DOSE:

2 cups

oral

Datura

(tea)

BODY WEIGHT:

50 kg

I visit my friend and he informs me he has collected the Datura plant. I am told it is “like tripping on acid.” I catch a glimpse of white flowers. I sit at the kitchen table and talk with my friend C and do not oversee the brewing the tea. There are five of us at the house. I drink two cups and the liquid is dark brown.

Within an hour I am wobbly and tired. This is all there is to it, I think.

The part of me that is wobbly and tired seems to be the consistent me whilst there is another me elsewhere but 'she' seems to be in a different point in time, like a memory. I think I am sitting down to find I am standing, and vice versa. I roll a cigarette and lift it to my mouth to smoke it, but it has disappeared. I roll another, again it’s vanished. My friend C talks to radios, curtains, empty air. I think how bizarrely he is behaving. There is an overarching sense of murkiness, of being in a dark whirlpool. Movements are slow motion. I am approached by a formless entity, am instructed in various details, yet I find myself in another room at the same time. I drink countless cups of water. I continue to try, futilely, to smoke a cigarette. Again, the cigarette has disappeared by the time I have brought it to my lips. I walk into weird cave-like atmospheres, Doctor Who-esque, they seem tubular, grainy. I spend a lot of time in those, come back out again, and do not recall what has occurred. There is a low buzz in the room and it seems minutes pass to walk from one room to another. When the room is not solid it is composed of waves and I am forced to sit down, only again, I am standing up and in a different spot.

The air in the room is thick, the sense of doom in my gut is sickening. There are light voices around me and I don’t know which to follow or to listen to.

Some time later it appears I have made my way home. I am in my bedroom. The bed unmade as I had left it, books stacked against the wall and on my side-table, my clothes, my window ledge with jade plants and cacti facing the sun. On my bed my friend D is reading my notebooks, I move closer to him and I can see my handwriting and drawings. A fight erupts since I would willingly let him read those if he'd ask. He tells me we are in his house, I am not at home, that he is not reading my notebooks but a magazine.

Such drowsiness. Rivers of darkness. Fear and sleepiness alternated with diversions by a door here, a person there, a whisper over there, and the endless phantom cigarettes. My friend C continues to appear to whisper his deepest secrets to the radio and to the curtains. His murmuring bothers me. I eventually fall into a shallow sleep, a sheet of black static punctuated by faces and sounds wakes me occasionally.

The next day we have to vote and my friend D and I walk to the local school where the booths are set up. People, the street, the sky appears wavery and insubstantial and I stay close to my friend as we walk. Everything is extremely blurry and I ask a poll person to read the candidates out me, with the excuse I have left my glasses at home. After two days my vision clears but the days following are surreal and filled with dread.

It was 11 years ago that I consumed Datura for the first and last time. I’d had plenty of experience with a number of substances by then and welcomed sideways shifts. But that was very different.

One of key challenges of Datura, for me, is that my reality changes thoroughly yet there is the underlying assumption that nothing has changed. The consumption of the plant itself is eclipsed. It is not like consuming acid where there is a discernable shift or a point of “normal” to refer back or forward to, such juxtaposition being one prime prize of acid. Datura so seamlessly inserts me into another state that the new reality goes unquestioned. I found it exceedingly difficult to know where I was, what I was doing, and where to locate the singular me at any time. But that’s in hindsight—at the time the situation of “me” was not apparent as it is now.

This experience was not linear or clear as it might sound from the limits of my description. Time and self were smudged all over the place. The perceptions/events were not interesting at the time, they were just like some upside-down day that I had to make the best of. And there is a lot I do not remember. Probably I am fortunate to recall what I do.

All I gained was knowing yet another realm is possible, which I guess has its own value. It was a glob of muddy chaos that made no sense, and probably would not, unless one found oneself under the guidance of someone who understands the spiritual properties of such plants.

While some of the details I have noted might sound interesting or even tolerable, Datura ultimately gave me the sense of being trapped by a malevolent something that knew how to play with me and could have obliterated me if it had wished. A sense of a being that did not want me in its world. For this it is not comparable to any other psychoactive material. (And the cigarette phenomenon baffles me. It seems to be the one thing all users have in common.)

Exp Year: 1994	ExpID: 49290
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Mar 19, 2006	Views: 56,986
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Datura (15) : Small Group (2-9) (17), First Times (2)