What we saw while we were sleeping

I’ve been talking with my friend all summer about ayahuasca. It came up naturally and even though I was incredibly sceptical, they had enough faith in me and me in them that the conversation could continue. For context, ayahuasca is a hallucigenic plant medicine from the used by some people in the amazon as part of a cultural ritual. It is incredibly potent and the trips last many hours. Ayahuasca ceremonies are often multi-day-long affairs. My first contact with people who had tripped on ayahuasca was this guy in Berlin who after going for a ceremony in Brazil suddenly flipped his entire life around, cut off a bunch of friends and became “reborn”. I later read this tweet by landshark which seemed to capture it pretty well:

Starting from that point, it took some time for my friend and I to reach some neutral ground. I think there’s also a slight availability bias because the cliche reactions to ayahuasca that landshark describes are abundant in their loudness. I have faith now that there are many people who had positive experiences who are calmly living better lives.

What I came to understand after all our conversations over the summer is the potency of ayahuasca in opening up one’s mind - that when if one is prepared to receive that they will be witness to things they have known all along but were too afraid to face. I’ve become somewhat calmer about Life in that I’ve understood that the Truth always exists, it will just be revealed in time. In a way, so many things are already decided.

There was one night where my friend had a burst of revelations. We texted til late into the night and when I fell asleep at three or so I could still see their three dots bumping along. I woke again at nine and they were still typing. It was almost like they were channeling a cosmic truth, their own. Later in the summer they did such brave things to better their life in a calm and considered way that when I think back on it I’m still in awe of their actions. I am so proud to call them my friend.

I once made a joke about getting high with the implication that it had to come from drugs. My friend in their infinite wisdom (damn them) said that altered states can come from anything: music, nature, even a trip somewhere (pun reluctantly placed). I thought about this a lot. An altered state is a place and time where the normal rules do not apply. Where you can be unburdened for a moment to live out a desire and in doing so begin to know the person who holds those desires. Dreams are adventures in ourselves.

The thing with altered states is that they are by nature temporary and any attempts to prolong them past their natural length incur exponentially higher costs, such is the cosmic bargain. The body fights to wake up from a sleep, drinking for too long breaks your body, harder drugs are self-explanatory. Altered states are inherently unstable, like bubbles. They are realms to visit and return from. A mini-heroes journey each time. Songs are beautiful in their finiteness, after all.

What interests me most is what we do with the bounty of the deep. What do we do with what we’ve learnt? What midnight colours are now visible in daytime? Who will we be now we know who we are?