DOSE:			Ayahuasca
			Salvia divinorum	(extract - 10x)

BODY WEIGHT:

170 lb

I am submitting this report to serve as forewarning to those who chose to experiment with psychedelic drugs. This is no horror story though, in fact, it is very positive but also very strange. It is a story of the after effects of psychedelic experiences, but not in so far as resulting in a general different sense of the world and not of 'flashbacks' either (as far as they resemble the associated drug state). This is a story about the doors opened in our minds that now swing loosely on their hinges: the psychedelic experience is a storm whose winds rattle the foundation of self, the drafts of its memory still crawl through the hallways of the mind, still seep into its hidden recesses.

The beginning of a synchronicity (now well over a year past) whose reach spanned across approximately three weeks began after smoking Salvia 10X at the height of an Ayahuasca trip. The details of that trip appear in Erowid's Salvia Vault in a report titled 'Impossible' so I will not reiterate them here, but there is one aspect of my experience not included that I would like to incorporate now, as I did not understand its relevance until recently while revisiting the memory of the experience. When I felt I was moving at the 'impossible angles' of higher dimensional space, I felt that some aspect of my being was rotating, that rotating was what allowed movement at those angles and indeed, I was physically rolling in place against the wall that the bed I was lying on was pressed against.

The important aspect of rotating in place is that it causes your body to move through space it has previously occupied repeatedly through time; additionally it is a familiar, identifiable motion that is interpretable symbolically given the proper clues (even if those clues come at a distant relative time). In three-dimensional computer models of higher dimensional objects (do a search for 'Klein Bottle' to get an idea), the objects often appear to go through themselves, in other words they occupy space they already appear to inhabit. For instance, a hypothetical four-dimensional person projected in three dimensions could appear to put their hand through their face (just as your silhouetted arm can appear to pass through your head's silhouette), when in fact their hand occupies unperceivable fourth-or-higher-dimensional space. Evidently, I cannot put my hand through my face and so spinning was the closest symbolic representation of higher-dimensional occupation that I could physically act out while lying down.

Even without this new suggestive realization at the time, I had reason to believe I had perceived higher dimensional space and set out to confirm my suspicions. I fervently read relevant writings associated with higher dimensions, including writings on special relativity and a fictional book written in the 19th century called 'Flatland', a classic of a very small genre. I had written down the events of my experience soon after its occurrence and consulted my notes regularly to ensure that I was not creating false memories to fit in with what I was learning. After going through a significant body of literature and with the said control in place, I concluded that what I experienced probably was a legitimate vision of higher dimensional space.

There are differing opinions about what higher dimensions (especially the fourth) are, and in this report of my experience I allude to higher dimensions in differing ways. To attempt to clarify this I can only state that whatever the technical physical natures of higher dimensions are (if any) they are far from being understood and as to how they might effect subjective human experience we can certainly only speculate. Given that the nature of my experience is recondite to say the least, I've here attempted in an arguably futile and stumbling manner to reflect on it from various angles, through many conceptual facets in hope that the reader might face at least one of them squarely, read in it their own countenance, and appropriate it for their own pursuits. I should also note that there is no 'empirical' evidence for the existence of dimensions beyond the fourth that I am aware of, though they have their place in some theories. For instance, in a recent television interview Michio Kaku stated 'the mind of God is music, resonating in ten-dimensional hyperspace'.

About three weeks into my aforementioned reading, I have a dream. I am waiting for someone to pick me up from a store (Wal-Mart I think) and decide to wander the aisles to pass time. In an adjacent aisle, I hear a baby crying; I become dizzy and find myself in the baby's body, lying in the seat of a shopping cart. I feel very confused and cannot understand the world around me but hear some children yelling. In broken harmony, they shout 'Mojo Jojo, Mojo Jojo!' (yes the damn monkey from the Powerpuff Girls cartoon) and I attempt to repeat their words only to vomit on myself. The woman pushing me in the cart bends down to clean up the mess and I wake up. I leave my bed stunned at the oddity and striking vitality of the dream and proceed to walk towards the bathroom, planning to return to bed after relieving myself. On the way, I remember that I had another dream just before waking; just as I finished using the bathroom the haze had settled enough to recall that the dream was of waking up, using the bathroom, and returning to bed. Not one to tempt fate and one who was still very tired as well, I returned to bed laughing.

That night, I sat down in front of the TV and began switching channels; imagine whose image I should happen to run across but that of Mojo Jojo's. I figured why not watch it, its not every night I have intense bizarre dreams involving cartoon characters. Mojo Jojo was hiding behind a group of children watching the Professor demonstrate his new time travel invention. The Professor had a mouse in a maze and explained that the mouse could only move in two dimensions, back and fourth and side-to-side; but, he explained if the mouse could move upwards into the third dimension it could see the cheese, and descend on it from above, going back into the maze without going through it. This was all very similar to the analogies between two and three-dimensional space I had read about in the writings. Then the professor told them that time is a fourth dimension and that to travel in time you must leave the fourth dimension and enter the fifth where you can place yourself back into time wherever you wish.

A part of Mojo's scheme included traveling back in time and so he leaped through the portal when it was opened. The ensuing scene consisted of monochromatic pencil animation, bizarre synthesizer sounds and a churning vortex; the whole segment actually had some very creative aspects to it. What are Mojo's first words upon leaving the fifth dimension? 'What a trip!' I think that those adults who saw this episode could clearly see this excerpt is an inside joke by the writers.

If you've stayed with me so far, this is where everything comes together. In order we have: the psychedelic experience, the subsequent readings, Dream One, Dream Two, the events foretold in Dream Two (kind of), and a component of the cartoon foretold in Dream One. Dream One orchestrates with parts of the Powerpuff Girls episode. The kids in that dream yell 'Mojo Jojo' who coincidently appears on screen soon after I turn on the television for the first time that day around six or seven o'clock and begin to scan the channels. The episode's higher dimensional analogies, themes, and the double meaning of the word 'trip' all find parallels with the psychedelic experience and readings. The place of the dream is a gigantic shopping center lined with tall isles obscuring my view, the layout of the ailes is as close to the maze in the episode as anything I typically encounter (tell me we aren't 'mice' running a maze of both product aisles and desire, of 'personal considerations', looking for 'cheese' when we shop).

Following this idea further as an associated characteristic of the dream's larger overarching theme: one might suggest that it is transient desire that anchors us to our paper-thin world, that it is what keeps us looking straight ahead and side-to-side to the shelves, the margins of the maze, that it keeps us speaking in echoes and distortions. Here, regarding the quality of speech, I am referring to the simultaneous shouts of the children and the 'vomit-speak' of the baby respectively. Of course, there are philosophies that would agree with this reading, but I digress. I do not see the baby, it is behind the shelves; I hear its cries and then feel dizzy before becoming it. The dizziness is symbolic of the vertigo of higher dimensional space, of literally not knowing which way is up. If my personal experience is true, this is also vertigo of self and meaning, as though slipping between the layers of overlapping shadows or riding a spinning leaf as it sinks below a newborn's gaze. By leaving the third dimension, I leave the 'maze' and descend into the baby (onto the cheese) from the inside.

To explain what I mean by 'from the inside' think of a square drawn on a plane, as three-dimensional beings we perceive the inside of the square, we can even touch its inside, but to an inhabitant of a two-dimensional plane whom can only perceive and touch the square's edges this is inconceivable. So too could a four-dimensional being perceive our interiors and enter into them from the inside (thankfully the dream was only symbolic!). This description finds a literary representation in 'Flatland' when the two-dimensional A. Square challenges a three-dimensional being to touch his stomach and receives a blunt response. After becoming the baby, I attempt to repeat the kids' words, 'Mojo Jojo' only to vomit on myself. Vomiting is an archetypal symbol of loss of control and the fact that it happened while attempting to communicate is relevant as well. Moreover, weak comparisons can be drawn between the infant and the monkey, as both are involved with higher dimensional movements (in the dream and in the episode correspondingly) and both are, taken at face value, emblematically ignorant entities.

Being so young, helpless, and so quickly losing control is representative of my extremely limited capacities of perception, communication, and physical freedom as a three-dimensional being. If I personally had any doubts about my impressions of this dream or the entire situation, they were quelled nearly a year later when under strikingly similar circumstances I experienced yet another drawn out series of associated events. It involved an experience derived from the combination of two drugs, followed by a dream in which I re-experienced the drug state symbolically, and the subsequent confirmation of an aspect of the dream on an animated television show (utterly bizarre to a comedic degree yes, I am all too aware, but how exactly should things like this, if they are to pass, come to pass?), but that and exceedingly more is the subject of a future report.

Dream Two foretells of waking, using the bathroom, and returning to bed. The events of this dream gradually rise from my sub-conscious as they emerge through a surreal haze, just as night's half-shut eyes, recalling their darkness, blink away the oneiric sun and scattered stars stream through the empyrean to meet us at twilight. The dream further serves to exemplify the non-linear nature of time (as I speculate an inhabitant of a higher dimension might view 'our time'). Merely thinking about all the experience's crossings and bends creates a kind of mental vertigo (a 'precognitive' dream remembered partially after the events of its predictions and occurring after a partially 'precognitive' dream that is relevant to the television episode, an event that occurs after the events foreseen in Dream Two).

Of course, the synchronicity as a whole also implies something about time and new light is shed on its meaning when viewed through the concept of higher dimensional structure. It is as if a series of events are pressing against one another, tangled in one of time's knots, the substance of each leaching into the others; perhaps a true synchronicity is a knot, one tied and pulled taut by our own hands in the secret spaces behind the eyes.

After seeing the connections between all these events, a profound elation overcame me. I think the essence of that elation can be felt in reading a passage from Edwin Abbot's 'Flatland'. A disenchanted A. Square (a two-dimensional square) having just been returned to Flatland and Plane Humanity from the third dimension by a three-dimensional sphere (who being a sphere believes himself the pinnacle of creation and ridicules the idea of dimensions higher than his own) from Solid Humanity speaks the words:

'My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet like a second Prometheus I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity. Away then with all personal considerations!'

These words grow especially powerful when we consider that Abbot penned them at the height of the Victorian Era! For me, they capture a broad sweeping, hopeful view of the world that ultimately transcends meaning itself in its infinite scope (its n-dimensional scope). It is because of this scope that though my experience is profound to me, it is infinitesimally small and I know I am no closer to truth because of it and can never be; we are forever in the shadow of infinity. I would have it no other way, how horribly banal, how unbearably limited the world would be if it could ever be possessed, if one could 'covet the stars'. It is a sensation of rising into some pregnant void, stretching and opening, perpetually inhaling, only then aware of your suffocation. This conceptual purview was later responsible for an experience that caused me to faint at the mere sight of the sky (being stunned and overwhelmingly awed by its immensity and beauty, but more than that as well) the morning after an Ayahuasca trip unrelated to the synchronicity.

Experiences following the conclusion of psychedelic states have provided me a glance of a world with unchained perceptions and boundless potential that has seemed frightening in the breadth of its vision but also soothing in its power. It is a world that demands to be faced without fear, through our full being.

Within the shifting plains of our perceptions, a synchronicity is an n-dimensional rose; we dizzy ourselves in tracing the spiral of its temporal bloom, but we needn't perceive its roots to know that its scent is sweet.

Exp Year: 2002	ExpID: 24418
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 11, 2003	Views: 22,554
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Dreams (85), Ayahuasca (8), Salvia divinorum (44) : Not Applicable (38), Mystical Experiences (9)