring, and they were also real: they were depictions of who we want others to believe we are, rendered for just a few seconds into clown-face exaggerations while my brain got organized enough to return them to the people I believed I knew. And did know again, because once the DMT got flushed out, all the former hallucinations fell comfortably back into place.

The foregoing is an important preamble but it’s not the point of this story. The point came some months later when I felt stable enough to attempt another safari into this strange and wonderful world.

Back I went … back to the same hippie pad under the same freeway overpass, surrounded by the same usual suspects with beards and beads and the smell of weed and patchouli oil. I cracked open my last ampule, took a clean syringe, pulled the cc of fluid, tied myself off and handed the syringe to someone who found a vein and plugged it in.

The same cough-cough as I exhaled the ethyl-ether solution after it made its way to my lungs. And then, and then.

All right, that’s the point of this story: to mundane appearances, nothing whatsoever happened. Could it have been a bad batch? Could its potency have died while sealed away? Listen, this was laboratory-grade stuff sealed in ampules! Possible that it could have been bad or impotent, but given the circumstances, Occam’s Razor would say I’m now just in the first lifetime. Nothing seemed to happen because I haven’t made it through the 20 minutes yet. Check back with me in a few million years. Or 20 minutes, depending on how you count time.

(God, I hope I remember enough of this lifetime to buy a bunch of Microsoft shares when the time comes around! Instead of that Pay’n’Save crap the broker was pushing.)