Unwary Traveller - an exploration on psilocybin

[Unwary Traveller]

Unwary Traveller

(See the fiction as religion thread for more context, I’ll mention this in what should end up being post #50 in that thread)

This is a fictional narrative within the ravings of a real ‘trip journal,’ written under the influence of psilocybin (using sclerotia, a.k.a. ‘magic truffles’ which are sold legally in ‘smart shops’ in the Netherlands). It was written in three parts on three different nights during a week-long visit to Amsterdam in November 2019. I was staying in a hotel which had floor-to-ceiling windows meeting in the corner of the room, with grey full-length curtains covering the glass on each side. With the curtains drawn, this gave a view from the bed which was oddly reminiscent of the ‘Black Lodge’ from Twin Peaks.

The first part abruptly introduces a sinister forest setting and ends up, not quite as prose poetry, but something along those lines. The second part switches to a brief science fiction narrative of dead cities within some nightmarish test zone. The third, longer part is a manic, febrile account of waking up at an inn within the same forest as part one.

I’ve retained the original timestamps which are next to each entry in the journal, the times with an asterisk have a footnote to explain them. In parts one and three I began writing at midnight, part two began at 2am. I’ve started each part at the point where I was getting some interesting visuals. A few of the more mundane initial entries have been removed, but once each trip gets going, the text here is the same as I wrote at the time, with the occasional word altered or phrase deleted to make more sense.

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: The Forest, at Night

0:44 First CEV. Images that seem to represent a descent into a dark realm. Images that light the blackness of the void within.

0:56 CEV slowly resolve into walls and ceiling with a red and white pattern, almost like 60s wallpaper. Appears to be a cavern stretching back, with walls that flow and undulate.

1:19 I was sitting on the bed, thinking, and noticed there was a motion in the curtains, as if the folds were waves and I was watching the ripples

1:26 When I try to explain coherently what the visuals are doing, my thoughts are altered by the same kind of strange resonances, waves, ripples and contortions.

1:30* Who are you writing to? Or who are you writing for? And why?

1:37* The trip feels like a heaviness starting to press down from above.

CEV: An astronaut in slow-motion, trying to escape his constraints and flee from the unnatural space he finds himself inside. Beckoning fingers from the indefinite surfaces pressing down on my imagination.

1:45 “A confrontation with the subconscious”

1:52 The waves of the music radiate out like heat. An interrogation by sound.

1:53 Within the fractal contortions and infinite webs. Are the words.

1:59* CEV: A figure met in a forest with a cloak concealing a metal rib cage like the supporting elements of a large structure, or the collapsible elements of a small tent. But this was not a small space, more like a large circus tent or vaulted cathedral. And you try to explain this to the police.

2:01 Or you would. But there are no police in this forest. The police, if they were to be asked, would advise you strongly not to come here. Not to come here at night, certainly. At night. Alone. Alone.

2:09* Promising a new religion, the demons come from above.

2:11 CEV: The sweeping tongues and the mouths and the faces that are not faces. And you came to the forest at night. Alone. Alone.

Alone, but followed.

Alone, but shadowed. Where the trees move. If there are trees. If the trees are to be believed in.

2:23* Skeletal, thin creatures, insectoid, in the rafters of attics. Disused houses in abandoned villages in the forest. The half-light that attracts the unwary traveller. At night. Alone. Alone.

2:25 You were not travelling. You just went to sleep. And now this. And now. This.

2:26 The creatures are something of a mystery. And the houses. There is something—undesirable—about the houses. In the forest. At night. Alone. Alone.

2:28 In the forest at night. Where the words billow amongst the trees. Where you come to write.

2:29 The sheen on the bark of the trees. Glows. It glows in the night and you woke up here, alone.

2:30 Bound in the webs in the rafters, in the undesirable houses, you experience the indescribable from the sting of the creature that brought you here. To the forest. At night. Alone.

2:33 Within the folds of indefinite surfaces pressing down upon you. Are the beaks and the mouths.

And the words came from the trees.

2:36* CEV: Railway cars corkscrewing through the concrete of underpasses and overpasses as reality collapses in upon itself. And folds. Folds into the trees. Into the curtains. The scenery rotates. To the forest. At night. Alone. The brightness among the trees that is not daylight. Do not come here. And do not touch the trees.

2:53* When the rain comes the words flow like liquid through the gutters of the undesirable houses, in the forest, at night. And if you had a family, they are gone. And you are alone. And you face the collection of faces that are not faces, amongst the rafters, in the undesirable houses, in the forest, at night.

Do not dream of this.

And do not come here. Alone.

3:16* To be surrounded and followed. Day after day. By something you cannot see. And to finally
give into it. To sink down amongst the trees and die here. Where your cries billow out with the words. Amongst the trees.

In the forest. At night. Alone.
Alone, but followed.
Always followed.

And now you wake up here. Alone. There is this. There is only this. There is nothing more. And I close the book. And the words are gone. The forest. At night. Where I am alone.

Part Two: The Dead Cities

2:37* OEV: Faint words / glyphs on the ceiling, which looks lemon yellow. There is a pendant light next to my bed with a very orange bulb.

2:57 CEV: An orange fractal effulgence of undulating surfaces.

3:51* I have an image (more of a vision than a visual) of stylised shamanic figures standing in a circle in a forest clearing at night, gazing in at something or someone in the centre. Their faces are like birds seen on totem poles, or Egyptian gods. They are silent and eerily unreal, and they just stand in a circle in the forest, in silence.

3:55* Purple girders and the view from the windows of ruined apartments in a dead city.

3:57* The dead cities, where we wait out the days.

4:05 CEV: Unfolding ribbons of dark red and white, sentient and strange, filling a palatial room. The word palatial invokes the image of a mountain range, as though I am viewing my writing as merely marks on paper with no meaning.

4:07 CEV: Things dredged up in the nets of the boats. They look dead. About the size of a large whale. Caught up in the equipment of industrial trawlers.

4:10 And time… elapses

4:15 The relics of a death that came from above. The cities built on piles of rubble of the same city that stands. In their lurid charm, we witness them. The drab olive sheen of the things floating in the water.

4:18 The eerie towers that lie empty along the waterside.

4:20 An oppressive weirdness that fills the room.

4:28 Consumed in the flames, the burning cities remain standing.

4:29 Glowing in the white heat of their incineration, the creatures wake

4:30 They are here. They are not here.

4:31 I write.

4:34 It comes in waves of nausea and dread.

4:35 The pressure of unknown depths. We carry strange cargoes.

4:37 Beneath the surface as the seas boil above. Where the cities burn and the silos lie empty.

5:19 The stern of a ship, torn cleanly in half, washes up on the sands beyond the cities.

5:21 The decks melted and caved-in from the blast and pressure waves from above. The hold torn apart from within.

5:23 In the test zone beyond the reef, the dead cities are seen once again.

5:26* The oily residue from the rain obscures the view through the windshield as the vehicles are positioned along the test range.

5:30 Where the cities are bombed into existence. The seas evaporate and fall as rain, hard pounding rain, and the ocean rushes in to fill the craters left by the bombs.

5:33 A mirage seen through binoculars. The cities reappear on the horizon as the seas churn.

5:35 There are things on the rooftops, and faces at the windows. Faces that are not faces.
Forms that heave between the walls of the buildings in the dead cities.

5:41 And the night closes in over the dead cities as we watch the skies and test the radar equipment.

6:01 The problem is not that the aliens are here. The problem is that they appear to be missionaries. Emissaries or devotees of something that may or may not exist. Their communications are of a disturbing nature. Complex simulations and attack data. Data which appears to show we have already been attacked. Simulations that may or may not be simulations. Creatures which insist they represent gods. Or something closely equivalent.

6:06 This is what you extract from the data runs overnight. The fact that you were never here to begin with.

6:07 There are no exits from the simulations that are not simulations. If this is a simulation then you are not here. If this is not a simulation then you should already be dead.

6:08 And they tell you about their gods.

6:11 Dead gods or gods of the dead. And they winch them out of the water to show you, and you kneel before the bloated, reeking thing before you. Stare into its eye, and tell me if it is alive or dead. And then tell me if you are alive or dead.

6:16* Do not dream of this. Do not wake up here. Do not ask yourself if this is real. Do not sleep. Do not sleep at all.

6:26 You place the file with its logs and descriptions of the data from the transmissions, back with all the others that are telling you the same thing. You are within the target area inside a simulation, looking out across calm waters at a city which does not exist. Do not wake up here. Do not dream of this. Do not sleep.

Part Three: Unwary Traveller

0:50 CEV: A man in a drab olive-green army jacket floats in the foetal position inside a room or dugout, filling the space tightly

0:55 CEV: I see figures, crowds, maybe vehicles. Someone is unloading the car decks of a ship, or motioning vehicles out of some dark space. As if the trip requires unloading.

1:25 OEV: There is an odd resonance to the curtains when I gaze out, thinking of something else. Something vibrating many times a second but remaining motionless.

1:35 CEV: The roofs of cars with a red glow over them, undulating strangely.

1:44* OEV: The ceiling is lemon yellow again and the wording is back.

1:53 CEV: Palaces where the floors move. In pink and lilac. Images of girls dancing to the music, shadows on the walls.

2:08 CEV: Staring up at something pinky-red, like a building lit up at night. Fractal surfaces extend this upward and then the surfaces fold in on themselves, an origami of light.

2:10 CEV: Oddly shaped rooms that feel as though they are underneath the supports of a larger structure. Furniture scrambled into strange shapes. Bright, harsh lighting fills empty spaces too small to be of any use.

2:13 CEV: Japanese Christmas shoppers at the backs of shops, extending into the surreal spaces of my mind. They wander, their expressions unreadable and inscrutable.

2:15 And where are we now?

2:17* CEV: Livid canyons where the horizon is filled by giant octopi, heaving as they move.

2:19 Looking deep into the surfaces of the night.

2:20 I cannot account for the deep orange cast that suffuses everything, but there it is.

2:21 We leave the bus and venture into the unreal, pretending this is a scheduled stop at a viewpoint, to admire the sunset perhaps.

2:22 Wandering further towards. Wandering further away. It is all relative, in here.

2:24 The spaces inside my mind writhe, and everything is orange.

2:26 Moving through black drapes into empty markets. Lit up and empty in the gathering night.

2:33 CEV: Fractal spaces the size of aircraft factories folding into themselves, turning silently, mosaic surfaces in unusual tints of yellow. Unnatural things.

2:45* CEV: An airport that has crashed into itself and turns inside out, slowly.

Riding chains of cars in the dark, drifting out across the abyss.

2:46 Following the lights in the darkness.

2:48 Where your sense of movement extends outwards, into this.

2:59* Bursting through glass canopies and crazing the concrete beneath your feet. Animating the city around you and holding the architecture in place while it watches. To see if you notice the difference. This is how they communicate with you. How else? From within. From within. From within.

3:02 Once inside your mind, they use the hallucinations to show you whatever they want. And you awaken into this reality even as you begin to consider it as a serious possibility. Do not dream of this. Do not wake up here. Do not wake up here again.

3:05 Writing in the half-light of the lamp on the night table. Submerged within an abyss of paranoid delusions, you continue to write. Because this is why you are here. This is what brought you here. You are an unwary traveller here on roads that are not roads, between places that should not be.

Between the lines and above your head. Watching you from inside the glass of the windows and through the gaps between the paving stones. This is how they communicate. From within.

Welcome, unwary traveller, and write.

3:11 You can smell the abyss, and the things within it. Do not trust the air. Where the windows look back at you. Where you woke up. Where you are. Where you always were, inside your hallucination.

3:14 What are the things you brought here with you? You already know.

3:18 Do not drift into the abyss with these things. Do not dream of this. Do not wake up here. Do not sleep.

3:19* Did you only now stop to ponder the mysteries of your consciousness? Then you are an unwary traveller. Let me in. Let me show you the way. The request is a formality, for I am already here, as you long suspected.

Let us visit the midnight places. Let us travel the roads that are not roads, between the places that should not be, in the spaces that are not there where you see them. Inside. Within. Within.

3:22 You write in the half-light. I see the pen move in your hand. Through your own eyes.

3:23 This is dissociation experienced within a paranoid delusion. Writing about it doesn’t fix it. Do not dream of this. Do not come here. Do not wake up into this. Do not sleep. Get out get out get out.

And something crawls into the void where you used to be. It may be you. It may not. It seems to know a lot about you. And why is this, unwary traveller? Open the window and look out across the ravaged landscape, the orange hell you know so well. Run down the roads that lead nowhere. Run quickly, and do not look back. Run away from yourself. Run away from your own mind.

Do not dream of this. Do not take this. Do not eat this. Do not wake up here. Never come here. Do not sleep again.

Just because you write it down doesn’t make it fiction. It makes you an unwary traveller inside your own head. Allow me to show you the road. Allow me to guide you through the abyss.

3:30 And were you asleep, and were you awake? Did you know? Could you tell? Do you know anything? Or do you just hold the pen?

3:31 Wading out into a sea of madness and drowning. Do not write of this. Do not wake up here. Do not sleep.

3:32* The music and the words guide you through the abyss where your mind used to be. You do not recognise yourself. You woke up here. Or so they keep telling you. At the inn.

Welcome, unwary traveller, welcome.

Look out of the window. Into the forest. Look between the trees. Look for the eyes watching you. And close the curtains, and keep them closed until the morning comes, if morning comes at all. I don’t think it does around these parts.

3:35 With an odd contortion of your body, I watch you write this out on the book behind you. You can feel my weight on your bed, where I am waiting for you to fall asleep.

Unwary traveller, I offer you this advice. Do not sleep. Do not sleep.

3:37 Climbing the walls. In the ducts and underneath the floors. We writhe and we write. And this is how we like it. As if you know of what you write.

3:39 You are here as our guest. Remember that, unwary traveller. Remember that when you wake up here. In the half-moment of waking when you feel the weight of the thing on your bed, looking at you.

Let us not dwell on this. Let us take to the road, and admire the views across the canyons.

You come here, to this, and you look out, feeling the cold air off an unreal void. And you look down into the abyss. And you are back where you began. Falling into your own psychosis as the psychedelics take hold in earnest.

You listen to the music, the track which plays on and on into infinity within your mind, and you woke up here, you woke up here, you dreamed of this, and here you are.

Welcome, unwary traveller! Welcome.

This is how they write now, and I have seen them do it. I guide the pen in your fingers. I was here all along. Look within, unwary traveller! Look within! This place you know so well, I know it a lot better.

3:48 Within the nausea. On the beats of the music. Are the words. And they come to you. And you write them down. And there it is.

3:54 The empty paper gapes like a wall of insanity, an iceberg drifting across the oceans of the night. Write of the chasms. Write quickly and clearly. Watch the pebbles under your feet disappear, and ask yourself where they are going. Listen to that roaring sound around you, and ask yourself—are you within a cavern? How tall must it be, for it to echo like that?

Keep to the road, and walk quickly, and do not look behind you. Do not stop at the inns. Do not talk to the people in the forest. Do not light any fires. Do not camp out here in the dark. Do not stop. And do not sleep at all.

3:59 If you stopped you could read the inscriptions on the stones beneath your heels and understand where you are. And by then, it would be too late, it would be too late, unwary traveller! You would sleep here, and you would wake up here, and it would start to become a habit.

Look out of the window. The man in the cloak with the lantern he waves frantically. Follow the lantern and do not talk to the man. Do not talk at all. Run into the forest. Run back. And tell me what you see out there.

4:02 I am not leaving the inn until I get some answers.

And now this is mania and dissociation experienced within a nest of paranoid delusions, each occurring simultaneously, or in parallel. Writing of this does not fix it.

Write of the forest and the road and the creatures out there. I am not leaving the inn no matter what you say.

4:05 There are wolves and bears. But they do not behave as wolves and bears should. You can see the seams where their hides have been torn open from within. Open the window and they will tell you themselves. They will tell you what they are, and you will believe them. Close the window, unwary traveller! Close the window!

We must leave this place. We must not sleep here. We must not sleep.

And you run into the forest. Closer to, or further away from, as you prefer.

Write of this. Write of this by the light of the small lamp in the inn. Ask yourself why the daylight never comes. And write.

4:09 You eat the books when you should be reading them. You live them. You woke up here, unwary traveller. You woke up here again.

4:11* You scan the forest for answers, and there are none. You stare at the eyes of the wolf, between the trees, frozen in the lamplight. That is not a wolf. And the paper became the trees.

You write of this. At the inn. And then you fall asleep. Into this.

I feel the weight of despair in every line of every page that came from the mill that takes its wood from the trees.

4:15 You go back into this. Because it is better than where you first started. And there lies the sadness of it all, unwary traveller. That you gave up so easily when it came down to it. It was almost as though you had been here before and were expecting my arrival on the windowsill at 4am.

Let us speak of the old times. Let us speak of the forest. Let us stop and talk around the fire.

Do you stop? Or do you back away? No longer so unwary, you run, and you keep on running, and you always come back here. And you listen to my stories. And then you wish you hadn’t. But you did, unwary traveller! You did.

4:20 This is how we get in. This is how we get in.

4:21 You do not know where you are.

4:23 Giving in to the psychosis is a mistake. Giving it a pen compounds it. And yet here you are.

The snow outside glows, and draws you further into the forest, where the dawn always seems to be just beyond the treeline. There is no treeline. There are just trees, and words, and lumber for the mill.

4:25 You head back to civilisation, and find the empty homes in the forest. There is something—undesirable—about the houses. Something you should have run from, unwary traveller, something you should have run from.

Your words fall on the roof and wake me where I hang upside down from the rafters. From where I can better observe my curious and over-confident prey. My unwary traveller, come home at last.

4:30 On forest paths. Inside the trees. Are the words.

4:36 Dare I ask when this wears off?

To whom do you wish to address this question? To the man in the cloak? Ask away, ask away, unwary traveller. It will be just like the old times on the road as we journey through the forest into the mountains and gaze into the ravines. Be sure to gaze, and not fall.

4:40 Whither, the forest? Wither the trees. Words, all words.

4:53 I hold the book upside down, and am presented with the troubling illusion of a completely blank journal. To go back there, and write this again, would not be acceptable.

This is where you come in, unwary traveller! I have paper, and pens, and tales for the road.

4:55 You can feel it within you. Just waiting to get out.

Mushroom soup, unwary traveller. Mushroom soup.

Let us not linger here. Onwards, gentlemen!

You look around. There is only you, and that is enough.

You pull on your cloak. And walk into the forest.

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

(A note on composition)

5:12 Just let it gnaw at you. Let the pressure build up. Within the skull. Within your body. Do not trust the sensation that tells you something is horribly wrong. Just breathe, and concentrate on your breathing. Close your eyes. You must close your eyes, to see. To see this. To see ‘them.’

Glimpses. Of nightmare dimensions of nameless horrors. Write of these things. The words will pour out of you. Words pouring through the chasms of your imagination.

You wake up into this. And you write. Because that is why you are here.

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

Notes to Part One

1:30 There is an abrupt switch to second-person point of view, something that frequently happens in my trip journals without being a conscious decision, but the 'you' being addressed is often the writer, not the reader. I sometimes think of this as more like 'first person dissociative.' I also wonder if the ingrained habit of timestamping every entry in the journal unconsciously reminds me of the old "Fighting Fantasy" books I read as a child, with their "choose your own adventure" type second-person perspective and branching storylines. In particular, the mood of this trip reminds me of the excellent cover image of The Forest of Doom, with its shapeshifting lizard creature wearing a cloak.

1:37 As the psilocybin takes effect, the trip feels like an oppressive physical weight. The hallucination (with eyes closed) of the astronaut is a typical random and brief scene which suddenly appears without context. In addition to abstract psychedelic imagery, almost any scene can be dredged up into your visuals, compiled from strange juxtapositions of random memories. Here the imagery has an obvious sense - the astronaut represents a 'psychonaut' and the unnerving feeling produced by the trip. I was reminded of my trip when I saw this YouTube

Floating in Space

CGI animation.

1:59 This convoluted description is better compared to a magician who sweeps his cape around his head and then disappears, only in this case the cloak is swept around my head, a portal into the forest within the trip. The 'circus tent' beneath the cloak is related to the idea of a psychedelic trip as a carnival, festival, or circus, the theatre of the mind. The cloaked figure, and the setting of a forest, are related to the story "The Erlking" I had been reading in John Connolly's Nocturnes, although the folklore of the 'Erl King' was already familiar to me via the M.G. Lewis translation of Goethe's poem. Although the image arose as a random visual, these will often pick out elements of recent experiences, which can include mental imagery from books you've read. Encountering fictional elements from other works gives an intertextual element to writing on psychedelics.

2:09 This is the type of disturbing phrase that sometimes appears from nowhere as a 'delusional mood' takes hold. It relates loosely to a previous trip of mine, a spiral of delusional religious revelations in which I wrote "the rulers of the universe will drop from the trees."

2:23 I'm not sure why I wrote "insectoid." The image I had was more like a human-sized skeleton of a bird, which behaved like a spider.

2:36 This is more or less the peak of this initial trip, with imagery of the world collapsing in upon itself, bringing me back to the hotel room in which the folds of the curtains look like the grey bark of trees in the forest, the scenery of the theatre of the mind.

2:53 The reference to your family being 'gone' is again related to the myth of the Erlking, some kind of elf or spirit, "a bearded giant or goblin who lures little children to the land of death"

3:16 This passage is to some extent a representation of being dogged by the anxieties of everyday life, transferred into the sinister imagery of the psychedelic state.

Notes to Part Two

2:37 The peculiar light bulb suspended from the ceiling had an extremely orange cast to it like a sodium street lamp, and accounts for the orange cast seen in subsequent imagery. Bright light shines through eyelids and can affect closed-eye-visuals.

3:51 This was a very eerie image which suddenly appeared in my mind's eye, and clearly relates to the unseen things following me at the end of part one. A google image search for "thunderbird totem pole" returns images close to what I saw. This vision is a reversal of what you would normally expect - the human in the centre of the circle is watched by figures that resemble carved idols, rather than a circle of humans surrounding an idol or totem pole.

3:55 I found the real-life prototype of these "girders" when looking at the base of the supports holding up the roof at Amsterdam Central station a few days later. This is a typical way in which memories, however insignificant, can reappear in psychedelic imagery in a transformed context.

3:57 Some of my favourite closed-eye-visuals are abstract architectural spaces which resemble futuristic cities in some nightmare dimension where the whole place is alive, as if reeling from some unimaginable apocalyptic alien invasion. These 'dead cities' are a common theme in my trips, a Lovecraftian city break.

5:26 This was a very vivid closed-eye visual from inside a vehicle, like a scene from a science fiction film. Experiments are being carried out in a place where nobody should be, and no good will come of it...

6:16 The frequents injunctions "do not sleep", "do not dream of this" and "do not wake up here" are perhaps invitations or invocations to do the opposite.

Notes to Part Three

1:44 By "wording" I'm referring to the common phenomenon of an indistinct but omnipresent "word soup" which covers walls, carpets and other surfaces with indecipherable glyphs or pseudo-alphabets (the word 'word' is being used here as a verb for some reason, like 'tile' versus 'tiling').

2:17 Despite the brief description, this was a fascinating image, like an Alex grey painting. Imagine looking out across the Grand Canyon, not too close to the edge. The sky is a hideous, unnatural orange colour. The heads of enormous octopus-like, Cthulhu-esque creatures are visible above the level of the edge of the canyon, as they march down it.

2:45 The "airport that has crashed into itself" was a bizarre visual of the concourse at Schipol, duplicated, folding and transforming in ways which would be physically impossible for any solid object. The image here of 'riding cars' relates to a common image in my trips of being whirled around on some kind of fairground ride inside my head, where the cars of the rides are made up of tiny glowing blocks that (somewhat unnervingly) always seem to resemble skulls.

2:59 The sudden arrival of a strange paranoid delusion which seems half-real as I write it down. Aliens that get inside your mind; an insidious incursion rather than a physical abduction. Was this the fate of the dead cities in part two?

3:19 The trip is shifting here into a dissociated state which feels like being "taken over" by something from within, producing a state similar to automatic writing. By a strange coincidence, I watched a good indie horror film recently called Sator in which the director incorporates automatic writing by his grandmother, who (in real life) during 1968 received messages from some kind of spirit who she believed ruled the forest near her house.

3:32 The setting of the trip has shifted to an inn, located somewhere within the forest we have visited previously

4:11 The trees in this forest undergo a surprising number of transformations in the text. They start off as the folds of the curtains, becoming tree trunks in the scenery of the theatre of the mind. The trees come not just from the story I am writing but the story I was reading previously about the Erl King. In turn, the trees provide the lumber for the mill which produces the paper I am writing on. The idea of the trees of the forest being sent to the mill is a sort of 'disenchantment,' as the real world begins to encroach on the unreality of this strange forest.

[A Defrocked Academic]

There is some very interesting imagery here. I found this passage especially evocative:

Quote

2:11 CEV: The sweeping tongues and the mouths and the faces that are not faces. And you came to the forest at night. Alone. Alone. [...] Alone, but shadowed. Where the trees move. If there are trees. If the trees are to be believed in. 2:23 Skeletal, thin creatures, insectoid, in the rafters of attics. Disused houses in abandoned villages in the forest. The half-light hat attracts the unwary traveller. At night. Alone. Alone. [...] 2:26 The creatures are something of a mystery. And the houses. There is something—undesirable—about the houses. In the forest. At night. Alone. Alone. [...] 2:30 Bound in the webs in the rafters, in the undesirable houses, you experience the indescribable from the sting of the creature that rought you here. To the forest. At night. Alone. 2:33 Within the folds of indefinite surfaces pressing down upon you. Are the beaks and the mouths.

There is something Ligottian about descriptions like "Skeletal, thin creatures, insectoid, in the rafters of attics". There is also something characteristically Ligottian about the use of lexical and syntactic repetition as a stylistic device:

Quote

rafters [...] houses [...] undesireable [...] in the webs in the rafters, in the undesirable houses [...]

Three examples out of many:

From "I Have a Special Plan for This World":

Quote

I have heard them talking in their sleep [...] I have heard them whispering in the corners of crooked houses And in the alleys and narrow back streets of this crooked creaking universe

From "Nethescurial":

Quote

Amid the rooms of our houses and beyond their walls — beneath dark waters and across moonlit skies — below earth mound and above mountain peak — in northern leaf and southern flower —

From "The Bungalow House":

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[T]he moonlight shone through the dusty blinds and revealed the bodies of insects and other vermin on the pale carpet. [...] And to see upon the pale, threadbare carpet those verminous bodies [...]

Or might it be more accurate to say that Ligotti's more dreamlike prose and this narrative both tap into a similar vein? I also find it interesting that the psychedelic experience seems to be filtered through the language and imagery of weird/horror fiction:

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5:35 There are things on the rooftops, and faces at the windows. Faces that are not faces. Forms that heave between the walls of the buildings in the dead cities. [...] 6:08 And they tell you about their gods. 6:11 Dead gods or gods of the dead. And they winch them out of the water to show you, and you kneel before the bloated, reeking thing before you. Stare into its eye, and tell me if it is alive or dead. And then tell me if you are alive or dead.

The implied setting of Part Two reminds me of "A Colder War" by Charles Stross.

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1:44 By "wording" I'm referring to the common phenomenon of an indistinct but omnipresent "word soup" which covers walls, carpets and other surfaces with indecipherable glyphs or pseudo-alphabets

I have experienced something like this while delirious with fever, although the glyphs covered my body instead of the walls.

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3:39 You are here as our guest. Remember that, unwary traveller. Remember that when you wake up here. In the half-moment of waking when you feel the weight of the thing on your bed, looking at you.

A night hag/sleep paralysis reference?

[Unwary Traveller]

Thanks for reading this.

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There is something Ligottian about descriptions like "Skeletal, thin creatures, insectoid, in the rafters of attics". There is also something characteristically Ligottian about the use of lexical and syntactic repetition as a stylistic device:

I think it's partly an effect of the drug to seize on some phrase or idea and repeat it because it seems particularly resonant. I find this helps give some sort of focus and direction to the trip, rather than just being a completely disconnected jumble of imagery.

The things that appear in closed-eye imagery can be taken magpie-like from all kinds of things dredged up at random from your memory. I think the skeletal animals are a result of watching the surreal 1988 film "Alice" - described here as "more like a version of Eraserhead as directed by the Henson Creature Workshop than anything that Lewis Carroll ever envisioned." - https://www.moriareviews.com/fantasy...o-v-alenky.htm

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The singularly most bizarre sequence is the pursuit of Alice by The Animals – stop-motion animated ‘things’ seemingly pieced together from animal skeletons, feathers and dolls’ clothing. Nothing seems more guaranteed to boggle the mind than the image of Alice being attacked by a miniature winged bed, or during her subsequent imprisonment in a pantry, watching skeletal baby dinosaurs pop out of eggs and loaves of bread and sprout six inch nails, or seeing a raw steak slither away of its own accord.

As an example of repetition from a different trip, I'll paste in this "accidental poem." For context, there was a brief segment between TV programmes where they were advertising cartoon shows on the network. They had a grid of images on screen showing a picture from each of the cartoons, and they’d done a very simple animation where each one flipped backwards and forwards between two images to give a very simple and jerky animation. There was something unsettling about this weird jerky to-and-fro movement, which came back to me when I was tripping. With my eyes closed I saw an image of some kind of strange figure, a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, descending a set of stairs into a basement with jerky movements, and a head that somehow simultaneously faced forwards and sideways. I started writing about this thing coming down the stairs, and gradually a weird rhythm came into my head with a lot of pauses, like someone or something shuffling awkwardly down a set of stairs:

They come down the stairs with pitchforks
Crab-like. Shambling
And they look at you
It is as if… you can see their thoughts
I sit. I write. They come down the stairs again. With pitchforks.
The way they move. The way they think. Slow. Calculating. Insane. Again
They come
And yet I know that… this… is no more than I deserve.
They come down the stairs with pitchforks.
They have come for me.
Shambling. Calculating. Looking.
Up the stairs. Down the stairs.
In their endless lairs,
Beneath the streets
Inside your head.
They come. For me. For me.
In this slow… rhythm… I see them shamble, and… think
And come down the stairs with pitchforks.
With pain in their eyes
With death in their eyes
With a death that comes, again,
And again, that comes… down the stairs… with pitchforks
As they fill my grave.
And they come… for me
This is what… I deserve
And I see… And I see… And I write.
And they come… down the stairs…
In their endless lairs… under the streets… everywhere… again.
The grave… again
They come
And they shamble
And they look
And they think
And they move… in crab-like ways
And they think… in crab-like ways
And they fill… my grave…
In the endless days… of the end.

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Or might it be more accurate to say that Ligotti's more dreamlike prose and this narrative both tap into a similar vein? I also find it interesting that the psychedelic experience seems to be filtered through the language and imagery of weird/horror fiction

Probably the 'dreamlike' aspect is the common thing, given that I am describing fleeting impressions and imagery within the dreamlike atmosphere of a trip.

I became interested in weird fiction because it seemed to parallel aspects of the psychedelic experience, specifically the almost Lovecraftian dread of the "beyond" that can result from taking too much. I find there is something a little sinister and "other" about the experience, certainly at higher doses. A lot of my trips have these dark vibes of drifting into the unknown, even if they eventually resolve into something more relaxed and euphoric.

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The implied setting of Part Two reminds me of "A Colder War" by Charles Stross.

I'll have to read that Charles Stross story, thanks. Some themes in my trips, like dead cities or that cold war / military experiment vibe, are things that interest me and recur quite often, with imagery like "where the silos lie empty, and the wolves howl in the empty missile rooms". A strong trip can feel like an experiment gone wrong, like the Castle Bravo nuclear weapon tests, where you are reeling from the unexpected yield and its effects. This description by Terence McKenna is appropriate: "it's like watching an atomic explosion on the other side of 50ft of absolutely clear crystal glass, I mean you can't believe that this is happening 'in my mind' - you have the feeling that everybody from Seattle to San Diego is just crawled under their desk as this thing tore past, but it's in your mind..."

Incidentally, there's a very good BBC documentary someone uploaded to YouTube titled "BBC Arena, A British Guide to the End of the World Full 720p" - the first half has some very evocative and unsettling descriptions of a 1950s UK nuclear weapons test out in the Pacific.

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A night hag/sleep paralysis reference?

Yes, I've never actually experienced this but it sounds terrifying. Referring to it here is a way of expressing the dissociative mood I was in, where it feels almost as though something "other" is present and some of the phrases written down seem to arise from nowhere without consciously thinking them up.

Again, thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings.