DOSE:

insufflated

Methamphetamine

(powder / crystals)

BODY WEIGHT:

160 lb

There is little description of what I actually felt physically on that night, so this may be more of a ramble than an actual experience, but I do feel that it holds some insight on how alert, attentive, focused, and obsessed the mind can be when tweaked out to the max. This is a journal entry I wrote during the peak of my 3rd (and fairly large) experience with methamphetamine. ...four hours typing away madly in front of the computer, and even consulting thesaurus.com regularly in order to get my points across as cleanly as possible.

What begins as a simple exploration of the possibility of removing the body of the need for sleep becomes a dissertation on life, reality, perception, and the current state of human existence.

----------------------
10/7/2003

In the past month, I've done the not-sleeping thing at least 4 times... Staying up for 24+ hours, completely depriving myself of sleep, spending massive amounts of time with [girlfriend], spending massive amounts of time making music - I sometimes feel as if I don't have enough time to do everything I want, and that sleeping is just wasting every precious oppurtunity that may present itself. Right now I'm on my 34th hour awake (except for a 3 hour nap), and this time I've tweaked myself completely out with methamphetamine. I haven't done meth (or any drug, frankly, aside from alcohol) in god knows how long... years... Yet, I've felt this burning urge to experience new and different states of perception and reality - all the while keeping my distance from psychedelics and entheogens.

This may seem confusing, considering psychedelics and entheogens are the tools that actually open the real doors to alternate perceptions and realities, but I'm still very wary about those things - for fear of possibly messing up something that's meant to be sacred. So my first exploitation into twisted points of view comes from the least psychedelic chemical of them all - methamphetamine. One could say the experience I'm having is a more natural experience, one that is mostly dictated by the way the brain behaves when it is deprived of sleep - something I can do without the drug too... but it gets rather hard to fight off the fatigue naturally around 24 hours.

Now here I am, not tired at all. It's really freaking amazing. I've spent like 18 hours straight on music, completely engulfed and focused on it all. The time is whizzing by, all around me... I'll look at the clock, glance back at it again, and notice that four hours have passed. Supposedly the only thing methamphetamine does is prevent the reuptake of adrenaline, meaning it simply opens the floodgates of adrenaline, preventing the need for sleep.

Now, I don't know much about adrenaline - ie: whether the body runs out of it, or whether I can replenish it on the fly. If the latter is possible, would it not be possible to completely hotwire the human body so that it never has to sleep again? I've had a conversation with [girlfriend]'s uncle about how nobody really knows why the human body needs sleep - that there is no scientific explanation for why we should have to sleep. The first assumption is to say that the body gets weak - that it needs repair. Well, if this is so, then why can't we 'repair' our bodies while we are fully awake? It certainly seems possible... Our energy comes from three things - the sun, food, and (arguably) a constant stream from the depths of the universe <--- but that's another story. Let's stay biological here.

So basically in order to do this, one would have to ingest the most potent cocktail of nutrients, vitamins, and proteins in order to keep a constant source of adrenaline, and anything else that needs replenishing... It all makes sense doesn't it?

Further in, the argument that one begins to hallucinate aurally and visually after 30+ hours. I'm feeling that a bit for sure... but this is no reason to call this state of mind 'crazy' or 'insane', for it's just an overawareness of reality (or whatever alternate reality the sleep deprived person has entered). Of course it's going to seem strange and uninviting... the urge to sleep will bite at the earlobes because the brain has been doing it nearly every night of its existence. So putting the alternate reality aside and the awareness of a new and alien sort of consciousness, it is still possible.

Now comes the question of whether or not a person will be able to familiarize himself/herself with the state of being conscious 24 hours a day, and breaking the habit of going to sleep well enough to be able to function healthily and normally in normal society. There's a hovering reality that the human race has 'agreed' upon, and that we all feel we have to hold onto in order to stay 'sane'. It's an illusion and only a massive agreement between millions of people so that we can all somewhat function on the same plane. This is necessary, of course, in order to master the art of existing in the physical realm. If we can't agree that a rock is a rock, and a tree is a tree, then we really can't do much. Agreeing on a centralized reality allows us to do amazing feats such as building skyscrapers and driving cars. This is the same agreement that we constantly strive for in modern science and technology. Everyone along the way had to agree on the names on the periodic table. Everyone had to agree on a feasible way of interpreting the human genome so that we can soon gain access to interpreting how genes affect our looks, our thoughts, and our fate. We're still digging deeper, translating that which is undiscovered into a language we can all understand.

Thus is reality. There's a mundane way of interpreting it, with all the unexplainables filtered out and all the spirituality removed, so that we can all connect on a purely platonic level, running around agreeing that a table is a table and a chair is a chair. This is necessary, and the safest, most secure, way of connecting with my fellow man - but it still means nothing. Even the mapping of the human genome means nothing - it's just a representation. Why we constantly search for ways to explain that which cannot be explained is unknown to me, but we still do it. Hell, I'm doing it right here.

So I am slowly entering a different reality -an entirely unique and personal reality that is only experienced by me. A reality that is far separated from society's agreed-upon reality. It seems pointless really, yet it has constantly remained a favorite 'pasttime' of the human race to share personal experiences among eachother. While we all can live happilly building skyscrapers, driving cars, and finding acceptable ways of manipulating the physical realm to make it more comfortable for ourselves, we still yearn for that deeper connection with one another. We still want to hear our friend tell us about a life-changing experience. We still want to hear stories of fantasy. We still want to close our eyes with headphones on and lose ourselves in the music. We still want to stare deeply into a piece of art and try to understand what other people are thinking and feeling. I suppose that's why I'm writing this. I'm more of an 'explainer' than a storyteller, however. I'm the same type of person that I can't understand - the type of person that craves an explanation for everything, a translation, a representation.

Okay wow, got off topic there.

Back to sleep depravation - at this point, I firmly believe that with the right chemicals, the human body can break the habit of sleep. This is not to say that sleeping isn't a wonderful, magical thing, it's just saying that it's completely possible to just go and go and go - but not without stepping foot into that door of unique, personal, and alienating awareness of self. Completely deleting those 7-10 hours of sleep from the normal schedule is an extremely jolting way of discovering a new awareness, and perhaps that's why it seems virtually impossible to so many people.

However, there is the possibility that sleep IS necessary, but not every single night. Maybe it's necessary in the sense that reading a book every now and then is necessary for a well-rounded intellect. Maybe it's necessary in the same way excersising is necessary for a strong, healthy body. If this is the case, then sleep becomes merely a 'thing I do' every now and then - the complete opposite of how alot of us live our lives by staying up for 2 days once every couple months or so.

Sleep is, of course, an alternate reality in itself, but the brain is only semi-conscious when it is in the grips. Dreams are still unexplained, yet they still remain as fascinating and real as when they were first made self-aware. A dream is a trip into a just as unique and personal world as sleep depravation is, except it is completely subconscious and non-shared (as far as we know). Dreams are one of the hardest things to try and relate to someone else, and as far as I can see, they have no real purpose in furthering society or 'reshaping' society's agreed-upon reality. -And that's really what we're all trying to do here, right?

We share a reality together - an extremely thin line of human experience that is tried and true for every single one of the billions of humans on this planet. Everything else comes directly from our own personal experiences, everything that breaks the rules, every ingenius idea, every piece of music, art, and entertainment, every moral and ideal, every code of ethics, every law... These things are what set us apart from eachother, and yet they are what still connects us all. Our differences realize our similarities. Every single moment in our society, this reality is bent, stretched, expanded, torn, and proved wrong for [i]just a fleeting moment[/i] until it is snapped back to that thin line of basic connectivity.

Some of these alterations, modifications, and unique (controversial) experiences stick though. Throughout our short history, we've managed to hold onto a few basic metaphysical and otherworldly ideas/things, and they have been around all along, whether it be a fairy tale, or whether it be an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. A few I can think of off the top of my head are the ideas of magic, poltergeists, religions, telepathy, mind-reading, myths, orcs, elves, gnomes, hobbits, fairies, unicorns, yeti, crystal balls, rising from the dead, zombies, etc... These things came from the brain - they were either experienced first hand, or made up entirely, yet they are believable enough so that nearly everyone in the world can still tell me what a unicorn is. So who's to say these creatures and ideas don't (or ever) exist(ed) ? Someone somewhere, or some group of people gave a name to these things, sat around campfires and told stories, or performed rituals.

Let's say in the next few hours I suddenly gain a realization that I can have conversations with the dead. It will be completely real to me - it will be an acceptable reality and something that does, in fact, exist, as has been proven so by how long it has lasted the test of time. Now whether or not I will actually be talking to another real dead human being will be debatable. There's no proving that. However, if I truly believe that I am in fact conversing with the deceased, then it will be a reality of my own unique and personal experience. I'm nowhere near that state though, of course. I'm in an overanalytic mode right now, and it'd really be a hard task for me to break through the questions and self-evaluation in order to fall completely into the grips of that kind of reality. 4 puffs of DMT would probably make it rather easy though.

....billions of different perceptions of reality crawling the earth right now - all held together by a single thread of common mundane yet necessary relation. It baffles me as to how we hold on. Somehow we've done it this long, but there's a huge explosion of self-expression arising all around us as of late (and I mean in the last 40 years). With the advent of television, the internet, and connectivity to the rest of the world at the touch of a button, we're able to access glimpses of these billions of perspectives quite conveniently. This has created somewhat of a worldwide meeting-room - a huge exchange of ideas and personal experiences. Experiences fuel ideas, create relation, and inspire. This vast network we've created has given us the chance to reshape our reality in an infinite number of ways. We can now gain perspective from people across the world, play chess with someone in China, and even create record labels that are run entirely through the internet by people who have never met eachother in person. Everyone's personal tastes can now be pruned indefinitely, for there is always a community or a person out there that is into the same thing. Suddenly technology has become a breeding ground for ways to change our world.

Earlier I mentioned that the whole point of the human experience is that it is completely transitional - this should include our reality. We've slowly been able to expand our collective shared reality starting from when we first realized we were monkeys, and now it seems to be expanding faster than ever. It's fairly obvious that this is the most important time in the entire history of human beings. Even though I've only been alive for two decades, I've been able to watch this collective consciousness twist, turn, shift, and expand in an ever-quickening rate of change. The television and radio really did wonders to speed up this process - notice how soon after the invention of the radio we had a world war. Soon after the invention of the television, human civilization blossomed at an astonishing rate with this new access to perspective and information. Huge explosions of self-expression sprouted, even if alot of them were helped along the way by large groups of people clinging onto the same idea and pushing it forward (trends).

There was another world war, and many others. Suddenly the global consciousness began to encompass far more than those simple mundane human connections. Any mode of perspective is now liable to grow a posse of followers in due time. Here we are in the 21st century - a seething mass of people with unique views and philosophies. The empty space between us is no longer empty, but filled with infinite routes of oppurtunity, bubbles of creativity, and... radiation.

We have discovered how to broadcast our own unique and personal realities to the entire world. The future of humankind could very well depend on what we choose to broadcast - but in the end everyone may stop watching the television set anyway.

Somewhere in here is some kind of government that tells us how fast to drive, how much money we're permitted to make, and what we're allowed to ingest or not to ingest. Even deeper in there lies a bunch of codes of conduct, morals, ethics, diplomacy and politics, but they all seem to quickly be diminishing in importance. These last few things seem to serve as the brakes for the evolution of our planetary consciousness. While these ideas may have been important lessons in learning how to live life productively, respecting other perspectives and beliefs, and creating an ideal environment for polite evolution many years ago, they can be vastly decieving and miscommunicative. We now live in a say-what-I-think, do-what-I-feel world, and the need for old-fashioned morale is disappearing rapidly. Unfortunately, it is the leaders of the nations in this world that are wrapped up the most in this type of language. A new generation of open minded revolutionaries are stepping forth ready to openly and honestly address our issues, and I think this is creating a huge wall of miscommunication, tension, and disagreement within political offices. Governments were not initially intended to be as transitional as they are needed to be in this day and age.

Technology is forcing the re-writing of nearly every word in the books and huge groups of people are protesting laws that have been in existence for hundreds of years. There's simply not enough room for a centralized government to continue functioning without learning to be in a constant state of attentiveness to the needs of the people. If that is not possible (and it's looking to be headed that way), then we had better get ready to scrap it altogether, and start from scratch. The people that have been involved in the United States government, at least, have been somewhat flexible in applying versatility to the books in the past with such revolutionary rewrites as the abolition of slavery and the allowance of women to vote.

The issues of today, however, are becoming much more complex for anyone to keep any kind of focus, direction, or general principle in the laws. The drug war has been in effect for decades and has accomplished absolutely nothing. Perhaps the closest we have gotten to coming to an agreement on this one was when marijuana was legal in the 70s under Carter. The old fashioned loonies as always shifted focus to Vietnam while it was made illegal once again. Drug policy is a tricky issue, I'm sure, and I'm glad I'm not involved in that hooplah... I just dodge around in the shadows like everyone else has to do upon the rare occasion that I ingest anything illegal. In an ideal world it would all be legal, everyone would be informed, the bad reputations would disappear, and they would be viewed and used as tools for exploring consciousness, reality, and these fleshy bodies that we have been lucky enough to inhabit. Another recent tricky issue is the issue of copyright infringement. Media is avaliable to whoever wants it for free on the internet and looks and sounds exactly like the real thing. Again, this can be used and abused, and can serve as brilliant promotion for music lovers, or a grab bag for apathetic thieves. The laws are in a constant state of fluxuation and re-writing, and nobody can seem to find a solution.

More importantly, everyone is beginning to ignore the laws altogether.

This may be the biggest problem we face today. At this rate, every generation may be evolving twice as fast as the previous, and I honestly can't see any possibility of a centralized government for any nation in 10 years. Already this generations government candidates are scaring the living shit out of the existing occupants. Of course, the leaders of the nations will be running around like headless chickens as they begin to realize the impossibility of control over so many people at once. There will be a breaking point where every ideal any government has tried to adopt becomes meaningless. Govt leaders will turn to force, of course, and threaten the planet out of frustration... and blahblahblah. I'd rather not write out that side of the scenario, because it probably won't be pretty - and I won't be involved in that nonsense anyway.

Somehow I went from methamphetamine to alternate realities to the evolution of humankind to hobbits and unicorns to government confusion and to the end of the human occupancy of the planet Earth.

I'm slightly tired... more delirious than tired.... I'm gonna see how much longer I can go - I have a couple days off work, and I've never really taken this stuff to the edge before.

Exp Year: 2003	ExpID: 29004
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: May 3, 2006	Views: 18,625
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Methamphetamine (37) : Alone (16), General (1)