L’invitation au voyage

Disclaimer: The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this document were hallucinated. No identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. In the case of identification with actual persons, too bad for the actual persons. No person or entity associated with this story received payment or anything of value or entered into any agreement or connection with the depiction of tobacco products. Ergot derivatives were depicted instead as a very worthy substitute. No animals, real or imaginary, were harmed in the making of this story.

This page was intentionally left filled with intricate colorful geometric figures and patterns.

More than an invitation to travel, this is an attempt to tell a tale of travel. A trip to a realm that is rarely voyaged to — at least, by the majority of people, certainly by a rational-to-the-bones nerd like myself. Without any doubt, it was one of the most intense experiences in my life, if not the most intense. Beautiful? Horrible? These categories are irrelevant. I am perfectly aware of the hopelessness of my endeavor to convey the memory of this “voyage” with regular words. Our language is incapable of such a description. In my hands, at least. I can at best attempt a low-dimensional projection. A band-limited approximation.

My choice of English is arbitrary and pragmatic. Probably, it is the easiest language to write in given the fact that this is the language in which I write the most. However, I’m unable to totally disentangle it from the linguistic multiverse I happen to live in.

At times I’m self-censoring myself, despite my willingness to be maximally sincere. Perhaps, I’m instinctively afraid of others thinking that I went nuts. I’m not completely excluding that possibility.

I don’t have a clear idea of my target audience. Besides myself, this modest opus will certainly be appreciated by my brother and to some extent by my wife, who through living for many years by my side share similar associations and can decipher my references, hidden meanings, and puns. It might well be that the text is largely unintelligible by a more general audience. So be it.

I don’t hope to be able to produce my own convincing verbal description of the voyage; yet, I do count to some extent on the eloquence of a few writers and poets whose words I will shamelessly borrow and put to my needs. Various writers do this smart trick quite often, only that they call it “postmodernism” — a refuge sheltering them from accusations of plagiarism. How can I describe an imaginary world better than, e.g., Baudelaire who was, by the way, an opium addict and a heavy drinker? Who knows how many of his bizarre “flowers” are the product of the deadly fumes?

I will structure my recount as a collection of loosely related paragraphs (a weakly-connected graph, if you pardon the nerdy metaphor), interleaving my observations, reflections, and recollections. I think this fragmented form conveys the feeling of the scattering of mind that accompanied my trip. In some places, I will have to expose very profound, very personal, very intimate parts of myself. Feel free to despise them or to deride them — I couldn’t care less.

Without further ado, here it is. Behold my rhapsody in a post-modernist style.

Thus began Zarathustra’s downfall

Mine began with ingesting a piece of blotter paper impregnated with what according to my estimates was about 100 micrograms of diethylamide of d-lysergic acid in water solution. I held it under the tongue for several minutes until the paper disintegrated completely and then swallowed the debris. It tasted a bit bitter — it was probably the paper or an admixture to the liquid, not the acid itself that is known to be tasteless.

I had split the blotter into three parts, taking one quarter around 1pm (I cannot refrain from referring to it as t=0), followed by half the quantity one hour later, and the remaining quarter after another hour. This schedule was intended as a precaution to avoid an unexpectedly strong effect. It failed in the sense that the effect took more time to build up, and at its peak it was, to say the least, unexpectedly strong. In retrospective, comparing my experience to the dose-dependent strength of various effects reported by others, I found it roughly corresponding to what 150-200 micrograms¹1. To us, used to the everyday scales of kilogram-second-meter, it is hard to grasp how tiny this quantity is. A grain of sand is one thousand times heavier; a human egg cell, invisible to the naked eye, has about this mass. When Hofmann first reported his self-experiment with 250 micrograms of the freshly synthesized “Lysergsäure-diäthylamid-25”, his incredulous colleagues asked him whether he measured the quantities right. In fact, LSD is probably the most potent psychoactive substance known to human. are supposed to induce. I attribute the discrepancy to the error margin pertinent to gauging 0.1 cc with a regular syringe or, less likely, to my individual increased sensitivity to LSD due to some neurological or metabolic peculiarities. Fortunately, due to its absurdly high lethal dose, LSD is safe with a huge margin.

You won’t die even if you mistake the quantity ten times, but you will quite surely freak out.

Don’t try it at home

A few words about the setting: it was particularly intimate and relaxed. I was at home on a Friday afternoon, with no particularly urgent tasks to do, in the gorgeous female company of Lucy and Amélie. Both were sober — the latter (Amélie) to the maximum extent of sobriety achievable by a nine-month-old baby, while the former (Lucy), being the only responsible adult, volunteered to monitor and prevent me from doing anything crazy like jumping out of the window (as urban legends about LSD often recount), and take me to ER if (utterly improbably) the thing went dead wrong.

Skin effect

Until about an hour and a half from t=0, the physical symptoms were barely noticeable. I could feel dizziness and a slight light-headed sensation, resembling a bit the first signs of alcohol intoxication, yet very different from it, not accompanied by the loss of lucidity. The world became slightly brighter, probably due to the pupil dilation effect, though I could not observe any noticeable dilation when seeing myself in the mirror. Drinking a cup of good tea with a fine bitter chocolate while listening to Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata (Anne Sophie Mutter playing) was, undoubtedly, great, but it felt just about the same it would normally do.

The first signs of weirdness appeared when I had a shower about two hours from t=0. Skin suddenly acquired an amazing sensitivity and spatial resolution: it seemed to me that I could feel every single drop of water falling on my shoulders and then track it as it went down the back. In my mind, I made an image of every cell of my skin connected individually to the brain with a long hair-thin white nerve. I don’t know if such a dense wiring exists in reality (probably not) and whether the brain can in principle localize the tactile stimulus down to the size of a water drop (probably yes), but this is how it felt. Also, touching the hair on the neck created that peculiar feeling of every hair being directly wired to the brain.

Music for my ears

Feeling the first tactile symptoms while having a shower, I tried experimenting with the other senses and put some New Age music. I have a monophonic loudspeaker installed in the bathroom that plays like “crêpe,” but this time it exceeded all expectations. With my eyes closed, I was hearing the music with unprecedented volume and depth. Hearing is not the right word — it doesn’t minimally convey the feeling of that sound. The space around, the entire universe, was singing for me like a giant sonorous chorus. I could feel every note with my whole body. The sensation of the space-filling sound was so strong that I momentarily lost my equilibrium and had to open the eyes to avoid falling. I thought to myself: people are paying a fortune for high-quality surround sound. What I’m getting from a single crappy speaker is orders of magnitude better than what I have ever heard from the best home theater systems. Unfortunately, this “technology” is not really applicable in everyday life.

Don’t hold your breath

Next step in sensory amplification: I gradually became aware of my breath. It was a strange sensation as if I were breathing with my head, and every inhale and exhale were almost palpable. It was a bit too intense, and at some moments I had the feeling of lacking oxygen. I even tried to check my pulse but gave it up quickly. Probably I had a bit of tachycardia, but nothing threatening.

Ode to joy

Around t=2:30h. Probably the second dose started acting at this point, and the effect was building up quickly. I continued listening to music, this time with a good pair of Sennheiser headphones. I prepared a long list of great pieces that in an appropriate setting I would find touching. I was wandering around the second floor, with the headphones on, listening to Mascagni’s Intermezzo sinfonico (with some perverted sadism, he has planted this transcendental masterpiece in the midst of his bloody drama.) Then to Puccini’s humming chorus from Butterfly. Then to the pas de deux from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. Again, in a particularly lyric setting, these pieces would move me.

This time the setting was more than particular. I was no more paying attention to the many-dimensional effects of the music. I was at the next level already, and what the drug was doing to my emotional state is impossible to describe with words. It wasn’t just listening to music. It was living it. My reactions to external stimuli became hugely exaggerated. I started feeling the sensation of almightiness. I was powerful, all-capable, invincible. To an innocent WhatsApp message of my business partner commenting on a rather attractive business plan he had proposed earlier that week I replied: “We will conquer the world!” I was truly feeling it. It was a powerful sensation.

The music continued playing, and I gradually became overfilled with joy, so much joy that I wanted to shout it to the entire world. Orgasmic joy. “ВОСТОРГ” — my unstable hand wrote with a pencil on a random piece of paper on the table, adding two exclamation marks — perhaps, to make sure that I would not forget that feeling. At that time, I was still logging my feelings — I naively believed to be able to do so during the entire experience; obviously, I couldn’t foresee such a potent effect. I wrote, “I’m so much filled with the desire to share my joy with others that my fingers are trembling impatiently while typing these words.”

I perfectly realize how desperately hopeless is my attempt to describe the indescribable with ink and paper (or, more precisely, with screen and keyboard). Needless to say, I haven’t experienced anything comparable to that intoxicating feeling of almightiness, that blissful joy.

I did, actually. It was like being in love.

The unbearable lightness of being

My playlist was long: a few movements from Beethoven’s piano sonatas and symphonies, Schumann’s piano concerto, Bach’s toccata and fugue, Pachelbel’s canon in D major, Geminiani’s La follia, the sextet from Cloud Atlas... However, I decided to switch context and listen to some poetry. As the first sample, I took Leopardi’s Silvia.

I’m not a particular fan of Leopardi. I find his style and language, and everything quite old-fashioned and out-dated. Yet, once I came across a masterly made video: A close-up of a pretty young woman’s face with shiny eyes, biting her lips in order not to cry (I think it was Nicole Kidman — a scene borrowed from some famous movie). And Vittorio Gassman reading “Silvia, rimembri ancora…”. I found it a true masterpiece; when I saw it for the first time I was in a particularly lyric mood and it made me shed a tear. This time it was simply overwhelming. My mind was racing, I was gasping for air. I wrote in my log “Tactile sensations are extreme. Tea and chocolate are divine. Feeling my breath. Visual perception starts changing. Overexcited state bordering with anxiety. I need to rest.” There is a gap of four hours in the log after this entry.... Quel giorno più non vi scrivemmo avante!

The next thing I remember is tearing off the headphones from my ears and rushing down the stairs, looking for Lucy and mumbling something like “È troppo, è troppo per me. Non è più bello.” I was feeling joy, tenderness, and anxiety — all of them more potent that I have ever felt, and all of them simultaneously.

Is this how children feel and manifest their emotions? Laughing and crying, joy and anguish, together and at the same time.

Time is the simplest thing

Emotions saturated akin to a loudspeaker flooded with positive feedback. Visual perception started playing strange games. Static objects were no more static; no straight line was straight. All was warping and flowing slowly as if I were seeing the world through turbulent air. At that point, I wished I could stop or at least pause and take a break. But it was thrusting forward dragging me with it. Anisotropic like Hotel California. Once you pop you can’t stop²2. Not exactly. A fast-acting sedative (benzodiazepine) or a 5-HT2A receptor antagonist antipsychotic (chlorpromazine) would be a safe way to abort the trip. However, I didn’t prepare anything of that kind. I’m glad I didn’t — I would have missed the most interesting part.. I remember climbing to bed and lamenting to Lucy that I was anxious and asking her to caress me. I took shower two or three times, as if in an attempt to cool down my racing mind, to wash away that unpleasant feeling of anxiety, that frightening sensation of loss of control. It was futile.

Next, I went out to the garden, lay down on the grass, and asked Lucy to water me with the garden hose. I could never imagine that grass, soil, and water had such a strong all-penetrating fragrance. The very same grass had hardly any smell, not even when freshly cut. Lying like that, wet, in the middle of a green lawn, in the mud, staring at the trees and the clouds, or closing the eyes and smelling the scents of the grass, the mind relaxed and the anxious feeling gradually dissolved giving way to a euphoric sensation.

I had no idea how much time I stayed there. Time had simply lost any meaning.

Quod oculis dum video et auribus dum audio

I returned inside around 4 pm or so³3. At least, this is what I can infer from the surveillance camera footage and environmental microphone recordings. The scene in the garden lasted just about 5 minutes. It felt way lo-o-onger.. By that time the effect of acid was probably reaching its peak. Visual perception was greatly affected, and I found it difficult to walk with such a distorted vision. I decided to lie on the couch on the second floor and surrendered to the dissolution of my mind of which I was gradually becoming aware.

One of the bold symptoms of my utterly distorted vision was the appearance of tracers. I was moving my hands in the air and watching them as many little babies do. It was like seeing them for the first time because it was the first time I saw my hands leaving traces. I’ve read about tracers as one of the most common visual effects of LSD, but I imagined them quite differently. The tracers I was observing (I doubt it is an appropriate word) were nothing like a motion-blurred image taken by a camera. They looked more like stroboscopic images — there were many replicas of the hands in slightly different positions, but all of them were fully opaque. That was rather amusing, and I continued playing with my hands in the air. The rational part of my mind responded to that by commenting “Sono completamente partito” with an idiotic intonation.

Lucy’s black-and-white drawings on the walls suddenly assumed a whole new palette. Sharp charcoal edges exploded with the colors of the rainbow, something remotely resembling a low-quality offset print with imperfect alignment between the colors or lousy image interpolation on TV screens, but much more vivid and intense.

One day I should try various computer graphics tools to synthetically reproduce these visual effects, at least, their zeroth-order approximation.

By that time the sun was already setting down and the two bare incandescent light bulbs of the entrance floor were lit. To my surprise, I noticed that they were flat as if they were drawn on a piece of paper, with the interior filled with a mysterious violet glow spilling outside, and a blindingly bright electric discharge arc inside. The arc looked like a cartoonish crushed line zigzagging between the two electric terminals. With a voluntary effort of my mind, I could switch between this preposterous view and the normal view of two regular light bulbs.

I continued seeing the regular “reality” — walls, furniture, plants, etc., but the image was no longer still — everything inside was moving, warping and flowing, slowly but incessantly. The pattern of this flow was somehow correlated to or affected by the acoustic sensory information. Every time I heard a sharp sound, the flow got disrupted. Also, the colorful edges of the drawings responded to sounds by becoming thinner or thicker, as if they were beating or breathing.

I read about synesthesia as one of the effects of LSD experienced at rather high doses, so I did not expect to experience it at all. It was surprising, even though in my case the intermixture of the senses was only slight, yet clearly distinguishable. A more difficult to explain synesthetic feeling was tactile. Hugging one of the couch pillows, seeing images, and listening to sounds became a very comforting fused experience of sensing — at that moment (moment is not the right word, since I could not feel the flow of time) it would be rather difficult to draw the boundaries between the individual senses, or to distinguish between what was real and what existed only in my head.

And smooth as monumental alabaster

Touching my own face was quite amusing too — it felt so smooth that the hand left a slight sensation of numbness and an after-feeling of mint freshness. After massaging my cheeks and chin for a couple of minutes, I shared this observation with Lucy and even invited her to try it herself. She touched the two-day stubble and seemed unconvinced. She even mocked me when I tried to insist on my smoothness argument.

Не дай себе засохнуть

A very fastidious physical (or “somatic”, as a clever MD would say) side-effect of LSD was that constant dryness in the mouth. I went to fill myself a glass of water innumerable times. It reached its peak when the visual hallucinations came and completely faded out about 24 hours after t=0. Another unpleasant effect was the light sensation of nausea. I don’t know if it was the consequence of the little dizziness that I felt. I don’t know if the latter in turn was the consequence of the altered visual perception of seeing everything flowing and morphing.

Luxe, calme et volupté

At some point in time (I can only roughly reference it to the moment before I lost the sense of time and another one approximately four hours later when in a brief moment of lucidity I momentarily re-acquired it and could scribble something in my log), I noticed to my surprise that vision persisted even when I closed my eyes. The effect was probably at its peak, and visual hallucinations appeared, strong and vivid. The visuals were not disturbing at all — they were comfortable and reassuring, so I continued lying on the couch with my eyes closed, losing contact with reality. I could hardly utter anything meaningful — words suddenly appeared so ridiculously futile and incapable of describing what I was experiencing.

I saw (it is strange to use this term, but it is the closest word I have in my vocabulary to describe a predominantly visual experience) the interior of something that had smoothly bending walls with a lot of finely structured geometric details — bumps, and holes, and doors and windows, all tinted with delicate yellow hues. It was something resembling an inside-out Technodrom (the sphere-shaped giant tank used by the Krang brain in the Ninja Turtles cartoon of which I was an aficionado in my teenage years), or a futuristic spaceship. “Un’astronave” — I commented. I (or that something — the beholder that was transmitting the images into my brain) was constantly moving — it was like navigating smoothly and effortlessly in the infinite corridors and spaces of a first-person flight game set in a cosmic key. The spaces I was flying by were certainly vast, but they felt small and intimate, and cozy.

The spaceship dissolved and gave way to a dark space, in which geometric figures appeared floating in the air. These were wireframe solids, dodecahedrons, icosahedrons, and other multi-faceted polyhedrons. They were flying by too fast for me to count the number of faces. They were hollow inside with the wireframes made of smoothed and gently polished wood, which by texture and the bright-brown-grayish shade looked like chestnut. If I remember correctly, there were long horizontal slits cut in these wooden wireframes, but even those slits were rounded and polished.

The abstract geometry gradually transfigured into something that looked like furniture, still with the same delicate chestnut texture and smooth, gentle, polished curves. The specific shape of the furniture was elusive — I cannot tell if it was a table or a sofa, but it felt like a furnished room. All was immersed into a soft diffuse light that left no shadows and tinted everything in calm colors of amber. Some parts of the furniture were soft (probably made for sitting) and covered with thick yellowish upholstery fabric on which simple geometric figures appeared embossed. They were tinted with an explosion of variegated vivid colors. It looked very much like the Elemento Designs pieces made in the style of the sixties (yet, with some transcendental touch), so I spoke this observation aloud. The forms, the illumination, the colors — everything seemed to be perfectly harmonious. “È la perfezione” — I added.

I was hugging the pillow and it was a warm, comfortable, and reassuring sensation — probably something resembling what a fetus feels while still in the womb. The warm amber lighting and the smooth, polished shapes must have evoked Baudelaire’s poem. “Luxe, calme et volupté” — I uttered, repeating it several times as if I were tasting the sound of the French words.

Parlami ancor come dianzi parlavi

While I was lying on the couch staring in marvel at my perfect worlds (“staring” is a strange term to describe what you see with closed eyes), Lucy was playing with the baby and singing something to her. Her voice touched something profound in my mind, and I found it soft and reassuring as if I were enveloped by her motherliness. It was beautiful, she was beautiful. So I commented (obviously, with the same idiotic intonation): “Hai una bella voce.” She was pleased to hear it.

A universe in a nutshell

It is impossible to fathom how much time this lasted. It was a blissful moment of beatitude. All the stresses and troubles of everyday life dwarfed in front of this euphoric sensation. Les meubles luisants faded away and the space was dark again. I was staring at something that looked like a spiral galaxy, with a few nebulous sleeves, a bright core, and a zillion of shiny dots, immersed into the foggy background of the cosmos. I knew that this was the entire universe (though the rational part of my mind suggested that the universe contains billions upon billions of such things, if not more). It was immense and at the same time compact — I felt that I could grasp it, and hug it, and hold it entirely in my arms. And I felt an indescribable oneness with it. It was a sweet blissful feeling as if I had discovered a paradise. I was part of something grand and beautiful; it was timeless, deathless, immutable, eternal. I was timeless, deathless, immutable, and eternal.

Till death do us part

I realized why terminally ill people to whom LSD was administered at the end of their earthly journey feared not death⁴4. When Aldous Huxley, a writer and a famous LSD evangelist was dying of laryngeal cancer, his physicians were prepared for an ugly agonizing death typical for this kind of patients. On his deathbed, already unable to speak, he wrote to his wife on a piece of paper “LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular”. He died several hours later with a serene smile on his face. If the misfortune happens and my own life takes a painful ending, I will probably ask for a similar favor. I might be a coward, but I prefer to die this way.. What is death, if you are one with the universe, and time itself has no power upon you? Albeit illusory, it is our protection mechanism against the fear of total, irreversible, irrevocable annihilation of oneself — that is, physical death. I’ve read a theory (a scarcely substantiated hypothesis, better to say) claiming that endogenous dimethyltryptamine is secreted by our dying brain. It induces symptoms similar to those of lysergic acid and was probably designed by Nature to make the process of dying more comfortable. I remembered vividly that in his last few days before succumbing to incurable cancer, already in a borderline conscious state, my Grandfather was wondering in surprise “I cannot understand whether I am a man or a bird.” He passed away feeling no pain, just that euphoric sensation of flight that gradually transitioned into eternity...

It was a shockingly rapid loss — my first conscious encounter with death, and it left an indelible trace in my memory. I saw him in my dreams every day for ten years if not longer... Long I reflected on it. The only consolation I could find was the realization that dear persons continue to live in our memories long after they cease to exist physically. Isn’t it akin to immortality? Be however small, this is our victory against death.

Google lists “death” as an antonym to “life”. This makes no sense. The antonym to “life” is “non-life”; “death” is merely an antonym to “birth”. The LSD-induced ecstasy made me reflect on that right boundary of the time interval we call life — during my voyage and after it. Death is, clearly, a very unpleasant event. And yet, coming to it inevitably implies that one has lived a life as a thinking and sentient being, has loved and was loved, gave and received. Hated and was hated, perhaps. Even if we can’t really answer “what for?”, it’s not a minute thing. It gives that entire interval a certain meaning.

I don’t think our innate fear of death is the fear of “non-being.” I didn’t exist for billions of years, and I will not exist for many more billions to come. That doesn’t minimally frighten me. But I’m a materialist to the bones and I don’t believe in the immortal soul nonsense. Which means that at that point all the information describing the unique and unrepeatable me will disappear and I will irreversibly cease to exist. Forever. That is an unpleasant thought. The irreversibility of the transition from “being” to “non-being” certainly contributes to the fear of death. Plus — depending on the circumstance — it might be physiologically unpleasant or even painful. Also, we probably tend to project the painful recollection of the departure of dear persons onto those who survive us, and imagining their sorrow becomes our own sorrow.

I doubt LSD has any pain-relieving effect. It doesn’t. It rather creates some distance from that physically or mentally suffering someone, a kind of an indirection. How could I feel pain when the boundaries of that I become blurred? Who is the one that is suffering exactly?

Мой ласковый и нежный зверь

Another death that has profoundly scarred my soul was that of my dog. My first and, quite likely, the only one. I was seventeen when he walked into our home — in a funny stampede on his thick paws, half-walking half-jumping as if he were hitting the keys of a typewriter. From a cute puppy, he grew into a stunning super-size Airedale Terrier, and I was to teach him his first lessons. Truth be said, I probably learned a lot more myself. He accompanied me during my college and grad school years, shared my successes and failures. Despair and love as well. He was the first to greet Lucy with his signature low B-flat when she walked into what used to be my home at that time. We laughed and had fun together. We had our fights too — I keep a record of one of them on my right arm.

We voyaged together through life growing side by side. I don’t know how it so happened that his great-great-great-grandparents became companions of our, human, ancestors around fifteen thousand years ago. This beautiful friendship has lasted through eons, through rising dynasties and falling empires, through our greatest achievements and most fearful crimes. I doubt we have ever merited it; we’ve certainly done so little in exchange for the unconditional love generously offered to us by our furry companions. Alas! A dog’s life is so bitterly short! Sometimes I felt superior to him at least in the sense of having a longer lifespan; other times I was ashamed of that feeling which seemed totally unfair to me.

I could foresee that day, I feared it, I silently wished it to come as late as possible...

He died peacefully, surrounded by those who loved him and whom he had loved. Going to sleep and never waking again. Perhaps, it was the last favor we owed him. Responsables pour toujours de ce que nous avons apprivoisé... I wish a death like that for myself too. Years have since passed, but I still cannot remember him without tears. He was like a brother to me if not more. A never-growing child. Мой ласковый и нежный зверь.

My reader shall excuse this brief parenthesis. It must have taken a fraction of a second to read anyway. I’m taking advantage of the moment of eternity...

Wonderful world

Much later, many days after the effect of the drug was gone without a trace, I was returning with my mind to that vivid vision, to that serene, blissful sensation of being one with the vast yet tangibly small universe. Remembering it had a therapeutic effect against the stress and anxiety of everyday life. It looks like now I have a new tool to combat stress — it is sufficient to remember that feeling of beatitude… So far, it’s been working like magic for many months.

A recollection of a few Clifford Simak’s science fiction novels that I read an innumerable number of times in my youth pops into my mind. In Time is the Simplest Thing, The Goblin Reservation, and in many other of his books, he transmits that reassuring feeling of being part of, being one with something great and awe-inspiring — be it time itself accessible with the power of one’s thought, or the cumulative knowledge of the entire universe deposited into Man’s custody. That life-affirming feeling the quintessence of which Louis Armstrong inscribed in his Wonderful World. That joie de vivre of the sixties, despite the nuclear bomb and the (very substantial) fear of assured mutual destruction. Or the optimistic reading of “И всем казалось, что радость будет, что в тихой заводи все корабли, и что на чужбине усталые люди светлую жизнь себе обрели…” — with the dark ending cut off with a pair of scissors.

The joy of first discovery

I knew my (then not yet) wife for about a year before we met for the first time. With pen and paper, we confided in each other things that no other person besides the two of us knew. So the time we first met I had the sensation of meeting an old intimate friend. Of course, there were a lot of fine details that I could never imagine, like the smell of her hair or the taste of her lips or the touch of her skin. It was a joy to discover them, so intense, so immense that I will not even attempt to describe it. But this is how it started — she was an intimate friend before becoming my lover, my wife, my accomplice, and the mother of our children.

Now I was reliving a similar experience. I had the feeling of meeting an old intimate friend I had never seen in reality and discovering a lot of amazing things about him. But this time it was my very self. It was like seeing (touching? grasping? feeling?) my inner self, how I was made inside. I don’t fully understand who was that one that was observing me from inside. Our self-awareness is so deeply rooted into our consciousness, perception, and language, that we don’t even have the right grammar to properly pose such questions, no appropriate vocabulary to describe such a state of being.

If before I could somehow produce at least a reasonable approximation of what was going on, I’m now stepping into a territory that completely defies description. I shall confine myself to saying that it seemed like if my mind was disassembled into parts and some{one|thing} somehow hosted inside me was aware of them. As if somebody was running his software on my brain’s virtual machine, using my brain’s thinking circuits to do his own thinking. That some{one|thing} had an existence on {his|her|its} own, could reason, and, probably with some effort, even solve a partial differential equation. I was sure that {he|she|it} wasn’t me, whatever that shall mean. And yet, I was aware of {his|her|its} presence and thoughts in my head.

I doubt I can convey the meaning of all this. I can only try describing the feeling. It was an intimate experience in the literal Latin sense of the word. It took me some time to rationalize, and the rationalization was breathtaking. It was pretty weird to realize that I saw myself from the inside. Probably my first introspective experience ever. Not frightening at all — on the contrary, it was very comfortable and reassuring. And at that time it felt normal.

When I was a first-year college student, I spent long hours in the library randomly looking up information about a new term, a notion, a theorem that I would accidentally hear before in a lecture. I was filled with the sense of awe toward the austere beauty of mathematics. And another unforgettable feeling was what I called the joy of the first discovery. It doesn’t matter that what I discovered was perhaps already known to the ancient Greek — for me it was for the first time. It was second only to tasting love — for the first time. Not as intense, of course, but similar.

It gradually faded away — with the years I became отягощенный знанием, nothing was completely novel anymore and I started relating new things to what I already knew. But this time I was again left with the feeling of awe and joy, with the sensation that I have discovered something fundamental. Discovered a part of myself that I never knew before. It was like returning to the years of my youth and feeling once again that joy of the first discovery.

As if in a dream, yet it is not a dream

Somewhere between the mid of my twenties until the beginning of my thirties, I had the peculiar capability of lucid dreaming. I never tried to study it or to use any of the available devices to enhance my dreaming skills. With the years, something has happened to my sleep patterns and this capability disappeared. Lucid dreaming would usually occur in the early morning hours, and I would become increasingly aware that I was dreaming, and could influence the course of the dream. Probably because of this gradual awareness, the dream would not fade away a few minutes after I awoke but would leave some imprint in my memory. For those who have never experienced it, lucid dreaming is really mind-invigorating.

I had two particular dreams that made a strong impression on me. One was a recurrent dream, in which I was flying. The details have faded away, but as far as I can recollect, below me lay grotesquely distorted landscapes full of strange details worthy of M. C. Escher, illuminated by morning light. Worth remembering was the inebriating feeling of freedom. I was in control of the third dimension, it was effortless, and I was overfilled with joy. I would stay in bed for long hours, semi-awake, reliving it again and again...

The other dream was in a much darker key. Fortunately, I saw it only once. I was standing on the flat roof or a balcony of some tall building. It was really tall, and the ground below was very distant — partially hidden by clouds and discolored by atmospheric scattering. A white jetliner passed by; it was flying very close, yet moving very slowly and in an absolute silence. Suddenly I realized that the plane had no engines (and I think no wings too) and that it was doomed to crash onto the ground. At that very moment, the plane started falling, and I was following it with my sight, unable to look away, seized by the suffocating feeling of desperate helplessness. I probably became aware that I was dreaming at that point, but nevertheless, I could not immediately control what was happening and it took some time until I could “switch the channel.” About ten years have since passed, but I still can feel that thrilling sense of helplessness almost tangible.

Now I experienced both the inebriating feeling of joy and the suffocating feeling of helplessness, with at least the same intensity. However, a cardinal difference is that in my lucid dreams I could draw a clear border between dream and reality — the dream could oftentimes be very palpable and powerful, but it was a dream and I was aware of it.

Acid dreaming was a totally different thing — it was real.

While being in the garden I noticed a large flag affixed to one of the neighboring buildings. I was shocked that I never saw it before. Lucy reassured me that it was there for many days already. I tried to think rationally: “It was there probably since the independence day. We were in Norway during that time, and that was about a month and a half ago. I must have seen it before. Then, how come that I have this striking impression to see it for the first time?”

The flag is still there today, and still looking at it I’m not sure if that Friday was the first time I saw it or not.

Virtual realities

I need to re-assess for myself what I exactly mean when I say “real”. What I saw, heard and felt was as real as anything real can be. I can classify it as an illusion (or a delusion) only by exercising my reason: I know that in a period of time from there to here I was under the influence of a psychoactive substance that altered my consciousness, and I can disqualify everything I remember as untrustworthy. Yet, if this is the case, how big is the difference between an LSD-induced hallucination and other hallucinations induced by our endogenous serotonin? Only the statistical fact that more than one person seems, at least superficially, to agree about them? This seems like a bloody weak criterion to define reality!

Some people are asking me with a certain degree of surprise: why the heck would I ever take a hallucinogenic drug? To some who know me well it seems shockingly unexpected. “You? Messing up with drugs??”

I don’t have a clear answer. First of all, I will put aside the unfortunate fact that LSD is thrown together into the same pile as heroin, cocaine, and similar dreck. It has a bad reputation — part of it was a political choice and the rest is a cumulative error. Back to the question “Why?” Curiosity is probably the essence of it. I once brought to the lab a short-wave infrared camera (sensitive to about 2000-6000 nm) and I was strolling around the place to see how the world looks like at those wavelengths. Most dyes were invisible, hair was white, many fabrics transparent. It was fun, it was crazy — I was curious and I was playing like a little child. And yet, the world in SWIR is very similar to the optical wavelengths we are able to see without instruments. Imagine how it would look like in microwave? What is the color of that metallic surface? And the texture of polarization? How does the world look like in hard UV and X-ray? What would it sound like in infra- and ultrasound ranges? At very high speeds or, on the contrary, at very long timescales? Isn’t it interesting to see how the reality is beyond our common senses? Isn’t it this curiosity that made Galileo point his telescope to the skies and van Leeuwenhoek — his microscope to a drop of water? What they saw there was another layer of reality they could never imagine — it must have been a shocking, awe-inspiring experience. It might well be that curiosity and the consequential drive to discover is the only tiny step homo sapiens has made away from the beasts. The desire to probe into another layer of reality was the only reason for spending many billions of dollars on building the LIGO or the LHC.

I’m not Galileo and am not claiming fundamental discoveries, but I guess it was that type of curiosity that drove me to do the LSD experiment.

There might exist some absolute physical reality described by quantum field theory and general relativity (and, maybe, some presently unknown theories). But we don’t have access to it. What we perceive as reality is a projection thereof. A projection created by our senses in our brain. It is crucial to realize that it is not immutable. I will use a signal processing metaphor comparing the brain to a decoder. The decoder that our brain applies to the sensory signals received from the eyes, the ears, etc. is subject to alterations. Most of them are endogenous — the way we perceive the same thing may change wildly depending on our mood, for example. So what we perceive as reality is actually a trajectory in the space of all kinds of possible perceived realities; we move all the time in this space but are normally restricted to a certain (small) subspace thereof. Acting chemically, by means of a drug, to bring our decoder utterly out of tune throws this trajectory into previously unexperienced layers of reality.

Compared to what you can find there, in the meanders of the mind, seeing the world in infrared wavelengths or through a microscope is like a pencil sketch compared to an IMAX movie.

Childhood’s end

Back to (still much altered) reality. Around 6 or 7pm, while having a bath with Amélie, Lucy, probably tired and frustrated by the weekend afternoon thrown away “per una cazzata,” complained and said that I was not dedicating enough time to our children. In a regular state of mind, we would simply have a dialogue and quickly settle the argument. But then — I was devastated. It was a catastrophe. A tragedy. It was my fault that caused the suffering of a dear person. Anxiety started building up swiftly, and I tried to calm down repeating aloud: “Let’s get back to comfort. Back to comfort. As you can see, I’m not adequate. I will remediate tomorrow. Whatever it takes.”

A sudden illumination stoke the rational part of the mind: this is how a child perceives reality. A misplaced word, a phrase said with the wrong intonation, or an impatient reaction can wreak havoc. I observed it many times, both with my children and those of others. I knew that. But never understood. Until now. Now I do. Psychologists will certainly laugh at me, but I am convinced that children are psychotic, at least exhibit similar symptoms: they see imaginary things in thin air, eat pretend food, and have conversations with nonexistent persons. By pure chance, my LSD experiment accidentally emulated what a child perceives in this state of psychosis, suddenly making it crystally clear: I was doing a terrible wrong to my children thus far. I shall no more treat them like little adults — children amplify and exaggerate everything. A slightly irritated reaction is nothing to an adult but is a tragedy, anxiety, and fear to a child. And when Mamma e Papà are having an argument, it must be the end of the world as we know it.

That devastating feeling was so damned strong. Rationally, I knew that it was a drug-induced over-reaction to something that was supposed to be a minute thing. But it felt very real, and it was only rationally that I could distinguish it from the “real” real. I will never forget that feeling. Now, returning to it in my mind, I see it as a negatively-charged oil spill, an intense dark splash of emotion. A remote memory emerged then from my childhood: I was a little boy (about six or seven) when I scribbled a bad word (“сволочь” — something like “scum” or “bastard”) with a finger on the neighbor’s dusty car. Un-nice. The gentleman complained, and my parents wanted to know what was exactly the word I wrote. I’m certain they were simply curious, probably half-laughing between themselves, but I was ashamed of saying that word, and the entire situation terrorized me. It seemed to me as facing a severe judge and awaiting his verdict. I cried for half an hour if not more (but never said that word eventually). Thirty years later, I lived again a scene of comparable painful intensity. Not a reminiscence — a reviviscence. I will speak to children softly from now on, and every time I start losing my temper, I will remind myself of this episode.

Shall I carry away something useful from my experiment, let it be this lesson. I consider it a therapeutic side-effect of LSD.

Scattered state

The literal meaning of schizophrenia in Greek is “split mind” — a memento of the dark ages when people believed (they still do) that the mentally ill could possess a split personality being like Dr. Jackyll during the day and Mr. Hyde during the night (nonsense). I myself have always translated schizo- as “scattered” of “shattered”, probably intuitively borrowing the meaning from the Italian schizzare. It must be a false friend. However, I find this metaphor of a scattered mind particularly suited to describe the last miles of my trip. Psychedelic literature talks about ego death or ego loss — maybe this happens at higher doses. My ego must be too inflated — it was neither dead, nor lost; it was there, only shattered into pieces and scattered around.

Whatever remained of the rational part of my brain continuously tried to re-emerge to the surface of reality, to collect the thoughts that seemed to elude its grasp like wrestling fish, and to fill the thought with noise: “I am disoriented. This is temporary. It is induced by a chemical substance. Nothing to fear about. The substance is LSD. How much? Less than 100 micrograms. When did I take it? Around 2pm. What time is it now? 8:30pm. I checked it an instance ago on the microwave oven. I don’t remember what time is it. Let’s check again. 8:31pm. When did I take it? Around 2pm. Then 3pm. That was several hours ago. That piece of news about the flood in Paris on the TV — I saw it already. Was it during lunch? When was that? What time is it now? Half past eight. I am under the influence of a drug. It is affecting my concentration. It is temporary. It should be gone in a few hours. What time is it? It is already coming down. I saw this news about that homicide in Italy. I was eating pasta with molten cheese. Was it today? When was that? The visuals are gone. When did I take the acid? Around 1pm, then the main dose around 2pm, then 3pm. About 100 micrograms in total. The effect should be down now. Why is it taking so long?”

The shred of the will was aware of the loss of control over the situation, and was flooding the mind with anxiety, trying to compensate for the dissolution of the short-term memory by insistently returning to the global invariants: “My name is… I have two children… The boy is with the grandparents… The girl is sleeping… Today is… Tomorrow I’m going to… ah, no, tomorrow is weekend. The day after tomorrow… I have that meeting… and then a lecture… When is the meeting? With whom? What for? What do I have to do tomorrow? No, tomorrow is weekend. And then? I spoke on the phone a few hours ago… I was lucid then… I seemed to be back to reality… When was that?… Now I lost control again… Why cannot I collect my thoughts as I always could before? My name is… I’m not insane… I’m going to take control over my brain now… What do I have in my agenda for tomorrow?… No, tomorrow is weekend...”

The first entry in the log after the four-hour lacune is around 7:45pm saying: “Lucy must be mad at me. Will listen to the ambient recordings afterward. Trying to collect the pieces of reality. It is impossible to describe.” And then: “I was fooling myself when I thought that I was adequate enough to continue writing. I’ve had an experience beyond space and time. I don’t want even to think about what I said or did. It’s beautiful to touch an object — rigid and still, return to the concrete reality. I’m still totally inadequate.”

Several times, I found myself grasping the granite counter in the kitchen firmly with both hands, as if this motionless stone was the only stable and immutable reference point in the Universe. I have never been so disoriented probably since I was born. Filling the dishwasher with dirty dishes appeared to be a Herculean task. “This plate goes here. Oops, tea leaves fell on the floor, let’s clean them up. The knives here. Why is this plate still here? I thought I have already put it in. Why did I open this drawer? The fork goes here. Didn’t I put this knife in already? Oops, the floor is dirty, some tea leaves fell. Didn’t I clean them up already? Clean up. Where do the knives go? I opened that drawer to put the copper pan in. Here it goes. How come the floor is messy with the tea leaves again?”

And the rest of the mind was simply lying there scattered around as a passive, apathetic observer. This is not happening to me. It is simply happening. Ego loss?

The sum of all fears

Rationally: “This confusion is one of the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide. An after effect. The precise mechanism of action is unknown. It does something to the serotonin receptors in the brain. A tiny quantity is sufficient to bring this circuit out of tune. But the effect is well-known, is temporary, and will disappear without a trace.”

Irrationally: “I did this experiment to see the effect of LSD on sensorial perception. I must have taken too much of it, and the whole thing went out of control. I did not expect such a strong effect. Now I cannot remember what I’m going to do next week, nor fill a dishwasher without messing up the entire kitchen. It has never happened to me before. I’m plunging into insanity. Something inside the brain is broken irreversibly. It is never going to be normal again.”

The struggle continued for some time — I did not follow how much exactly. The reason made desperate attempts to climb up to the surface. The irrational fear of insanity threw it back down, provoked waves of anxiety, and forced me to lie down with closed eyes trying to empty the thoughts of the continuous background noise. Aware of this strife, each time anxiety started building up, I would comment aloud: “Un attacchino d’ansia.” Anxiety inundated the brain, big, huge, impossible to withstand. Its deafening tapping was like an obstinate pendulum, like the chord’s of Chopin’s prelude — G#! G! #G#! G#! - G#! G#! G#! G#! Then the mood swung back for a while to a serene, euphoric state. I desperately needed a comforting word, a caress, a reassurance that everything would be alright. I felt that it could change everything. But Lucy probably didn’t understand that need of mine or didn’t take it seriously. I was left to struggle alone.

The scattered state continued oscillating like this for a few long hours, yet the distorted perception of time rendered this or any other temporal reference meaningless. I tried to have dinner, but the disoriented state plus the feeling of nausea forced me to eventually abandon the attempt and refuse food.

Gradient ascent

The finale of a drug experience is colloquially known as “comedown.” I find the upward direction an inexplicably better metaphor. The next and last entry in the log around 10:15pm says: “Seeming to have a better grasp with reality now. Still in a semi-confusional state of mind, but at least I have a mind again instead of pieces of shattered and scattered ego.”

I was sitting with Lucy on the couch (the nerdy pun of a tightly-coupled pair comes to mind) and we were watching short youtube videos showing all kinds of kitten, cubs, and babies. Seeing those little creatures and being hugged by another beloved one evoked a sweet sensation of tenderness. At that point, I realized that the effect of the drug was going away, that there was no reason to fear, and that everything would be alright. Not only that specific affair. Everything.

I was still confused, but I finally climbed back to reality, and the reality was wonderful.

Hello darkness, my old friend

I went to bed around 10:30pm or so, but the excited state induced by LSD was incompatible with sleep. I knew about it before, though I hoped that the effect would be already mild enough by night and would not interfere with my sleep. I passed sleepless hours reading scientific papers about LSD pharmacodynamics, various studies reporting the cognitive and perceptual effects, etc. The iPad battery drained around 3am, and I tried to turn off the light and sleep. I repeated the attempt an hour later, after taking 40 drops of valerian extract. I don’t know if I slept at all, if yes it was at most two hours of a superficial semi-awake sleep.

All my troubles seemed so far away

I woke up early the following morning. Lucy was still sleeping, and I took baby Amélie with me to leave her sleep undisturbed. I brewed some tea for myself (it tasted very good, but, fortunately, normal) and we sat down on the grass in the garden (it was practically odorless again). I read her a few stories from Gianni Rodari’s book. There was nothing in the refrigerator and I was fasting for more than 18 hours already. I took Amélie with me for a quick car ride. When she cried, I would sing in a loud yet soft voice “Vola, o serenata, la mia diletta è sola...” and she would calm down. It felt as if I could caress her emotions. I perfectly knew what to do in order to reassure her and it seemed to work. We bought some pastries, bread, butter, milk, and I decided to prepare a little breakfast and bring it to bed. By the time I finished brewing the coffee, Lucy silently walked into the kitchen. We substituted le petit-déjeneur au lit with a petit-déjeneur sur l’herbe in the garden.

Perhaps it was a residual effect of the acid — I was unusually aware of the space around me, never making a false step, never stumbling on a stone. It was like walking in a slow motion movie. And I felt excessively emotive — a smile on the baby’s face would bring tears to my eyes. I remembered that Lucy, and I guess, every other woman, feels like that once a month because of the natural hormonal changes. And that fragile emotive state was especially evident for a couple of weeks after giving birth.

I think I understand women a bit better now. Their minds must span a slightly bigger subspace of realities… at the expense of some stability. That is croce e delizia of womanhood. I realize that in those particular states, delicate and vulnerable, Lucy needed a bit more support. She had rarely asked for it, and I didn’t have enough insight or intuition to feel that need of hers. She just needed a smile, a hug, a caress, a tender or comforting word. And, chiefly, not arguing about unimportant things even when technically I was right and she — dead wrong. I sort of learned it on my own flesh — quite eloquently, I shall say — what it means not to receive it when you really need it.

I was exhausted by the intensity of the mental strain and the sleepless night and was still thirsty, but that was nothing. Life was so wonderful! I was looking at the placid surface of the sea covered with the shiny scales of sunlight. And all the troubles, all the stress, and worries of the past many rather intensive months seemed to sweetly shipwreck in that sea.