DOSE:

4 hits

smoked

Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

10 st

A few months ago, I had a bit of a freak out (to put it mildly).  I have wanted to write down exactly what happened both in my mind and in the real world, but didn’t know how to put it.  Well, I’m swallowing my pride and doing it.  It’s probably not going to be completely coherent, but it is, at least, honest and a very accurate representation of what I perceived to be happening.  Despite my fears and perceptions, the people involved handled the situation brilliantly and I could not have got through it without them.

It started at Tom’s, while Taya and I were watching The Wonderland Experience with Tom in his bedroom.  At least, I would guess that’s when it started.  I don’t really have a sense of beginnings with these things, it’s more of a gradual change.  There are a lot of uncertainties with this kind of experience, but I’m pretty sure the frame of mind I was in was a familiar one.  I have been smoking weed for a while now, and I know the risks.  I won’t go too far into details, but suffice to say, I’ve done my research.  Every experience with the drug is different - I have experienced extreme creativity, elation, philosophy and sadness.  All very different frames of mind, but all common in some way.  There is always a point in the evening when I feel a certain detachment from my universe.  This happens from day to day all the time, but when smoking weed I feel less sensitive to my surroundings, and I can analyse this experience more closely. 

The best way to describe it to someone that doesn’t know is this:
When I'm reading a book and my mind trails off - not necessarily away from the story, but doesn’t literally read the words on the page.  Suddenly I find myself right at the bottom of a page I don’t remember reading, but I know my eyes have scanned the words.  My brain has the words in it somewhere, but I have no real recollection of them.  I visit this frame of mind quite often when stoned.  It can often mean that I don’t grasp what’s going on in a film we’re watching, or understand what someone might have said to me, but as it’s only an intermittent thing, and not all night, it’s not a big problem, and can often lead to interesting adventures around my mind.  It’s sort of like I'm sitting in the back of my head, watching my life play out on a cinema screen.  Thinking about what’s happening, and leaving my body to react instinctively. 

Sometimes, when I’ve had particularly trippy weed and there are no real distractions around me, I feel like I’ve gone up another level altogether, and I’m watching my subconscious mind playing with my conscious thoughts while I sit in another cinema in my sub-subconscious.  This sub-sub conscious cinema is very interesting and exciting.  I can introduce a conscious thought, like a picnic in the park, and watch my subconscious flip through files so-to-speak - memories, ideas…often, for some reason, I will see vintage cartoons detailing aspects of the thought.  Cartoons I don’t remember seeing in real life, but that my subconscious uses to analyse a thought.  If I try hard enough I can see this happening during the daytime, when not under the influence.  I have come to the conclusion that this is how my brain works.  That makes sense to me, and it seems incredible that I can see these inner workings taking place.

Now, this is all well and good, but one evening, after watching aforementioned Wonderland Experience, a disturbing situation arose.  We had had a few shotties and I was feeling contentedly high.  I sort of remember the beginning and the end of the film, but have very little recollection of what went on in-between.  It is likely that I had a bit of a trip into my sub (or sub-sub) conscious during this time, and came back to reality after that. 

Except I didn’t seem to fully return to the real world.  I remember someone putting Family Guy on, and sitting while Taya and Tom laughed and chatted.  I was slowly becoming aware of an unintentional detachment from the room.  Try as I might, I couldn’t grasp the storyline on Family Guy.  It wasn’t that it was moving too fast, I just couldn’t connect jokes to punchlines or anything.  This is not an unfamiliar experience, but it felt a little unnerving because I had a small niggling feeling of claustrophobia, and the sensation that the longer I sat there, the deeper I was falling.  Then I felt like I had been quiet for too long and that I should say something to bring me back to reality.

Usually at this point, something would come to mind and I would say it, but all I could focus on was the question of what I would say.  I became fixated over the line between my positive and negative thoughts.  I need to say something/what if I can’t think of anything? I need to watch the TV/Why can’t I understand it? I need to get back to reality/what if I stay like this forever?  This fixation quickly evolved into panic, and I was becoming aware that my heart was beating quickly.  This sometimes happens when smoking weed, but due to me being already paranoid, I became extremely worried.  The fixation of positives and negatives evolved into a logical thought process: what if state of mind followed a long line, with happiness at the top, death at the bottom and whatever was happening to me, right in the middle.  I got more and more worked up about this and decided I was having a panic attack.  I couldn’t help but think about the line of mental wellbeing I had conjured up:

Happy

Pondering

Philosophical

Obsession / Fear

Panic Attack

Madness (Alzheimers, Autism, Aspergers etc.)

Unconscious

Heart attack

Death

I truly believe what followed was an episode of utter madness (though I now see madness to be another state of mind that, depending on how far down the rabbit hole one is, one may have the ability to control the outcome).  Tom asked if I was OK.  Apparently I was ‘fidgeting’.  I knew that I had felt like I didn’t know how I should sit, like sitting was alien to me.  Like being in my own body was alien to me, so naturally I was trying to get comfortable, and this appeared very strange to an outsider.  I suppose it would have appeared similar to a baby in a high chair.  Uncomfortable, but unaware of how to move his body properly to get comfortable. 

Anyway, when Tom quite rightly asked if I was OK, it acted like a catalyst.  It made it not in my head.   Suddenly, my fear that something wasn’t right was amplified because others noticed it.  My heart was beating too hard and too fast for me to keep it to myself now, so I decided I absolutely had to say something.  After deliberating how to do this for what I believe to be quite some time, I turned to Taya and said “My heart’s beating really fast”, or words to that effect.  I’m not sure how I said this.  I tried to sound calm, but the concern I was feeling must have come through in my voice and Taya started to panic too.  It suddenly occurred to me that I had never witnessed someone panic openly about my health.  I looked at Taya and saw the same questions in her eyes as the ones I was thinking.  “What’s wrong with him?”, “What if we have to go to hospital?”, “What if it’s serious?”  I said I was having a panic attack, and Tom suggested we go and make a cup of tea.  He was trying to sound calm so that I wouldn’t panic any more, and that sort of helped, but I could see that it wasn’t real calm, and my mind was telling me that if he’s suggesting something new to do, then it must be because something bad is happening to me. 

As I stood up, the full weight of my state of mind hit me.  Even though I was doing and saying things, it felt like I was still in my subconscious cinema.  Rather than just doing things and saying things, it was like I was ordering my body to say and do things.  I could literally feel the delay in reaction and the messages coursing through my nervous system.  Like I was controlling an organic robot from inside.  I suddenly felt another wave of panic as I thought about my heart racing.  It felt like I was controlling how fast it was going.  The more I obsessed, the faster it would beat.  Naturally I thought back to the line of wellbeing.  I was right in the middle of it.  The fact that we were downstairs making a cup of tea was because I was right in the middle of it. 

I began to think that I had the power to decide how far down the line I wanted to go, and that the panic attack was the turning point that allowed me to do this.  It was such a strong feeling that it felt like a certainty.  Like if I concentrated enough, I would make my heart beat so fast it would just stop.  This naturally made me panic, so somehow I calmed myself down again.  Every time the wave of panic came over me, I could feel my muscles tense, my blood throbbing in my ears.  I stood and watched the kettle starting to boil, as the feeling of positive/negative thoughts returned and I began to feel like I had said everything before.  Like I couldn’t think of anything but the handful of phrases swimming round my head.  And every time I said one of them, the reply from Tom appeared to be the same as last time (almost as if he was mocking me, though I knew even then that he wasn’t).  I paced up and down the kitchen involuntarily, while Tom made Tea.  The atmosphere seemed stale, like it wasn’t mine.  The feeling I normally got when I sensed another person in the room wasn’t there.  I was just watching Tom make tea in a movie.  Through waves of tears and terror at feeling nothing I managed a conversation, but I am certain now that I perceived it very differently to the actual events:

Me: “Is this what mad people feel like?  What if I stay like this?”
Tom: “It’s normal, don’t worry.  Just let it wash over you.”
Me: “What if I stay like this?  I’ve said that before.  It’s like I’m in a loop, every thing keeps repeating like in the movies”
Tom: “Ha ha, yeah.  It happens sometimes when you smoke weed; it’s normal don’t worry.”
Me: “Is this what mad people feel like? What if I stay like this? I’ve said that before”
Tom: “Just let it wash over you.”
Me: “It’s like Groundhog day, everything keeps repeating”

etc etc etc

I craved something new.  I knew in the back of my mind that I wasn’t really experiencing things over and over.  But I was worried that I was perceiving it as such, and that inner turmoil between thinking I was looping, and knowing in my mind it wasn’t real brought me back, over and over, to the original thought about my positive and negative thoughts happening in tandem and me not being able to see one without the other. 

I went into the living room and said, “This is new!” But it didn’t feel new; and it didn’t feel real either.  Everything still felt plastic.  I couldn’t feel a connection to my environment and I kept fixating on that.  I just wanted to go to sleep, in the hopes that I would wake up and it would all be gone.  In a moment of what I thought to be clarity, I realised that I felt like I was looping the last four things I did/said/saw.  Taya came downstairs after presumably hearing me wailing, and I tried to hug her.  I can’t remember what I said to her, or if I just cried but I know it was embarrassingly dramatic.  Things were still looping, and I was becoming increasingly saddened by the fact that I could feel her next to me, but only physically.  It was like the instinctive senses weren’t working properly.  I couldn’t sense her in the room, even though I was making physical contact.  I begged her to talk to me about something new, and after some deliberation she asked me what I wanted to get for our shopping the next day.  I couldn’t think about it properly.  I think I said a couple of items - peppers, crisps - but it seemed like such an ordeal to think about the real world.  It seemed much more natural to analyse why I couldn’t think straight.   To sit in my mind-cinema and think about what was happening in the real world rather than actually address it.

Tom brought me my cup of Tea, and we all went back upstairs.  I felt like Taya and Tom had decided I was out of it.  Someone may have said something to that effect, but I don’t recall.  Interestingly, this seemed to tell me to calm down and not worry, even though I was still feeling disconnected.  I sat down again, back in the bedroom and Tom started doing something on the computer.  Possibly continuing the episode of Family Guy, but I can’t remember.  I was still looping every last 4 things that happened.  Tom said I seemed like I was over the worst of it now; but I insisted everything still felt strange and that things were repeating. 

As soon as I had said it, I felt another wave of deja vu and of course another wave of panic.  Then Tom said, “It happens sometimes when you smoke weed”  I felt angry at Tom because I was sure he had said that last time I spoke about looping, and that he was just mocking me.  Another wave followed.  “Shall we do something else?” he asked, and we decided to play Halo 3.  Try as I might, I couldn’t concentrate on the game, and kept going into autopilot.  All I could think about was that there was a single thought - the idea that positive and negative thoughts happen simultaneously all the time and that if you concentrate on them, you won’t be able to think of anything without seeing its positive/negative partner, the everything starts to look/feel/sound the same and you fall back into your subconscious and can’t get out - that got me half way down my Line of Wellbeing to Panic Attack, and that once I was in that frame of mind, I could control my mental health by thinking about the possibility that I could control my mental health.  A very confusing thought, but again this is likely to make sense to anyone who has had a philosophical experience with Cannabis.

I wanted to go home, but I felt that if I expressed this desire out loud, it would address the fact that something was wrong again, which would start the whole attack all over again.  I felt my heart beat start to pound again, but this time I managed to ignore it.  “I think I would like to call a Taxi,” I said “Probably the best idea, all things considered.”  I had addressed the issue quite eloquently, and for this I felt a swell of pride.  It was the first time since the start of the evening that I had felt anything real or positive so I decided to go with it.

It went on like that for the rest of the night.  Flipping either side of the panic attack on the Line of Wellbeing.  Even waiting for the Taxi outside Tom’s, I couldn’t smile at Taya properly.  It was like I had forgotten how to express emotion.  I was still ‘telling’ my body to do stuff right up until I got into bed that night.  I was apprehensive about going to sleep now, as my mind would be free to wonder without any visual stimuli, but after two or three waves of small to moderate panic, I finally fell asleep.  It had been a very scary ordeal.  I had obviously unsettled Taya, and for that I felt terrible.  She pointed out to me the next morning that I couldn’t recall my address to the Taxi driver.  It wasn’t that I didn’t know it, I just couldn’t stop thinking about the situation.  I couldn’t get out of my mind-cinema.

The next day, I felt a lot better.  I even felt vaguely normal.  But it would be a good couple of weeks before I completely recovered.  Reality kept sitting just out of reach.  I decided to call home, to hear my mum’s voice.  Had I been completely compos mentis I would probably left it a few days before calling her, or at least not blurted out the entire nights events to her, sounding like a hopeless heroin junkie.  It was clear to both Taya and I for the two weeks after the event, that I still wasn’t making decisions properly. 

I decided to stay away from weed for at least a couple of weeks.  And even when I do take it, it’s only in very small doses, among people that understand my situation.  Even now, on a normal day and I’m staring into space, and someone asks me if I’m OK, I am taken aback for a moment and my heart rate raises slightly.

Tom explained the situation in a unique and helpful way, the next time I saw him.  He said that when I freaked out, I basically fell over a cliff’s edge.  The next time I smoke, I’ll probably take a tumble down the cliff face again, but I’ll find a branch and climb back up - if I’m afraid it’ll happen, it probably will - but my experience tells me it doesn’t matter if it does.  Then, the next time, I’ll walk along, see the cliff and run away.  A few months down the line, I’ll be dancing on the edge, possibly bungee jumping off it.  And in a few years I won’t even see it as an issue.  It’ll be just something that happened a long time ago.  I like that metaphor.  It makes a lot of sense. 

I have tried weed since, and stopped after a couple of tokes because I could feel myself falling into the trap again.  I don’t think the weed was having any effect on me at all (I hadn’t had much at all), it was just the fear of it happening again that brought it back.  Once I realised that, I was OK.  I don’t like going into my own world too much any more, but it’s important to know that it doesn’t matter if I do.  It’s sort of like quicksand.  If the only thing I concentrate on is getting the hell out of it, I’ll sink further.  But if I just let it happen, chances are I’ll be OK.  I know now that if I do have a panic attack, I have the power to pull myself out of it.  It’s just something that can happen to people; weed or not.

As terrifying as it was, I am actually glad of the experience.  For one thing, it taught me a lot about my own mind (something Tom assured me would happen to anyone who takes any drug regularly), and for another, I know now that panic attacks are just something that people can go through, whether it be triggered by a particular frame of mind, or thought; or just a chemical fuck up in their brain.  The main thing is I know I can come out of it now, no matter how fatal it seems.

Exp Year: 2009	ExpID: 87624
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: Jul 15, 2017	Views: 13,820
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