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This Is Your Brain On Drugs

02:42 / 15.06.04

So you know how you have all these profound, amazing ideas when you're in altered states of consciousness, and a lot of the time you can't remember them later? Have you ever remembered one after the fact and realized it was utter rubbish, or that it was actually something you already knew but the drugs or whatever made it seem like a sparkling new shiny idea fresh mined from the Akashic record instead of something your subconscious went and pulled out of your ass?

I came across this scrap I apparently wrote down (in very odd handwriting, but that's a different issue altogether) whilst out of my skull, and for the life of me I don't see why this seemed relevatory at the time:

"Control issues related to toilet training. Major psychological impact of holding in stool - results in people holding in emotions. Similarity to" (At this point it just stops.)

Mwah? I'm regurgitating Freudian psychobabble at 2:00 AM like it's a divine revelation that I thought important enough to put in my journal?

I'm sure there are some funny stories out there about things like this. 'Fess up. Cuz otherwise I'm just going to feel lame and worry a lot about my dad telling me there was a Potty Monster in the toilet and how that may have deeply scarred my psyche. And I bloody well even wrote a rhyming summary, even if it scans like a three-legged one-eyed dog running downstairs.

Mrowr!

10:50 / 15.06.04

Not drug-related, but since I was a sproglet, I've had that dream wherein one realises that flying - or, at least, directive floating - is simply a matter of lifting one foot off the ground, then the other, maintaining one's balance, and coordinating vertical with forward motion. It's always so real, and so obvious a readily-performable skill, that in the hypnopompic moments before full wakefulness, I find myself frantically trying to remember how I did it.

Never works, though.

Ex

11:24 / 15.06.04

My dream world similarly sometimes produces really quality observations, and sometimes appalling tosh, and I can't distinguish between them in the dream. For example, I still think the revelation a dream-friend murmured to me in a dream-cafe ("You can have friendly lovers or lovely friends") was a nice bit of whimsy, and I would give my subconscious an icecream (if I could find it) for coming up with "Heterosexuality is a system for linking bodies to acts to identities", as it did while alseep some time last year.

However, last week I made the somnolent observation that allowing Aragorn to lick chocolate mousse cake off my thumb wasn't cheating if my SO was within one hundred yards. I thought this was the kind of information that would transform relationships worldwide and would see me unseating Dossie Easton as the Top Dog of sexual negotiation.

So I learned from dreams that fierce emotions aren't always attached to appropriate events. There's a lovely bit in Tibor Fischer (Under the Frog) where one character constantly dreams of reading the most amazing book of poetry in the world. Only once does he manage to bring back one sentence from the dream: "The dog ran."

11:31 / 15.06.04

I've had the same sort of dream Ganesh I was getting really pissed off with the people around me "Look it's simple lift one foot and now the other, what's wrong with you people"

I actually wrote a dream this morning on my PC at about 4am, will be interesting to see what I actually wrote.

As for the out of the face thing, I've been coming up with excellent ideas while I have a smoke in the kitchen but I can't remember any of them.

My house mate has come up with an idea of selling bricks made out of mud, he's serious about it.

11:40 / 15.06.04

i had horrible dream the other nite. i dreamt i was morrissey, and i was lying in bed with nick cave (that was a good bit) when all of a sudden a giant black hairy catapillar comes crawling towards me out of a wooden chest in the corner of the bedroom. i start screaming and shouting "Nick! do something! get it away from me!" i actually shouted this out loud in real life and nearly punched my girlfriend in panic.. just thinking about it now gives me the creeps....

11:43 / 15.06.04

Aren't bricks already made of mud? A specialised form of mud, I grant you, but mud nonetheless.

He could add straw for an extra authentico rustic touch. And do wattle-and-daub as a sideline in eco-friendly housing.

I am always having very profound thoughts in somnolent states but I never write them down, so the only thing I recall is that I had a terribly profound thought - never what it actually was. Perhaps this is a good thing, as it enables me to maintain my illusion that I am awfully wise and inscrutable (I am not at all wise or inscrutable).

12:08 / 15.06.04

He was going for the dried grass method rather than straw, I did try and tell him that people have already used the mud bricks idea but he was thinking on a larger scale, a large warehouse in London with lots of mud. He has actually built a barbeque out of them in the back garden, which does actually work (at least until it rains).

Although I'm not much better we found some old school chairs which we've got in the back garden and I was thinking about taking them all (there was about 30) and varnishing them and selling them to the middle classes, you know as art. The authentic graffiti would change the price from chair to chair.

Tryphena Absent

12:12 / 15.06.04

I dreamt that I was running down a hill on point(e) in men's black, leather, lace up shoes. It was immensely fun because I was running at great speed but I kept seeing dogs tied to lamp posts and eventually one seemed so frightening that I had to stop and wait for my people to catch up so they could walk me past the dog.

Revelation: my fear of dogs is scuppering my pretense at freedom.

Well that's been obvious for 10 years.

12:31 / 15.06.04

I once awoke after a night's heavy boozing to find that I had written down on my bedside table a theory linking different theoretical schools of anthropology and the changing view of witchcraft. It actually formed the kernel of a respectable essay, of which I was quite proud.
I often have dreams who's emotional impact are far beyond what actually happened. I wake up inconsolable because in the dream the shop didn't have any butter. I don't know what that's all about.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

13:22 / 15.06.04

Random Access Hard Disk time instead of linear, analogue time with me as the Play Head. See, instead of time being like a tape, constanttly passing the 'repro' head of my internal 'tape machine', all physical and fixed, it was suddenly rendered hard disk style, with 'me' able to hop around in random access, non-linear editing style and visit (and revisit) any given moment of the whole psychedelic experience at will.

Fuck, that really was profound, and didn't seem like codshit afterwards at all. Shall I start another thread?

13:43 / 15.06.04

Hmmm.

You know, on the same trip as the toilet training revelation, I also had a thing about psychedelics as time travel. Time never does seem to move at the same rate as usual when you're bombed anyway, and I became convinced that if one used one's mind to manipulate reality in the proper way, one could resolve timewave potentialities according to will - basically, jump between potential futures, and possibly potential pasts.

Also became convinced that each individual person may actually exist in a separate timewave sequence, and that this accounts for a lot of people disagreeing about details of past events - not just that perceptions or memories differ, but realities differ - it's two people from different time sequences trying to resolve what were actually separate events in two almost-the-same-but-slightly-different pasts, like parallel dimensions. (Of course, since percepion defines reality anyway, I'm not sure that this is a new insight or just a different way of formulating RAW's Quantum Psychology, but it's interesting...)

14:08 / 15.06.04

My house mate has come up with an idea of selling bricks made out of mud, he's serious about it.

Other business ideas as a result of altered states -one of my firends suggested that I should open a shop selling Lederhosen next door to the shop he was going to open, selling Lederhosengummiuppentreiber, which prevent one's Lederhosen from falling down. At the time I thought that maybe Lederhosengummiuppentreiber alone weren't enough to keep a business afloat...

14:42 / 15.06.04

They say that you only dream for, like, fifteen seconds before you wake; but I swear, some nights I dream for eight hours solid & if I'm not deeply asleep, I'm still thinking the whole time. So I was struggling to sleep & thinking and dreaming that I was on the longest quest ever, and at the end I got a bagel. And I was thinking, that whole quest was to get a bagel? And then I thought, Sleep is about struggling all night long, and all you get is a bagel.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

07:26 / 16.06.04

Entire cults have committed suicide over less.

unheimlich manoeuvre

23:48 / 09.07.04

i was thinking while having a smoke that if the new British legislation about inciting religious hatred was based on belief systems as definitive rather than "biological" ethnicity or race, that (not necessarily) atheist political and ethical points of view ought to be similiarly covered.

No star here laces

18:09 / 10.07.04

15 sheets of A4, the result of 3 hash yoghurts and a bad case of the flu (the yoghurts due to being unable to smoke due to hacking cough).

Create 3 layer connectionist neural nets and then use each net as a node in a larger 3-layer net. Interconnect these as chunks modelled on the brain in terms of designate one as the limbic system, one as the neocortex etc.

And you'll have an artificial intelligence, honestly.

Was absolutely convinced I'd win the nobel prize for that...