There and Back Again: A Heroic Journey Into the Unconscious

“You took too much. You broke a wall. You fucked up.” Anxiety kicks in, guttural fear. My heart is already racing furiously. I start to hear my loved ones voices, their floating faces circling round me as they lament my descent into madness. I was experiencing, in real time, my worst fear. The more I fought the worse it got. I look around as my room fades from a neon lit purple to grey. My plants die in front of my eyes, a measure of time rapidly passing. And I think to myself, seriously concerned:

“How long have I been in this state? Where am I really? Surely I am not still in my room, years have gone by. I must be locked in an asylum somewhere, unaware of reality and trapped in my head.”

Panic consumes me. It flows through my veins like a burning poison and spreads through my entire being. “Please let this not be real. Just let me be sober again. Bring me back to my regular mind.” And just as quickly as panic set in, it dissipates. Acceptance. I slide into surrender. If I lost my mind, there is nothing I can do about it now. Not in this state. Just let it.

“Please help me work through this incessant blockage I feel in my mind. In my life.” This was the simple intention I set before drinking a chamomile tea with 5.7 grams of powdered dry mushrooms, my first heroic dose. A heroic dose is defined by Terence McKenna as a dose greater than 5 grams. Taken alone in the dark. I have been cultivating a relationship with psilocybin for over a decade. These holy teachers have helped me process trauma and grief. They have helped me work through and let go of various negative experiences and emotions but an anchor that I could not break free from continued to weigh heavy on my existence. I felt stalled by it unsure what was causing it and therefore unable to address it properly. I decided to consult with the holy teachers and see what answers, if any, would reveal themselves to me. I did not anticipate the depth of the journey awaiting within my own unconscious. Many times I have felt estranged from society. Disassociated from this shared reality between the living. The fear of losing my mind has long plagued my thoughts but what I never considered was the equally frightening possibility of being lost IN my mind. And that is exactly the reality I was thrust into navigating during my five hour long heroic journey.

I got a very real, very literal and frightening, taste of what it must feel like to be trapped in your head while the world around you moves on. My trip started 30 min in and from what seemed like one second to the next, I dove into the recesses of my mind and was uncertain I would ever touch surface again. Time ceased to exist and I found myself consumed by a panicked worry that years had gone by without my noticing it. I sat upright in my bed and looked around as I uttered to myself “You took too much, you broke a wall. You fucked up.”

After accepting that there was no escaping this now I lay down in my bed, unable to move, and close my eyes. Suddenly, upon entering some time tunnel, I bullet train travel back through different stages of my life. On the last day of 2018, on New Years Eve, I decided to quit drinking, my second attempt at quitting in my 20’s. Many nights during those drinking days I’d black out and have no recollection of hours of lived experiences. To anyone else with me during those blackouts, I was awake, present, but the next morning my memory tape was wiped clean of those hours. Or, I would come to mid blackout not knowing where I was or how I got there, and would immediately leave where I was. These black outs are memories I never imagined I could access, and here I was waking up in the middle of them through this portal, this railway through repression, that the mushrooms opened up for me. When I’d appear in the memory as myself I could not move but I could hear and I got slices of vision, as if looking through a sleepy eye, a trunk left slightly open. I recognized the streets, voices. I was jumping from memory to memory, a la Enter the Void.

While in my bed all I could move of my actual body were my fingers. Whenever I managed to open my eyes to the present, to my room, I would look up at my hand and I would snap my fingers as if trying to snap myself out of those memories, out of my unconscious, and teleport myself back to reality. But as soon as I snapped my fingers, the mushrooms were alerted to my escape attempt, and I would be pulled right back into the memory, forced to face it. All of these buried experiences being excavated from my unconscious and I could not opt out. In some instances, I felt like I was quite literally going to explode and right when I could not take it anymore, I’d jump into another memory or a moment of nothingness, intermediary calm, allowing me just enough time to self-regulate before continuing on the next stop through this reel of twisted memories.

This kept on for a couple hours. I drank the tea at 5:30pm, a couple of hours stretched to a century. I look towards the window, no sign of light, the sun abandoned me and I was left alone in eternal darkness. This fear of light never returning lasted until I heard the coyotes howl. How glad I was to hear them. Those layered howls delivered a sense of time and calm to my frantic mind. It had to be around 7pm, when I usually first hear the coyotes in the distance. My memory ride through the tunnel of time came to an end. I tried to move but still had not regained control over my body, something I was familiar with as a person who deals with sleep paralysis.

So, I surrendered again and this time I morphed into earth itself. Evolution. I was an air bubble in the primordial soup and I was the primordial soup itself. I was the mountains. The sky and the stars. I was explosions and volcanic eruptions. Bacteria, to animal, to human being. Slowly, I started regaining control of my limbs. About a limb an hour. I morphed into different people, spoke in their voice, repeated their commonly used phrases, and felt their face on my face. I experienced an instant of life through their eyes. And then I was back in my own identity. I traveled into my own body and magic school bused through my liver. As I lay there, my eyes ricocheting between the four walls of my room, I hear a voice “Get over yourself. Who do you think you are that you don’t have to do the work? You think you deserve to be frustrated? You haven’t failed enough to earn the right to feel frustrated.” This voice was my own but I was not speaking. It filled my room, a voice with wisdom from all times. Past, present, and future. My higher self as it were.

I finally make it back to the surface of this reality and climb out of my mind. I reach for my phone, something I tried doing multiple times throughout the trip but my hand rejected it. Every time I attempted to reach for my phone to check the time my vision would bounce to the opposite side of my room with a blink. I could not, each time, turn my phone to the screen. Finally, I was able to grab a hold of it and turn it around. I unlock the screen and check the time: 10:16pm. If six hours passed and my concept of reality or time was still not restored, then it was time to call for help. I was safe. I made it back. Multiple times throughout the trip I was painfully cold but, unable to get up, I just pulled my covers over me. As I lay there returning to my senses, I realized I had pissed myself. My sheets and comforter were wet. When I tell you there were certain moments I felt I was going to explode, well, I guess I did. I got up from my bed, I was drenched in both urine and sweat. I removed all my clothes and the sheets and placed them into the washer. I changed, too exhausted to shower just then, and went to sit on my couch. I texted two loved ones to let them know I made it back safely and then, mid deep breath, I started sobbing. I cried with my entire being. I cried for the memories I accessed. For the terror I experienced at the thought of never returning to this reality. For the battle I have long waged against my mind when all I wanted was to have it back just five hours ago. For those who have been lost to the trenches of their minds and ended their lives to escape from it. The most cliché statements hold deep and simple truth. I felt humbled like never before in my life. This heroic dose took me on a journey to the darkest, deepest caves of my unconscious and it was absolutely terrifying.

A month later while watching a show I heard a Carl Jung quote that made me smile, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

I smiled because it dawned on me: that is exactly what the mushrooms knew I needed: to make the unconscious conscious. To face my shadow, my self at my black out worst, and return to myself at present with the greatest gratitude ever felt. On a smaller scale, I do live in my head daily. And the world does pass me by when I get lost in rumination and regret. I was shown what can happen when that is taken to the extreme and that was real horror. But to constantly rob yourself of the present, to commit this daily crime against myself, that should inspire horror in and of itself.

I am my own blockage.

How much time do you spend stuck in your mind?

Get out of your head and into your life.