Transient Hyperspatial Psycho-phenomena

Written by 00benallen

They started with dreams, but it didn't work. Dreams are too logical, our brains still work to make sense of the chaos. We still filter it all out, the endless churn, even in dreams. A whole town would suddenly wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. Another would wake up grinning. One time, nearly the entire province of New Brunswick woke up shouting the same word, "Neutral". It would make it on the news, strange stuff like that makes for great television, but they'd bring experts on who would talk about how the media can plant ideas in people's heads, or blame the weather. The religious and spiritual crowds had a field day, calling it visions from god or signs of doom or blessings to come. They were wrong like we always are.
Then they tried the mentally ill. People with predispositions for psychosis were the most susceptible, schizophrenics, drug addicts, people with severe brain damage. Doctors and psychiatrists started noticing patterns in their visions. They'd all see a similar face on a wall facing west, or complain of fragments of music all from the same song. The first paper came out the next year, "Visions which drift across Germany: A pattern in psychotic phenomena which correlates with geographic location and time". It was a big deal. There were a lot of early theories, most of which hinted at some connection between human minds at a distance that certain types of brains can access and pick up on. It created a big flood of new ESP research for a while, everyone hoping to find a key to telepathy or use hallucinations to predict the future or learn deeper truths about the universe. None of it worked really, just a lot of noise with occasional patterns which didn't amount to anything useful. None of the theories were right anyway, it's so hard to see something for what it truly is when you're standing inside of it, even if it can see you.
The research did lead to the next attempt though. A huge surge in psychedelics research accompanied all of the other wacky stuff. I guess the logic was if dreams and visions are being affected, so might the hallucinations brought on by drugs. I guess we were half right? I think all we did was give them a better way in.
My first experience was after I volunteered for one of the psychedelics trials. I was a "psychonaut" anyway, I'd tried every one I could get my hands on. LCD, shrooms, DMT, mescaline, I found it all so fun and enlightening. I'd worked my way up, getting brave and experienced enough to try some truly massive doses. I'd seen god, met myself from another universe, and watched passively as my whole being was scattered to the cosmic winds. It was all for fun in the end, but I think it did make me a better person too. I don't think this did.


I sat in the room and waited as they hooked me up to a bunch of electrodes and an IV, watching as the drugs dripped down into my arm. I started to feel it, a familiar discomfort as the filters in my mind lifted and I started to drift within myself. I laughed as the shapes and colours of the room around me swam, geometric and biological patterns hinting at the structure of my visual hardware. Tears came to my eyes when the music they had playing peaked in intensity and I saw the music flow in front of my eyes as well as heard it buzz through my ears. It was magic, the usual magic, an experience I'd had many times but was always fresh. Then it changed.
In my reverie, I felt myself pass into something, or maybe something pass into me, or both. All of a sudden I wasn't where I was before, and something was permeating me, leaking into me against my will. I felt trapped, oppressed, and observed. I was alone in this space, a single solitary subject of scrutiny, yet surrounded by intent and focus. I was somehow part of something else, someone else, and it was someone so unlike me, I couldn't begin to understand what it wanted. I took a deep breath, fighting against fear as it took hold of me, reminding myself that I was on drugs and that this was just some weird chapter of my trip. But instead of feeling soothed, it got worse.
I fell deeper away from myself, closing my eyes I became as large as the universe and smaller than an atom. I saw the chaos. The churning engine of creation which produced all of existence. This wasn't god. It wasn't alive, it didn't think, it just was. And within the roiling endless everything this being vibrated. I looked at myself through this being's mind and saw energy, patterns of frequency and structure which were but temporary fractals glued together by happenstance. I wasn't a person, I wasn't conscious, I was as coincidental and complex as a gust of wind. All this being saw in me was an unusual repetition. It perceived that I was made of patterns of various levels of abstraction and that some of the simpler patterns near the top were repeated within me. I suppose this was its perception of consciousness, a knowledge of the self amounted to nothing more than a blurry, lossy, internal recursion. I felt empty, I was nothing relevant at all.
Then I passed out of it, the three-dimensional space I occupied no longer intersecting with the higher-dimensional space it resided in. I looked at the doctor in the room who was examining me, realizing that my throat was hoarse from screaming. I found out later I had been screaming my own name. Over and over again. And so had everyone. For those few minutes, every subject in the lab was screaming my name.
The paper came out thirteen months later, "Transient Hyperspatial Psycho-phenomena: Sufficient doses of psychedelic drugs cause localized shared psychosis". Of course, the scientists wrote everything down that I could describe, but they couldn't make any judgements on what happened. Too anecdotal and impossible to replicate. But I knew.
Our brains filter everything out. The fantastic density of information and complexity around us is sifted into only the parts which are most useful for our survival, and as a result, we miss everything else. I think I screamed my name out of a survival instinct so basic I didn't know I had it. To insist I existed. That I was separate, independent, real. Not just a collection of frequencies and energies but a conscious being who mattered. But there was one strange part of the study that they left out of the paper, that no one in the lab would openly admit to even when I asked. Even my family won't answer me honestly, although they look horribly uncomfortable when I ask.
I wish someone could remember my name.