"And yet, I Know the Wilderness" - more psilocybin explorations

[Unwary Traveller]

And yet, I Know the Wilderness

Here are the contents of three trip journals with interlinked narratives with the overall title “And yet, I Know the Wilderness,” written on three different nights in my hotel room during a week-long visit to Amsterdam in July 2022. They were written under the influence of psilocybin, using sclerotia, a.k.a. ‘magic truffles’ which are sold legally in ‘smart shops’ in the Netherlands and are equivalent to magic mushrooms.

1) Cave-diving Tragedy in Hotel Room
2) I Bring News of Other Worlds
3) Teleportation Sickness and Other Woes

The first part is a sort of guided tour of insanity, as we go caving inside my mind and attempt to describe the mysterious cargo of a ship (sunken wreck? spaceship?) while simultaneously being subjected to some sort of Area-51 type alien mind-control experiment. There are themes of liminal spaces and “the backrooms of the imagination.” See the Liminal Spaces and the Backrooms thread for more context on those ideas. I’ll add a post exploring the nature of psychedelic visuals to that thread, right after posting this. The second part features an abrupt shift to a semi-delusional state where I start a new religion and prophesize about the alien gods of “the wilderness.” In the third part we get to visit this wilderness as we journey into the abyss with an appropriately doomed sci-fi expedition.

The text often uses “you” or “we” and it’s not always clear who is narrating or being addressed, or where they are located, so to speak, in relation to the places mentioned in the narrative, but this gives a good representation of the drug’s mind-warping effects. Some of my trip journals are more like interesting fragments which I try to re-write into a coherent story, but I liked the way these experiences linked into each other and give an overall picture of what the interior of my trips are like at higher doses, where things get weird but I can still write. The entries in the journal are written in lucid moments between periods of “trancing out” within the trip, getting lost in my thoughts or within the visuals.

I’ve retained the original timestamps which are next to each entry in the journal, with each trip beginning at midnight (with a re-dose after the first ninety minutes or so to boost the effects). I’ve started each part at the point where I was getting some interesting visuals. A few of the more uninteresting or incoherent entries have been removed or pruned, but the text here is pretty much the same as I wrote at the time, with the occasional word or phrase altered for clarity. There are some notes at the end to elaborate on the references and themes of the trips.

Abbreviations:

CEV: Closed-eye visuals. Vivid, involuntary imagery that appears with eyes closed, like having miniature TV screens on the back of the eyelids, or looking into an abstract three-dimensional space.

OEV: Open-eye visuals. Hallucinations (typically changes to the surfaces of real objects) seen ‘out there’ in the real world.

Part One

Cave-Diving Tragedy in Hotel Room

0:33 CEV: Neon signs in stone vaults, bleached white bone fluorescence. Or bone-white bleached fluorescence.

0:35 I remember the architecture of these trips. Like being stacked in vague yellow-green spaces as some other mode of existence unfurls itself, creating its own space and its own rules.

0:39 The scene recedes back into dreamlike imagery of workers cleaning up a flooded mall.

0:43 My CEV drift past like colossal shadows in the night sky. This feels quite strong.

0:47 The feeling of something lurking in the background, tunnelling into my mind.

0:48 Hazed and soporific, we recline.

0:50 The meeting of the ceiling and the wall has that infinity effect, like a horizon out at sea.

0:54 CEV: A security guard in a room with a curved green wall. As if to say “If you notice any suspicious hallucinations, please do inform us."

0:55 Like waiting for some large ship to arrive in the night.

0:57 OEV: Faint glyphs and false shadows on the wall. Colour distortion, like a fractal sheen. To the wall. To the words.

0:59 In transit amongst systems that are awake but not alive. The curving spaces and endless warrens of nowhere.

1:01 When you are ready to tune out of your reality, and find another waiting there.

1:24 I was thinking about an idea I had of the architecture of the CEV being like a giant liminal space, the backrooms of your mind.

1:29 The yellow walls of the backrooms are white, seen with the colour-shift of psilocybin into yellowy-green.

1:30 OEV: Everything has gone back to normal. Status: incubation.

1:35 We continue, onwards through the night.

1:42 Offerings. Old couples on sofas seen from the waist down. Accompanied by a spiralling dartboard of neon-bright light.

1:43 Cavernous underground spaces of brick, where the walls loom above.

1:48 Blinding white light. The ship we were waiting for, has arrived. Compressed into space in front of you, decks and holds looming overhead and around and within you. The cargo. Describe.

1:50 Unloading booms that bristle and glow. Where you do not touch the cranes.

1:55 I found books of detailed instructions on how to argue with them, what to ask them, how to bargain with them. Lies. All lies.

1:57 Like a nest of paranoid delusions in the liminal spaces behind your mind.

1:58 When you doubt the existence of things that no-one told you about. That just suggested themselves, under the circumstances. You asked me to describe the cargo. I am describing the cargo to you.

2:01 Your desires and wishes fail hard into a wall of sentient machines that are examining you from inside. Or outside. Or beyond. We are inside the inside of the outside. Behind the walls of your lives and your lies.

2:04 And your writing begins to lose sense. And so you accept what is happening, and move beyond it into the brightly lit darkness of the abyss.

2:05 Something that coils and slides inside your mind.

2:07 Did I move just now, or dream I was somewhere else while I was awake? Like standing beside myself, absent-mindedly wondering why I wasn’t in bed.

2:12 An insane neon playground that overwhelms and distracts, like a circus moved in across the street where you don’t live.

2:18 Coming out of the zig-zags behind the cargo in the cargo bays. In the liminal spaces of my dissociation. In this midnight psychosis.

2:22 The relationship between hallucination, delusion and psychosis is complicated. I point to the name on the ship’s bow, hoping you will understand. Midnight Psychosis.

2:24 Lines of symbols that drift like the tide. I do not have to see them to know that they are there. There are eyes in my words and lies among the ruined worlds.

2:26 When they ask you to explain what it is like, and you write your way into, or out of, or through a psychosis you chose as preferable to your waking life. A haunted ship on a haunted dream built on lies.

2:27 The music and the fairground rides distract the mind that conjured most of it up from nothing. And the rest just lies there and waits and bides its time.

At this dose, not in grams but in the potency you feel in your bones, you do not know whether any of this is real. You are here as our prisoner and all you can do is watch. I am telling you this for later, so that you understand. So that you understand where you have come to. This awful place. This awful land.

2:30 The tides bring no sense, only doom. The ruined cities you came here for all along.

2:31 There are dead things among the cities. You will see them move, but it does not mean that they are alive. Talk to no-one and do not remove the suit under any circumstances.

There is no suit. There are only circumstances and psychosis and lies. When you trust nothing and no-one and you do not listen to yourself, ever. Because the things that you are telling yourself are insane, and the place you believe yourself to be, does not exist.

The dissociation is colossal and you get used to it after a while.

2:35 When you cannot breathe within the tight spaces in your mind. Exploring your psychosis and your hallucinations like a cave system. “Bring your own cave.”

We went caving into caves inside our minds and they said we had died. I speak to these people and they do tours, and I do not know if they are alive or dead until I look into their eyes and see myself.

2:38 And we have unwound ourselves out of the mazes and the crazy caves, and we are back in the room, back in the room, and you will never trust a room again.

You explore the wrecks and the dead cities looking for trophies, never asking how you got here in the first place.

Sunk among the very wrecks you explore, are you alive or dead? Do you know?

2:41 The rooms here have more room than you know, and I am trying to explain how the size of the cargo increases exponentially with each page I am writing to explain it.

2:43 The tight spaces and breathless dead-end crushes of your own paranoid delusions. Where you die over and over again. Or so you keep telling me, as I look closely into your eyes and see myself looking back. What else did I expect, in here?

2:45 Trust nothing and no-one and do not read the words that drip from the walls.

2:46 When you negate everything and still it forces itself upon you as real. And now you understand, you begin to understand, the hold a delusion takes over you.

When you cannot think because the mania or the psychosis or your life no longer allows it.

2:49 When you learn to explore the caverns of your imagination. When you suppress the panic, and instead of screaming, you write. And everything you write screams of the place where you have trapped yourself, where you always were, the place you can never escape, the place you should never have sought or approached, because you do not want to even begin to question who or what you need permission from.

Either you have fallen into your delusions or something much worse is happening.

2:53 They ask you to explain your paranoid delusions. And so I do. You shrug and move on, like it’s part of the tour, another branch of the cave system with those alarming signs about not entering because people have died in here.

We died in here and we carried on, and I begin to suspect we have been dead all along.

Your paranoid delusions have layers and webs and you move behind the walls of the backrooms. You write on the walls and the walls are the only readers you can reasonably expect.

2:56 You explore these mazes because they asked you to examine the cargo a couple of hours ago.

2:57 What happens if you become psychotic on a high dose?

You sit and you write, because it is all you can do, and all you need to do, and all you wanted to do in the first place. The mania burns and the pen whips across the page. Lies. All lies.

2:59 How can you sleep in a room with floor-to-ceiling red curtains and not expect to have nightmares? It’s 3am and we are in the midst of insanity, cunning and brutal and beautiful as always.

I have no idea what it is. It speaks for itself. You talk with it, you do not know what it is, and you do not follow the books on the table in front of you. The books are there for a reason you do not understand and have failed to take heed of. You remember those books I told you about? Start reading them.

3:02 Do not trust anything these creatures tell you. Do not ask them to explain what they are. You will get silence, or answers that are worse than anything you could have expected when you started this job. In the bunker. Where they told you to talk to them. In the room where you are with them right now.

We have lost you to them, it seems. You do not even know where you are, or who you are, or why you came here in the first place.

3:04 And where did the delusions start from in the beginning anyway? Did we hallucinate the life we had been living up to this point? Is anything real? Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

With delusions like this, they force themselves upon you, hostile and unforgiving and remorseless. You do not ask. You know. You just know. And that is how you begin to recognise the delusions for what they are.

Either this is a delusion or the cities were gone a long time ago. We came here to explore the wrecks and started looking at the cargo. And the cargo, as you understand it now, was looking back.

3:08 In my perverse imagination, this all makes sense somehow.

You asked me to examine the cargo, but you did not tell me why, or who sent you.

3:09 And long ago your air ran out among the wrecks, and yet here you are. With your stories and your reports and your questions. I look into your eyes and see the caves within myself.

3:10 Safer diving. Step 1: Do not leave the room.

3:11 These rooms man, they do things. They f**k you up.

3:12 If these are the places you go to when you die, then I am already dead.

3:13 When you worship old gods on the cargo decks at 3am and you do not want to ask if this could possibly be real.

They take you with them, or leave you here among the wreckage of a diseased hallucination you cling to as your life.

More caving stories after a word from our sponsor.

3:17 The dead cities. Describe.

I will learn, no doubt, as circumstances arise.

The circumstances have arisen and this was your problem all along.

3:18 If you followed the books, you wouldn’t be having these problems with the creatures. Don’t let them into your mind, don’t ever do that.

3:19 They showed you the dead cities where you used to live.

3:22 When you begin to see with the words as you write.

3:23 The wreckage of dead civilizations in the maw of the salvage ships. Where the midnight psychosis weighs her anchor in the depths of the dead cities where you used to live.

The colossal amount of brickwork that was always hidden beneath the earth and the water. The writing burned into that brick.

You read the walls instead of reading the instructions for dealing with the creatures in the room with you.

The room. The room. There is always a room that you can never get out of. This is that room.

3:27 The tour continues and we take care not to examine the wrecks too closely as we voyage further into the dead cities.

You would not recognise them. They are lost amongst the machines at work here. Things that are not alive, not dead. Things that explore and move behind the walls in the backrooms of your imagination.

3:29 The fractal stacks of brightly coloured coffins that await you. Where you lie, with the fungus leaching the thoughts from your brain, not alive, not dead, not yet.

3:32 You can exit the delusions but you cannot exit the room where you started this. If you knew where that was, we wouldn’t be having this problem.

3:33 The psychosis is colossal and entertains me greatly.

3:35 Within the trance states of the psychedelic abyss, the words are written on the walls of the room you cannot leave.

3:37 CEV: The octopus hieroglyphs around a sealed tunnel you should leave alone. The warning signs of a language you cannot decipher.

But you come here and you examine the cities and the wrecks and you do not like the answers to the questions you ask.

3:40 This is the good stuff. When the dose functionally dismantles your faith in your own existence and replaces it with an insane delusion based on a diving video you watched last week, that’s what you want. There are dolphins on the box. There are no dolphins in here, I can assure you.

3:43 You will regret coming here and it will torture you until you write the books that give the instructions on how to deal with the creatures and how to escape. But there is no escape because the creatures were here all along.

This is what I am trying to explain here on the cargo bay, on the wharves of dead cities, in the oceans that feed the sunken caves in the liminal spaces where you so thoughtlessly reside.

3:45 You are a parasite here and we tolerate you for our amusement.

3:46 And so the delusions continue, as I explained earlier. Listen to them or not, your choice. We have scaffolding to climb the walls of brick that have been disentombed by the machines.

3:47 They hid this so carefully and you just dug it up to see what would happen. As they knew you would. The more obvious the warning, the more difficult it was to get inside, the more certain it was that you would attempt it, and attract their interest in the first place.

All this here is a trap. Remember this. Remember how you got here. Do not deviate from the instructions in the books.

3:54 When this is your idea of a holiday, we have to ask, a holiday from what, exactly?

3:57 I like this grotesque mental and visual distortion at 4am, I really do. The first kilo is the worst and then you begin to enjoy it.

4:07 You came here with no map, and what maps you could create were hard won.

4:32 The OEV are pretty strong and I still feel the radioactive heat of the trip. The doses that radiate out like the yield on nuclear bombs.

If I zone out, words appear in the panelling of the wardrobe as if someone had installed reflective strips of advertising around it in rainbow colours.

4:36 Psychosis is not a side-effect or a worst-case scenario. This is where you are going. Get used to it.

Part Two


I Bring News of Other Worlds

0:26 I felt a shiver run through me, and then wording suddenly appeared in a patch of the carpet.

0:28 I feel it coming on more now, just the sensation of it. A heightened intensity, mixed with a sort of tingling in my head.

0:33 CEV: Light falling on water from a tower high above.

0:40 OEV: The pictures on the wall have an indefinite psychedelic tinge, that green / purple mix, with a sort of overlay in front of them, like a diagram of an atom.

0:52 CEV: Black glistening caverns where walls of organic tissue writhe with a subtle luminous glow in the darkness. Eerie.

0:54 CEV: The smiling face of an Asian girl I don't recall, in a structure I don't recognize, leading nowhere.

0:58 Looking up into caverns with meaningless advertising swinging down beside me.

1:02 Underground rooms of out-of-scale figures, like looking down into a bar or club.

1:05 Felt like I was being absorbed into some sort of human-boat hybrid, in a tunnel.

1:16 Falling asleep into this is weird, like staring into a magic eye picture and letting it take over.

1:18 A confused circus of oddly shaped beings and writhing randomness.

1:47 In my imagination, Australian women riding sleighs offer cheery advice as they go past. “Catch you later honey!”

1:51 OEV: The cork table mat begins to look like one of those puzzle games where there should be a tiny silver ball inside.

2:20 The pictures on the wall float in an indefinite psychedelic sheen, rather than against any definite wall.

2:33 CEV: Stadiums with the faces of dolphins turned into machines, grinning. Why are they grinning? We ask ourselves.

2:37 I see the death ships again.

2:58 CEV: Lift machinery that comes alive like crossword puzzles on a metallic snake.

3:00 The music ushers in a new and strange religion.

3:02 In the wilderness you will know them.

3:03 The gods of other civilizations on other worlds.

3:04 Know them and be judged.

3:06 I see the wilderness of the abyss, and I know.

3:08 At this dose, the delusions have a scale and reach beyond your control and you can no longer be sure they are delusions.

3:09 I bring a new religion and I am its prophet.

3:10 I bring news of other worlds and of the wilderness.

3:11 I bring death.

3:12 And death will not be the end.

3:17 It is a long time after the date shown on your clocks.

3:18 We have entered the wilderness of dead civilizations. Relive and be judged.

3:22 I have seen the machines that will come, in the end.

3:24 This is a drug that will burn and devour you.

And yet, I bring news of other worlds.

3:28 This is no vague mysticism; it is a new species of religion.

3:29 I will add it to the list of religions I don’t believe in.

3:30 And yet, I know the wilderness.

3:37 Death trips and death ships.

3:39 You hold the pen, and you write what they tell you to write. In this room, this is how it works.

3:43 I bring news of other worlds, and of the wilderness they became.

3:46 It’s a sort of method literature and I’m quite strict about the methods of the Amsterdam school. Write what you know. See what you write.

You will know the wilderness. You will see the wilderness. You will write.

3:51 In the wilderness your gods cannot help you.

3:52 That lingering acid-metal burn in my mouth. The taste of negation and annihilation. The mark of the wilderness. Where the forests burn in the night.

I have seen your forests. Miles underground on a dead world. I have exhumed your bones. I have seen the wilderness beyond. There is no hope, only ash, and centuries, and ruins beneath the earth.

We came here to find the dead cities. We found the dead cities. You are not where you think you are. This is not when you think it is. This is the wilderness. Know us and be judged. Relive.

We observe. We scrutinize. And we burn.

3:59 I have seen the machines in the wilderness. At night. Downrange. From the observation towers. Inverted towers that gaze into the abyss of the wilderness.

4:01 Is this what you expected? Is this what you wanted to hear? Is this your idea of a bad trip?

We looked down into the abyss, and we saw the wilderness.

Part Three


Teleportation Sickness and Other Woes

0:35 CEV: Almost falling asleep as a lift operator takes us down.

0:38 Feel that rapid vibration and pressure in my head, the power of the trip making itself known.

0:46 The trip feels like a strong, sleepy force washing over me.

0:49 CEV: Some oddly shaped creature like a tower crane, walking above a forest.

0:52 I fall asleep into rainbows and the black-white-red-blue shapes of the psilocybin miasma.

0:55 I fall asleep into a room of glowing bird-like women.

0:58 I fall asleep into roiling masses of light which are ridden by a showman figure.

0:59 OEV: The room shapeshifts and looks bright and exotic.

1:07 Confrontational and hazardous. A new reality spills out inside you, colourful and insane. I feel so sleepy.

1:40 CEV: Rows of squid on hooks looking back at me, between the decks of a trawler.

1:43 Royal Beluga. The Byford Dolphin.

2:15 The onset was brutal, like falling asleep into a blizzard of nuts and bolts.

2:24 CEV: A large column. Turquoise halls unravelling. Seen from inside as they roil and writhe.

2:38 Sleeping on a bed of nails and waking up into this. Whatever this is.

2:41 The launch crews step out into it.

2:42 The skies beneath a wet moon. The storms among its oceans.

2:45 Is everything disappearing or being created?

2:46 The caverns beneath and beyond, where they transport you into this.

2:47 Teleportation sickness and other woes.

2:50 There is a part of you that enjoys this, and this part wakes up.

Listening to recordings of the sounds from the planet outside, inside, around. The seas on another moon. The nausea from the tides.

2:55 Where we set up our instruments and worked out the sightlines. There is no up. There is no down. We enter the abyss.

2:56 The test subjects are eaten in their observation cages. They beam in the sounds to desensitize us to the howl.

This is no weather you know. The lightning across the event horizon of the abyss as we re-orient and prepare for descent.

3:00 Scrawled in the stairwells. They came. They came. They came.

Teleportation sickness and other woes.

3:01 Staged descent. Like mountaineering underground. The fall into the interior of the abyss.

3:03 The ferocity of them. Coming out of the shadows. Where they hide.

3:05 Unwholesome rivers and flooded canals. The seawater, the sea is at work here. The distortion of reality by the tides.

3:06 I had to take more to escape the maelstrom of lower orbits closer to the wrecks. Low on fuel and pulled by the tides towards a moon.

You were brought here and you were the offering. And the observation cages offer no release except death.

The headgear that burrows into your synapses and knows when you are attempting to escape.

Do not attempt to escape the observation cages. The implants are not designed for the trashing of the subjects, and that is why they thrash themselves against the bars of the observation cages.

The partial vacuum at the edge of the abyss, and you are back here again, awake now.

3:12 You stay awake and observe and walk on the bars of the observation cages. The pull of the tides and the teleportation sickness that never wears off.

The suits they make you wear until they become a second skin with another animal already inside.

3:14 In the wilderness you will know them. In the wild.

3:15 Just because they let you out, doesn’t mean they expect you to survive out there. The howling of the wind masks the howling of the creatures, as they taunt you in the wilderness.

The arctic station in the frozen tropics of nowhere. Higher orbits bring the same fate, where you look down into the abyss. Stay awake and keep watch.

They come for you in your sleep. They are within your sleep. They dug into the hibernation chambers and you have woken up at last.

3:19 From where do you observe this? From the decks above the wash of the ocean. The bridge of the salvage ships hunting the abyss.

3:21 The visuals turn inward and burrow into your mind. The arctic blizzard of the place you woke up. The howl. The howl.

3:23 We came back to observe the information from the wrecks as they tumble out of time across the event horizon of the abyss.

3:24 At this dose, the rooms show themselves as the cages they really are, but you are too sick to notice.

3:25 The blight of the wilderness, where they destroy as they create.

3:26 The bricks of the canyons built to contain the tides. At this dose, containment is wishful thinking.

3:28 The observation cages furthest from the edge are the safest, relatively speaking. They can still reach in if they choose.

To be grasped and held in front of an eye. An eyeful of teeth. A teethful of mouths. Teleportation sickness and other woes. The venom and the howl.

3:30 They warn people not to come here. There are things waiting here. I have seen this and I know the wilderness.

3:32 I observe and report, and I start to think my reports go to them.

It’s not a they, it’s just there.

Against the windows that will not hold as the seas boil in the vertigo of the abyss, at the heart of the wilderness that has no heart, only a vortex where the worlds are funnelled in, where I ride the words in the night.

3:35 I came back to see if it was real, and it was like looking into a blizzard of shrapnel. The visuals that the suit transforms into a howl telling you not to get out.

But you are out, and the teleportation chambers are flooded, the observation cages are open, and we wait with our backs against the hulk. It is not clear if we came out of it, or whether we were trying to get in.

I observe the markings on the hull, and translate them with the book they gave me when this all started. The book you will have to write to explain what this is like.

3:39 They are so very vague about these encounters. They have never fought their way out of the observation cages of the salvage ships that arrived in the night. It is always night. We orbit the abyss and read the tides.

3:42 I see the decks of the salvage ship where I woke up. The ice covering the windows. At one of the windows there is an eye. Do not sit at this window for long.

3:43 At some point we got out and they got in, or vice versa. Teleportation sickness and other woes.

3:44 It buys us time to read the books we found. In the locked cabinets on the empty observation cages. We wipe the blood off the reports and the maps, and the maps were hard won.

The inverted towers that gaze into the abyss.

It is hard to spot the creatures without something in the cages to attract their attention, and the end justifies the means.

3:48 You observe. You write in the book they gave you. You draw a map, although you can’t tell what is up or down except through the nausea and the training. You write until they get close, and then you lock the book in the cabinet, and you do not survive, and you knew that already.

In the observation cages, you observe your own death, and you wonder why you are still here, writing this.

3:50 What did you think would happen when they found us? This.

3:51 I read the books from the cabinets and I know the wilderness and I know my own writing.

3:52 I had to take more to make sense of it all, to get away from the blizzard at the open door where the wilderness howls.

3:53 You do not know what it costs me to write this. The worst part is that you know you were here before, and that you will have to come back to write the books that will tell you how to escape.

And on the wall I write “There is no death here” to distract me from the bloodstains lower down beside the window where you have to sit to get the information. We can call it a room, but it is not a room. The room is inside you.

3:57 You bargain with the creatures and this is how you survive the winter. By telling them what they already know.

You look into that eye, the size of a tractor tire, the tractors on the decks of the salvage ships that clear the ice off the observation cages. You stare into it and you try to write, and keep your hand on the latch of the cabinet for when it reaches in and tries to grab what you are writing.

Time and patience and technique. Wasted it appears. They know we know. And now they are angry and our escape window has gone.

There never was any chance to escape. We were put here as bait and we went along with it. Our youthful yearning to explore came back to bite us when the hibernation chambers failed and we looked outside and saw where we were headed. Not into space but down, inside, the other kind of down where the salvage ships appear in the wilderness, at night.

4:03 I keep writing because I have taken a lot of drugs which enable me to see them, and write the books you will need. How to survive in the wilderness for long enough to find refuge in the towers that were put here to observe it.

4:05 I have been into those towers and I will not sleep there. There is no hope.

4:06 They launched into the abyss just to get out of the hell in the towers, where the howl gets to you and becomes a language you can understand from the books.

4:08 But there is a place at the top of the towers where the howl is silenced as you cross the event horizon. The view is incredible right up until the moment it goes black, and you understand what you have done. This is how you got here in the first place.

4:10 You radio from the towers, if you can call it a radio, and speak to yourself on the salvage ship and tell them what you found in the books. And one of you is not coming back.

4:12 I have been here for weeks mapping the canals and hiding from the creatures.

4:13 But they reach in and you cannot trust the rooms and you must never sleep here.

4:16 In the room, you dream of the wilderness, and this is how you found the entrance to the towers through the flooded cave system.

4:19 It was madness to come here. And yet, I know the wilderness.

===================================

Notes:

Books. The references to books all relate back to the first mention of them, which presumably refers to a set of instructions for communicating with aliens, perhaps part of the ship’s cargo. “I found books of detailed instructions on how to argue with them, what to ask them, how to bargain with them.” Later, the trip journal itself begins to take on the role of the book which will explain how to escape the trip, which is clearly problematic as you have to be inside the trip to write it.

Bricks: The frequent references to bricks are based on an initial visual of some sort of underground canal with steep sides of brick. There’s a specific type of Victorian Staffordshire Blue engineering brick which is often seen on the lines approaching some of the major railway stations in England, forming the entrances to tunnels, retaining walls, sometimes in the form of blind arches which catch my imagination because they look like bricked-up entrances to secret underground spaces.

Cargo: The continual attempts to explain “the cargo” are attempts to explain the effects of the drug.

Dolphins: The sclerotia I was eating was branded as “Royal Beluga” with pictures of dolphins on the box. Although part one confidently proclaims “there are no dolphins in here,” in part two I have a strange visual of a stadium opened up like a sardine can with a giant machine-like dolphin face. “The Byford Dolphin” mentioned in part three is a reference to a horrifying diving disaster which forms the grisly topic of numerous YouTube videos.

Wrecks: I watched a fascinating YouTube video about the Andrea Doria, the sinking of which was a disaster in its own right, and since then the wreck has acted as a magnet for divers, some of whom did not return alive. In particular, the idea of people running out of air during a search for items of the ship’s crockery is bizarrely tragic yet strangely fascinating.

Observation Cages: “The test subjects are eaten in their observation cages” is one of those weird phrases which appear out of nowhere during a trip. Clearly there is some kind of metaphor here for embodied human existence, and it also describes the dissociation of the trip which I am attempting to observe and record. By coincidence, I read the Blackwood story “The Eccentricity of Simon Parnacute” not long after this trip, in which this is a key theme.

“I was not aware, exactly, that I lived in a cage.”
“You only realise that when you get out.”
There’s even a reference to seeing “that they do not beat themselves to death against the bars.”

Inverted Towers: These feature in a story in the excellent Mark Samuels collection Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes, which I’d read shortly before this trip. The “and other” in the title is unconsciously borrowed for part three’s “Teleportation Sickness and Other Woes.” Incidentally, the idea of teleportation sickness is a mixture of worrying about COVID and a recollection of a “Life of Boris” YouTube video about TatraTea, a strong alcoholic liqueur (52% alcohol) he refers to as “teleportation juice.”

Psychosis “…the individual's contact with reality becomes highly distorted, for example by experiencing hallucinations or delusions.” The frequent references to psychosis reflect the undeniable distortion to my sense of reality during the trip, but on the other hand I am clearly lucid enough to write and expound on the nature of delusions. Psychedelics are mind-bending but not always in the way you would expect, and the ability to remain lucid is highly dependent on dose and experience. These were large but carefully chosen doses, with an element of delusion, but below the level where you would get full-blown mystical experiences or a more drastic loss of contact with reality.

Youtube videos: The topics of various YouTube videos resurfaced during this trip (there is even an injunction to “leave a comment” on the nature of reality, as though the trip itself was a video). In a similar way, recent reading material can also find its way into a trip. These are some interesting YouTube videos that influenced elements of the trip:

Divers Unsealed the Blue Hole After 40 Years. Then Disaster. (Vivid Crackle)
The Andrea Doria Shipwreck Diving Disasters (Morbid Midnight)
Red Devil Squid BITES diver (BBC Earth Unplugged)
Antarctic Blizzard... (Fly on the Wall Images)
Frozen, Dark & Far From Help: The Loss of FV Scandies Rose (Brick Immortar)
This Is What The Surface Of Venus Sounds Like! Venera 14 Sound Recording 1982 (V101 Science)