Psilocybin Trial Diary - Day four: Dosing day two (25mg)

Post-dose on Wormwood Scrubs

I’m trying to write this nearly a week later, on Wednesday, 12th August, and am having to overcome my usual procrastination and the feeling that there’s no way I can describe everything I went through last Thursday. What I need to realise is that I don’t need to describe everything. I also need to trust in myself that whatever comes up as I write will be what’s meant to come up. Forensic detail isn’t required, the essence of the experience is what’s important. Anyway, here goes…

I wake up, shower and then have a veggie samosa and apple juice breakfast – mindful of Robin’s story about how a burger breakfast had had a major impact on someone else’s dosing day. I somehow contrive to be five minutes late to the centre even though I’m staying a one-minute walk away. I wear comfortable linen trousers – which prove far more comfortable and relaxed than the jeans I wore last week. Robin comes to collect me and we go to the participant lounge where I am breathalysed, give a urine sample and answer some questionnaires.

I’m really glad I’d taken the time to write down the first dose experience as it helped me to work out the issues I had, what my fears and concerns were and what I may be able to do to have a better experience. Voicing these fears to Robin and then to James and Mark really helps as they are able to address them and help me and also look out for what may arise during the day. The saying/mantra they mention to me, “in and through” proves to be massively important to the whole experience.

At around 10.30am, I take five psilocybin tablets, amounting to 25mg. The feeling gradually rises up within me. It becomes more and more intense and more and more unbearable in many ways. Darkness descends on me. I feel panicky. I focus on my breath. I feel like I want to run away at one point but that isn’t possible – like a panic attack, this is an internal experience from which there is no escape.

As the emotions and imagery intensify, I feel more resistant, more scared, more like I just want this to stop. This time the visuals are fully-realised images, scenes and experiences most of the time and less like the kaleidoscopic patterns I saw last week.

I have given myself permission this time, that everything is OK. If I want to roll over, if I want to express any emotion at all, if I want to get under the covers, adjust the bed using the control pad that is to my right, say whatever I want, share my fears with my three ‘carers’ rather than feeling I have to suffer in silence – everything is OK. I even give myself permission to wet myself if I really can’t control my bladder because I can’t feel properly whether I needed the toilet or not (thankfully I don’t wet myself).

At one point, I allow myself to crawl up in a ball, foetal. Then I say out loud, “I hate my Dad.” James replies that this is OK. I then ask aloud, “What do I do with the anger though?” But that’s just it, it’s not about fixing it to remove it, this is impossible, it’s about changing my relationship to it.

During this phase, I see a personified horse on its hind legs wearing military clothing and holding a gun by its side. The image is very scary, threatening and dark. It peers out from beneath its military helmet with an intense frown and staring eyes. Like a dream, you can explain it to someone else but it’s only if you experience it yourself and feel the atmosphere and emotions as well that you fully understand how scary it is. The horse is looking to my left and it is my instinct to pass it to the right, push it away and escape it. But rather than do what I’ve habitually trained myself to do for what feels like my whole life, I decide to move to the left and look the horse directly in the eyes. Then I start to laugh and laugh and laugh; a military horse standing on its hind legs with a gun?! It suddenly seems so comical and ridiculous that I can’t stop laughing. This seems to form a turning point for me.

Around the same time, during the same dark phase, I also see Skeletor from He-Man in my mind and comment to the others, “He’s just an insecure little man really.” James later says Skeletor may be a symbol for my Dad. I then chat with the others about He-Man, Mum-ra (truly evil?) and the Thundercats.

I also see my Dad abusing me again – something that has flashed into my head now and again ever since it happened – but, once again, rather than pushing the image to one side and avoiding the situation, I look him in the eyes and move through the discomfort and fear (in and through, in and through).

Initially, I’m still constantly worried about needing the toilet. But after the shift beyond the darkness occurs and I am in a very different state of mind, the fear of wetting myself disappears. I can now gauge how full my bladder is. It’s strange but it’s almost as if I purposefully used the issue last week as a way of not letting go completely. Having worked through the darkness though, having been overcome and forced to face or let go of everything, I am fine.

Going to the toilet during the dark phase, I think ‘I don’t want to feel like this, I want it to stop, what if I never feel normal again, what if I’m changed forever?’ But later on, once I get through that, I think to myself ‘I don’t want this to end, I love this feeling’. (Even during the darker phase though, I catch sight of Animal on the Muppet t-shirt I’m wearing when I’m washing my hands in the toilet sink and laugh a lot about it to myself.)

With my demons fully revealed and presented to me, having looked my deepest fears directly in the eye, I enter a state where I feel completely elated, at peace, absolutely euphoric, the most relaxed and content I have ever been. At times I am flying through space, I am at the edge of the universe. The relationship between space and the stars strikes me: the intense light and the intense darkness. But the stars’ light dissipates gradually, there are many shades of grey between the extremes of light and dark.

I feel absolutely, completely present. It’s like zooming in on the present moment to a cellular, atomic level; the 'isness' of all things is overwhelmingly apparent, I can see and feel it. Every living thing, every object is shining with its own presence and life. At one point I hold a rose in my hands (after James has de-thorned it (health and safety!)) and examine it, its beauty radiating from within it. I am in awe of it and its beauty and I am one with it.

Back in my room post-dose

I realise that rather than focusing on the isness of the moment, I've always concerned myself with the 'mightness' - this might happen, that might happen, if I do x then what might happen. Anxiety can't really survive in the overwhelming presence of the isness. Negative thoughts and feelings still arise but they rise and then fade again in complete awareness. They just are. Being fully accepted just means they are a ripple that subsides quickly, painlessly and without a struggle - without either resistance or clinging on.

I ask James if he has ever read Aldous Huxley’s Doors Of Perception and he replies that he has it in his bag as he is currently re-reading it. This is bizarre. Is it a coincidence? Synchronicity? A sign, a signal or a chance occurrence? Who knows. Going with the ‘just do what you need to’ mentality I ask James if I can read some of it. It takes me a long time to actually read the words – the words move around the page and it is hard to focus, but mainly it takes me a while because the soft, paperback book feels absolutely amazing in my hands. So smooth and soft. Feeling the edges of the pages with my fingertips gives me as much pleasure as reading does.

Every sense is completely, fully immersive and alive. At times I feel the music flowing out of my palms like energy. Touching the blanket, squeezing the pillow, playing with my own hair, squeezing the foam on the eyemask, eating fruit – the texture and taste, the squish of raspberries and blueberries in my mouth – everything feels like a joyful experience.

“I wonder if this is what the Pope feels like?” I ask half-joking at one point, as I feel completely heavenly, in its most literal sense. I feel at one with myself – there is no distinction between I and myself, or any distinction between myself and other people or any other living thing. I wonder momentarily if I will end up becoming religious after this but realise the feeling, the insight is bigger than a single religious path. This covers all religious paths, all life paths, the essence of the soul, the essence of being.

I understand, or actually just know inherently, the oneness of all people and all living things. Everyone’s essence is interconnected. We are all one.

This leads me to think about the migrants who are currently effectively imprisoned in camps in Calais, desperate to come to the UK having fled thousands of miles, often risking their lives in the process. At this point I cry my heart out. Floods of tears that I don’t want to try and stop. It is an expression, like laughing (which I am also doing a lot of) and there is no question of trying to stop myself. They’re just people. They are human. They just need love and compassion. James later says that he saw the migrants and my feelings towards them as a symbol of myself.

I carry on talking about how ridiculous it is not to allow people the freedom to travel wherever they want to in the world, how manmade borders do not exist in reality and should be done away with, how people are simply trying to tell migrants that they don’t want to share what they have, don’t want to share their relatively privileged, comfortable circumstances with others. This is MINE and you cannot have it because if you have it too you will take it away from me. Crazy.

At one point, the dogs me and my wife share with a friend, Bagel and Biscuit, come into my head. I think about when I have shouted at them and how they just want love, and will respond better to love and compassion than anger and recrimination – just like any other living thing does.

Everybody needs love. Everyone IS love. I feel a knowing that approaching everyone with love is the way to live life. It troubles me applying that to my Dad and, to a lesser extent, to my Mum but I think that while I will live my life through love, it’s still my decision who I spend my time with, and there are others in my life that I want to spend time with more. That is the greatest gift I can give to anyone – time.

I think at one moment that logically I should stop eating meat, but then think about how much I like the taste – later I resolve to at least change my relationship with meat, if not entirely give it up.

Later on, I have a great understanding that my reality is mine only. I don’t need to change it, I don’t need others to validate it, I don’t need to impose it on other people and argue with them to convince them. They have their worldview, I have mine; everybody’s worldview is completely individual. Yes, of course there is more crossover between some people than others and friendships may be formed from this commonality but even then, every single worldview, every understanding of the world, every reality is unique.

I feel so much love within me and want to share it with the others so I say, “I really hope you’re as lucky as I am and have people in your life that love you” – or words to that effect. Later on, I do the ‘non-romantic handhold’ (hands holding forearms), not out of fear but because I want to share my experience with the others. I want to take them with me to the edge of the universe and show them just how beautiful it is. I also hold my own hand at times and it feels warm and comforting, the ultimate expression of self-love.

I still have negative thoughts coming into my head periodically but I now know how to approach them – in and through, in and through – approaching even negative thoughts and feelings with love, compassion and understanding.

I realise something very important about my ‘knot’ – the tight knot of tension that I often feel in my solar plexus. I realise that it is where all of my ‘disallowed’ feelings are pushed to, crammed into to become discomfort, to be expressed as anger or depression and then stuffed away again. I realise now that this merely solidifies and amplifies the feelings rather than gets rid of them. The more you resist, the more you push, the more you struggle to eradicate the feelings you don’t want, the stronger and more intense they become, the more they take over. I can visualise my knot as being a tight black mass that then develops tendrils and opens up. I feel compassion for it. James asks me while I’m in my blissful state where my knot is now. All I can do is shrug and make a ‘Merrrr?’ ‘I dunno’ type of sound.

I seem to be able to see everything so clearly, both in my internal world and in the external world. At one point I ask, “Why are people scared to be themselves? What else CAN you be other than yourself?” and I have a huge sense that only I can be me, that I don’t need to strive to be something or someone other, that I am good enough as I am.

It also strikes me that I don’t need to filter myself for other people, be palatable to everyone, be all things to all people. “If you try to be all things to all people then you just end up becoming bland and beige – and it’s exhausting too”, I say at one point. I have wasted many years of my life trying to do everything, be everything, please everyone, but, as I have been doing recently, I am going to focus mostly on the things that I genuinely connect with now.

It also strikes me how strange and pointless a fear of death – the one certainty in life – is.

I feel as if I am floating. Suspended in air. Good and bad emotions and thoughts are one in many ways, as they all need to be approached with love and compassion, whatever they are, whether they are difficult or easy to deal with.

Externally, the lights on the ceiling look like a new galaxy forming, with deep blues and purples that you can sink into infinitely. Meanwhile, the plant leaves at the end of the bed almost look like they’re spinning.

The music throughout the experience couldn’t be better suited – emotional, meditative, contemplative, at times airy, at times foreboding. It really helps to both drag the darkness out of my subconscious but also helps to soothe and ease the pain and discomfort that brings. I make a remark about how I would like a copy of the playlist and how in the pre-download age, I used to know all of the track titles and information about each track, even (I joke) down to the barely audible kazoo player in the background of a song. I couldn’t believe that James and Robin didn’t know what a kazoo was. I envisaged the four of us starting a kazoo band and laughed – it’s what the world needs! I comment on how the kazoo is often looked down upon but is also infinitely versatile and creative as anyone can play any tune on it.

After a chatty period, I quieten down and immerse myself in the music again, wanting to make the most of the rest of my journey. Gradually the waves of absolute euphoria dissipate and decrease in frequency. I don’t want it to end but, as all things must, it does. As I gradually sober up, the room and music slip back to a more normal, familiar feel and look.

We have a chat once I’ve almost ‘landed’, I fill in a questionnaire about my experience and then Robin takes me to the participant lounge where I eat my chicken dinner. Robin then very kindly presents me with a bunch of flowers (roses and lilies) which I’m really touched by and we all say goodbye for the day. I take the flowers to my room (using a water bottle as a makeshift vase) and then walk across the Imperial College and neighbouring hospital grounds to go for a wander on Wormwood Scrubs, feeling the need to connect with nature.

I stroll slowly, feeling the grass, springy and cushiony under my feet, almost as if I am barefoot. I take photos, sit on a bench and absorb the world around me. The sun warms me and I shine back at it. I think about the anger I have towards my Dad. I think to myself that while he may have hurt me when I was a child, he isn’t directly hurting me now. Or, more to the point, the only person that’s perpetuating that pain and is able to bring it to an end is myself. Being loving towards myself involves having the compassion to alter my relationships with my past pain. I can liberate myself from the negative effects of the past and want to.

After I’m attacked by a swarm of what I think were horseflies – and checking in with myself, “Is this really happening or am I still tripping?” – and being bitten (it feels good to feel all the same), I decide it’s time to head back to my room.

I watch nature programmes on TV, which just seems right, speak to my wife on the phone (I’m massively enthusiastic about going to the Extreme Chill festival in Iceland next year) and later on try to fall asleep with my iPod on. I have too many expectations of the music though (“I want it to be like earlier on! I want images, I want the music to open up.”) and find it hard to nod off.

Once I drop my expectations and just let the music envelope me, I once again feel that connection and then drift off to a sleep that’s only briefly interrupted by a particularly noisy Aphex Twin track.