Dream from Hell

Telepathy, time travel, and assorted craziness

Substances: Ayahuasca, Peganum harmala, Mimosa hostilis

A half ounce of Mimosa hostilis root bark was extracted in my usual way (see earlier trip reports). This was then poured into a pyrex baking dish and allowed to evaporate. The dry extract was then scraped up with a razor blade and gelcapped, resulting in 15 caps. As a liquid extract, a half ounce of Mimosa makes one decent dose. I had fully intended to take all 15 capsules.

9PM: Me and R drive my friend B to drop her off where she was meeting a friend. The plan at this point is to go back to my place, where I would take all 15 capsules and R was going to stay for a while just so he could see me trip.

9:30: R and I arrive back at my place. As I sat there with the capsules in front of me, I got a sudden overwhelming feeling that I should not take all 15. I ask R if he wanted to try it, and he says yes. We each take a tablespoon's worth (about 3g) of crushed harmala seeds which had been gelcapped.

9:45: I take 8 of the capsules and R takes 7.

10-11PM: The trip comes on slowly. All goes much like my other ayahuasca dreams. It is pleasant and mild, and there is no nausea. It is at this point comparable to half a hit of average blotter acid. Very mild. Almost too mild. We try playing with candles and blacklight to try and intensify the trip. I begin to think "Damn the dry extract doesn't work anywhere near as good as the liquid." and feel disappointed with the trip.

11:30: I had about a dose worth of liquid Mimosa extract in my closet. I consider getting it out and splitting it with R to try and make the trip stronger. The idea of tasting the vile root bark tea makes me hesitate.

12AM: Still considering taking more, when all of the sudden I begin to feel nauseous. R feels this at the same time. At the same time, the mental effects begin to dramatically intensify. I have to turn off the blacklight because it is fucking with me too hard. I turn to R and say, "This is TOO much, I want it to stop." He says "No, this is cool!". About 5 seconds later we both jump up and run to the bathrooms (I have 2 in my apartment) and puke violently. I throw up lumps of Mimosa tar and ground harmala seeds. The Mimosa chunks seem to have expanded in my stomach, and I stare into my toilet at large black chunks. I honestly cannot tell what I'm looking at - did I just throw up a spleen?? What is that in the toilet? Was that supposed to come out?!?! What IS that? I am shaking and sweating. I manage to get up, flush, and walk halfway back to my bed when I feel it again and run and puke in my bathroom sink, unable to make it to the toilet. In the other bathroom, I hear R throwing up loudly. I begin thinking "Fuck, are we OK?" I begin yelling "R! R! I think I'm not OK!" but he is busy vomiting. I feel my pulse race, I feel burning hot, I'm still trembling from vomitting so hard. I seriously wonder if I'd poisoned myself.

12:15: We're done puking and sitting on my bed shaking. I have to take a shit. I get up and go into the bathroom. I sit on the toilet and shit. As I do, I begin to realize I am dying. I know I am going to be dead within minutes, and I'm thinking "Damn, I don't want to be one of those people who die taking a shit." I don't want to be remembered as that guy who took some weird drug and died taking a shit. I am terrified. I squeeze the rest of it out very quickly, wipe as fast as I can, and pull my pants up as I stumble out of the bathroom. "Yes, I made it out of there and I'm not dead YET." As I'm walking back to my bed, I suddenly have to puke again. Once more, I just hurl into my bathroom sink, afraid to go back to the toilet. As I stand there squeezing Mimosa tar out of my throat, I look into my bathroom mirror and notice my reflection isn't there. My room is there, but I'm simply not in the reflection. Maybe I *DID* die while I was shitting! This slides into a memory gap. For the next several hours, there is absolutely no way of piecing together a coherent, linear chronology of what happened. Time no longer functioned properly.

Time Chunk 1: R and I are on my bed. I have no idea who, where, or when I am. I keep asking R, who seems to be answering me in riddles. "What is going on R?!?" "What do you THINK is going on?" I realize I am not in reality dealing with R anymore. I know that this is in fact some sort of Bardo entity. I am dead, and this entity is trying to make me realize that I've died, and accept my death...sort of like the character of the chiropractor in the movie Jacob's Ladder, who makes Jacob realize that he has died. Like Schroedinger's Cat, I look back and am quite certain that I was in a state of being simultaneously dead and alive, occupying the same space in two universes. Had I accepted my death, I would have become locked in a reality where I had in fact died, and would not be writing this today. I also think that another version of me in another reality DID accept his death, and did die. That parallell me, I think, somehow communicated with the earlier me, and warned me not to take all the capsules. I can think of no other explanation for why I didn't take all 15 as I had originally planned. *This* me, however, realized that he was not dead, and managed to survive that night.

Time Chunk 2: My entire room mirror images itself. Left becomes right, and vice versa. This spatial distortion is so complete that ebem writing on my posters and tape cases is reversed, looking as if they would held up to a mirror. Time Chunk 3: Things look severely distorted. R walks into my room and I see him in the form of some kind of Indian god. Four faces around his head, multiple arms. I realize I am looking at one of the Wrathful Deities from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Every time I blink my eyes, my room changes shape, size, layout, and lighting. Furniture rearranges itself and ceases to be identifyable.

Time Chunk 4: Things get really fucked up. It was as if my room were reduced to a 2 dimensional picture which was subsequently torn to confetti and thrown into a blender. My head was attatched to R's arm. My foot is sticking out of the wall, next to a book which had somehow fused with my alarmclock. All concept of space, time, and direction are scrambled. "I" is not even a vaguely remembered concept. Ultimate chaos. Ultimate fear.

Time Chunk 5: We are sitting on my bed. We find ourselves endlessly looping through the same 5 minute chunk of time. The odd thing is we are aware of this loop, and able to talk about it. The only problem is that since time is looping, so is the conversation. We think up ways to try and count the loops, only to forget them when God hits the rewind button next. R commented that it was like the Star Trek Generations movie. It is both funny and annoying. Neither of us to this day can tell whether we were simply real fucked up and kept repeating ourselves verbatim over and over, or whether we actually experienced the same 5 minutes hundreds of times. While this is going on, and for the rest of the trip, there is an intense telepathy between me and R, to the point where I would have an itch and he would scratch his foot, and we would have to spend some time trying to decide who was having which thoughts. "Am I thinking that, or are you?" "Uhh, I think its me but Im not sure..." Words are annoyingly clumsy. Our conversation becomes:

"You know?"
"Yeah..."
"Exactly!!!"
"Yeah I know..."

and it made complete sense. The words were spoken simply out of a habit for verbal speech. The real conversation was telepathic. We found ourselves able to feel/be other people who were not physically present, particularly our friend B who left before this all began. This went beyond time, as well, and we both simultaneously were aware of an old Chinese man eating noodles with chopsticks, and realized that this event happened centuries ago. We are able to see my bedroom in other times as well, and see people who had been there.

Time Chunk 5: We are lying on my bed. We both had our eyes closed, and were unable to move or open our eyes, yet somehow could still talk (not sure if it was telepathically or verbally). It occurs to us that we are in fact asleep or otherwise unconscious.

Time Chunk 6: We are on my bed. Nuclear bombs are on the way in. We see one streak across the sky, and the mushroom cloud. A red glow rushes towards us.

Time Chunk 7: I look out my window. There is a cop car down the street with its lights on. Are we in jail? Did we get busted and not remember it? Probably. What is a cop anyway, and what is jail? Neither of us know, but we know a cop has put us in jail. NO WAIT! Im not in jail, I'm at work! SHIT! How do I keep everyone from knowing Im this fucked up?! Where do I work anyway? Who the fuck am I? Where am I, when am I, and who is tripping? Is it me? What's a me?!?!

Time Chunk 8: I am dying, I know I am. I begin asking for B. Where is she? I want her to be here. My God, I'm in love with her. I'm dying and all I want is just to see her once more before I die. B!!! I tell R "Oh shit, I think I'm in love with B...what should I do?" Where is she? Wasnt she here? I need her here now. She doesnt even know I love her and now I'm going to die. I begin saying her name, hoping she will somehow hear me.

3:33: R says "Its 3:33, make a wish!" I regain a foothold on linear time. From this moment on, there are no more gaps in my memory, and I remember things in the order they actually happened. But we are still halfway outside of time, and are able to easily look into other times and parallell realities, even to the point of manipulating them. We find it necessary to identify ourselves not just by name but by time and place, "Murple in 1998 in my room" "R 3 years from now in the universe where I didnt take the DMT", etc. We slowly begin to lose this extra-temporal sense though, and gradually become grounded in one time and one universe. We begin looking back at the trip and trying to make sense of it all. The next few hours are spent unwinding, coming back, and talking about the THING we just experienced.

5:00: My roommate knocks on my door, "You guys are still up?!?" We look at the clock and are blown away that we'd been tripping for 7 hours. All previous ayahuasca journeys had lasted an hour or two. We are shocked.

6:00: I finally feel grounded enough to drive, and take R home. I get back around 6:45. To complete the time loop, I focus and try to send a thought to my previous self, "DONT TAKE ALL 15 CAPSULES ME, YOU WONT MAKE IT THROUGH!" I go to sleep, and have wild dreams.

I woke up the next day not quite sure I was the same me in the same reality as I was yesterday. It even occurred to me that perhaps I was still tripping and this was yet another hallucination. The next night I saw R, and he said he had the same thought. Over 2 months later, I still am not sure I came back to the same universe I left. I am still trying to put this in perspective. I can still remember it vividly. The problem is, I dont remember events in the order they actually occured in. The "Time Chunks" above are just that - snippets of reality that certainly did not happen in the order in which I wrote them.

What did I learn? I finally faced my feelings for B, for one - that would be the real world application of this trip, one I am still coming to terms with. I also learned that ayahuasca is VERY powerful stuff, exponentially stronger than any other psychedelic I've ever tried. I feel as if I was shown the machine language of the universe. But in all honesty, it will be many years before I fully understand this trip - if ever.

To back up what Chiron said - Mimosa rootbark is VERY VERY VERY strong, it WILL kick your ass through several dimensions. Psychedelic bravado is not in order with this substance. This is no toy psychedelic, this is the Real Thing. Do not assume that just because you can eat a quarter sheet of acid and cope that you can handle ayahuasca. You can't handle ayahuasca. IT handles YOU. Use her with respect, and she can show you things you cant see any other way. Use her unwisely, and she will tear you apart and teach you respect.