The following occurred at the tail end of a two and a half day crystal festival – one of those whimsical little vacations from sleep, food, and coherence that I had been indulging on and off for a week or two.
In accordance with the final days of these festivals - the sleep-deprived hallucinations already graced whatever spot I chose to fix my eyes upon for longer than a couple of seconds.
[--- I quite enjoyed these hallucinations - which were of a different kind than acidic visuals - usually taking the form of tightly knit little bundles of transparent sticks (very much like the little protazoan floaters I have had ever since I started wearing contact lenses, which become most apparent when staring into a uniform light source) that first spin counter-clockwise into appearance whenever and wherever I happen to rest my eyes. Resting my eyes is synonymous and simultaneous with the little spinning sticks catching my eye – and as I continue to marvel at the center of the branchy whirlpool, the radius of their rotation expands and slows until the sticks take on the form of something I recognize – sometimes transparent crayfish like creatures, or other mildly threatening (depending on my mood) insectoid or living flow-chart-like whatsits. This tangible quality of the visuals pleased me – in contrast to the more typical melting or shifting of my previous hallucinatory nights and days. ---]
The sun had risen a couple of hours before and my crew of self-supporting, giggling cohorts and I were basking in the delight of yet another sunrise we would see together thanks to our child-like foray into the smoking glass (we hadn’t missed one for almost a week). One of my buddies whipped out a bowl and started passing it around. Not everyone was at the same stage of the crystal festival – some were just starting out, some had reached the thirty-six hour checkpoint, and I was leading the pack and nearing the finale with somewhere near sixty hours under my belt. Someone told me - 'Ohhhh… you are in for a big surprise.' - as he passed me the bowl – something about really strange things occuring when combining methduced sleep-deprivation and marijuana. These encouraging warnings piqued my excitement – so I took multiple large hits from the little pipe – several times coughing with overeagerness.
Then it got interesting.
I lost interest in the laughter around me and wandered inside. When I returned my gaze to the white wall that had previously served as the screen for my sticky hallucinations, I now noticed a purple-blue flower growing on the wall near the ceiling. Following the flower I noticed a slowly moving blue slug on the ground creeping towards me. I stood bewilderblissed for a couple seconds, blinked my eyes a couple times, and then turned around to see what was lurking on the other side of the room. Similar strange little living objects were growing and moving behind me – but there were more on the other side than I cared to notice, so I turned back to the flower and slug and noticed them sitting, quivering in the selfsame spot I had seen them before. The flower was pretty, but the slowpproaching slug bothered me a little. I held onto enough reality to hopefully know that the slug was just a blue piece of paper on the ground, and the flower was a blue and purple piece of paper taped to the wall.
Just to make sure of my safety from the slug – I ran up to him and kicked him and then ran away again. My hopes were confirmed, the slug shed his sluggish nature and returned to the piece of paper I knew was his essence. After this I walked up to the flittering flower and scared her back into her paper nature as well. Sanity secured – I decided to rush over to the piano on the other side of the room – avoiding noticing as many of the other little plants and slugs that lurked inside the multivarious litter strewn across the room.
The night before, I had for the first time in over a decade sat down in front of a piano and played around. I enjoyed the experience tremendously – it was the my first attempt to touch a musical instrument since my first and only musical training at the age of five with a narcoleptic French woman who would sleep while I practiced. I never ended up pursuing the music because video games overwhelmed my passion at the time.
Music offered a tantalizing prospect in my then super-hallucinatory mode.
I was messing around with some solo-like somethings with my right hand (I love female vocalists) and throwing in some deep resonating left hand in between – all of it done with the right pedal held down (I love resonating echoes). All the same little stick-drawing microscopic insects that showed themselves the night before were still there [notches on the piano], including a couple fascinating decaying holes on the ivory keys [notches in the keys]. They never interfered with my playing – so I just ignored them.
The playing was fun but I ran up against the musical obstacle of being unable to synchronize my right hand playing with my left. I played harder – trying to synch them together until… bang!
I have no specific memory per se of the moment when my hands began playing together but I remember describing it soon afterwards like a waterfall. After that moment, the keyboard became transparent – much like the keyboard I am typing on right now – meaning, I did not see the keys as keys which I was struggling to hit in order to make the right music – the music was just flowing out of me.
I played very, very hard and very, very loud and very, very beautifully for some amount of time afterwards. What I was playing, how long I was playing, and where I was during that amount of time has vibrated off somewhere in the cosmos – and all I remember was, it was good.
But then it got – really - interesting.
Whenever it was that I stopped playing and finally stood up (my hands had begun hurting), I looked back onto those white walls around me that had held slugs and flowers and what not. Now, instead of colorful slugs and flowers, I saw sparkling transparent video game images projected onto whatever white surface I happened to glance on. The phenomenon was so strange that I walked outside to look at the walls of the building and there they still were, the disconnected images just kept on moving, shooting, jumping, running, flying, falling, and zooming around. I remember recognizing a specific character from the Nintendo game Rygar – one of my personal favorites as a child.
I figure that my brain shit out the interminable years of eight to twelve hour days in front of a light box onto my visual field as soon as I reconnected with the musical passion that preceded the electronic obsession. Since then, in moments of meditative calm, I have seen other little traces of those video games – each time coinciding with a moment of spiritual growth.
For the record, it wasn’t the meth that did it – it was the sleep deprivation that placed me in a fertile state for planting the marijuana into my brain. (I wouldn’t even call meth a drug anymore - all it seems to do it make my body forget to close its eyes). And I wouldn’t recommend meth to anyone – my body needs sleep, and without it I become a panicky fool. Someday I’ll write up the other meth experience when because of not sleeping for days I managed to convince myself a homeless man had hypnotized and brainwashed me. I slept and then I figured out I was just a panicky fool.
I used to love speculating on what this means about our minds, our development, and who we are – but after I got bored talking about life rather than living and learning from it – all I have done since that day is run and sing and love and grow and play.
