What Happened During Dinner
The Degenerate and I were talking last night about the post, Into the Ketaverse, wondering what the reaction would be. He teased me a bit, speculating that people would soon be clamoring for more of his content, looking forward to the trip reports more than “that touchy-feely stuff you’ve been posting recently.” He joked about needing to change the name of the blog eventually.
I didn’t take offense. I thought there was a chance he might be right, but I was enjoying the conversation and glad that he seemed inclined to contribute more.
We continued talking and after a while, animated, he started rattling off ideas for posts, like a reporter pitching stories to his editor. I chuckled, shaking my head at his wilder ideas, wondering if I had created a monster.
It was my turn to make fun of him, “Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me you’re actually the main character in this story…”
“That’s it!” he said. “Origin story…”
Seeing my confusion, he reached for his iPad and disappeared into it for a while. “There!” he said triumphantly, putting it on the table and spinning it toward me.
On the screen I saw a years-old entry in his Notes app. “My very first time,” he beamed. “Just as I wrote it up the next morning.”
A quick read convinced me that I needed to let his unedited words tell the story of that first time, before he was The Degenerate, and let them fill you in on what happened during dinner.
Last night, on the first day of the year, I had my first true K-hole. I thought I had fallen into one before, but I realize now that I had just skimmed the edges and then been flung back out – I never actually entered. This time I did and it blew my mind in a completely new and intense way.
This note is an attempt to describe and explain what I experienced. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to find the words to describe what happened and how it felt. But I think it will help me process it to write it down as best I can, knowing that there’s a lot that will be missed in the telling. I also know that I may have forced a narrative and a framework onto what was a mix of parallel experiences, linear thinking, confusion and intense emotions. But it’s worth an attempt so….
After I took a very fat “V****-sized” line of ketamine, I started feeling the way I’ve always felt before on K: very intoxicated, high as a kite, uncoordinated, unable to speak, giddy, enjoying the music. But after about 10 minutes, suddenly the whole world shrank and I felt myself slipping into a single moment of time – the very small space in front of me and the tiny slice of time I was currently in. I became aware of a beat or tick that kept time at the lowest level of consciousness with many thousands of them fitting into the tiny sliver of a second that I had fallen into. Somehow I was within a single moment but these ticks were still aligned with and connected to the beat of the music or the saccades of my eyeballs in the real world.
As I fell further, these ticks slowed down and stretched in perceived duration until each one seemed to last for a second or more and became like a metronome, tick, tock, tick, tock. I realized that a whole timeline existed at this level and a train of thought could exist at this frequency, a much higher one than we usually operate on. The tick, tock began to accelerate coming faster and faster until it became a buzz that then collapsed into a discrete percussive sound that ended suddenly. Then I heard the slow tick tock again, which sped up again, until the buzz reached infinite frequency again and collapsed into another discrete sound. A third time this happened until I realized that the tick tock that I was aware of and experienced speeding up were themselves creating a higher level tick tock on each collapse. As I became aware of this the lower level ticks started moving from slow to fast at a faster pace, with the time it took to collapse into the higher level tick coming more frequently. I was simultaneously aware of the low-level ticks being “long” and containing enough time within in them to think, and the fact that they were accelerating in frequency (while each still being “long enough”), and the fact that their collapse was a high-level tick that was itself accelerating.
Then I realized that the higher-level ticks were reaching infinite frequency and collapsed into a first even higher-level tick. This is the part that seemed to take forever and a day because I had to experience each 0th-level tick accelerating until it collapsed into a 1st-level tick which accelerated into a 2nd-level tick. At this point I saw a pattern and, without experiencing it, realized that these 2nd-level ticks had to roll up into a 3rd-level and then 4th ad infinitum. And this gave me huge satisfaction to see this and my mind was blown and I felt enlightened to some extent.
I basked for a bit in my new understanding of the fractal, self-similar nature of time, marveling in the infinite levels, which I could move between and even experience simultaneously.
But then I felt a wrenching and a sudden certainty that me understanding this recursion, reaching this enlightenment, was the first tick that I was aware of in a larger clock, one that only ticked when a consciousness on the level below made this leap. At this point my mind was pretty well blown and reality started to visually shred in front of me with everything I could see and hear coming apart at the seams and becoming free-floating in time and space. It was super intense because the intellectual exercise of seeing the patterns in my perception of time and understanding something new about them, then looped back around and tore up my perception again. Nothing I’ve ever seen on acid or shrooms compared to this at all. Reality just disintegrated and I really did not have any idea what was going on.
I realized, though, that these now-highest-level ticks, one per conscious realization of the nature of time, must necessarily be the ticks of a higher level consciousness operating at an obscene scale. At this point, I became “aware” of these consciousnesses who seemed somehow above and behind me and also someplace else. And they seemed huge. And at this point I felt very, very small because my whole life leading up to this realization about the nature of time was a tick that fit together with a million other ticks into one “moment” of their “lives”. And then I heard two of them say or felt them think something like, “He still doesn’t get it….” and “Should we show him now?” and I realized that these consciousnesses were linked to my friends, who I could still barely perceive around me, trying to get me to eat, checking to see if I was okay, and that maybe each of my friends in the “real world” were creating, through their own revelations, a single tick for their higher-level counterpart. But I felt hugely comforted because these higher-level beings, one of whom was probably higher-level me, were together and related to my friends I knew. And they cared about me and what I was experiencing.
After deciding that, yes, they should show me, I started moving up the levels faster and faster and, of course, saw that they were simply in the process of coming to enlightenments themselves that were ticks for higher-level consciousnesses than them and I thought I saw it all and understood and I felt even smaller for a moment. But then I felt a “No” that made me realize I had gotten it wrong and that as we kept going up the levels, we were actually on an Escher staircase, unknowably long in circuit but definitely circular so that after the “top” (which was arbitrary and relative) you were back at the “bottom”. It was a loop without beginning or end, and our ticks, even in the real world, our ticks were made up of the moments of enlightenment of the top of the chain, and around it went in an infinite loop.
At this point I stopped feeling very small and felt like a hugely important piece of an infinite-leveled, circular system. But then everything kind of exploded and I realized that in addition to ticks within ticks, there were infinite copies of each tick, each slightly different, happening all together and overlapping within each tick. And I pulled away from them all and saw all the versions of that one real-life tick that I was still in, all happening at the same time. It’s very difficult to relate what happened next because time completely seemed to be broken. I could see all the different ticks, each a world happening. I didn’t know which one was mine anymore. I started to get really scared that linear thought was gone, that I didn’t know which level I was supposed to be on, that even within the right level I didn’t know which copy was mine…. I tried to pull away and get back to the real world but I was stuck there. I didn’t know if I could unbreak time for me and return to “normal”. But after a moment or eternity of panic and dread, I began to feel better as I realized that I couldn’t get out of it, I had to go through it. And there were “people” who cared about me at all the levels and wherever I ended up I was going to be alright. So I dove in and felt like I was tossed about by waves, no thoughts, just tossing about as everything washed over me. And I started to forget what the real world was like.
But then I saw a moment that looked close to what I remembered about the world and chose it. I don’t know if it was the right one but it had the things and the people in it that I expected and it seemed to work the right way. Slowly it expanded until I couldn’t see the other replicas and I was mostly back.
All the while that this was happening to most of me, part of me was aware of, if not attentive to, my surroundings, that there was food on my plate, that people were trying to get me to eat, that people were checking in on me and enjoying watching the state I was in, that I was clinging to the table so that I wouldn’t fall over.
I ended the experience with that amazing hug from R that lasted a very, very long time until someone (I later learned it was her) put a gummy bear in my mouth and brought me fully back to the realization that I was lying on the floor in the kitchen. My first question was whether time had passed normally here in this world while I was gone. Then I thought about whether what I saw was “real” in some way or not. Was it a hallucination, something true about how we perceive reality, or something true about reality itself? Is there a difference between those? Ultimately, I decided that it didn’t matter, or that it wasn’t a good question because something was real and, even if I made it up, the very fact that I was able to make it up, in a moment, and experience it so vividly and lucidly meant that something important had happened.