Barbelith Underground > Temple > A different kind of deja vu

Okay, this is hard to explain.

YEARS ago, in high school around the time I first started smoking pot I began occasionally having these episodes I dubbed, for lack of a better vocabulary, 'pot-flashbacks'. No one I knew had similar experiences and of course I just chalked it up to the drug because at the time I was first falling in love with the idea of seeing 'through' the world around me and the only way I knew how to do that was with drugs.

'Well then, what the hell was it like?'

I'll tell you, although again, this is hard to put into words.

The first one, I was sitting in Geometry paying attention (to some degree) to the instructor's lesson when all of a sudden my vision and tactal sense began to 'boil'. I use that term because the only thing I've found close to describe this in words is Burroughs talkign about 'silver spots boiling in front of Audrey's eyes' in Cities of the Red Night.

Anyway, it felt similar to passing out. Vision shutters black, skin burns with added sensation from nowhere and suddenly hot air shoots through my nose.

While this was happening physically (or maybe as a result) I began to see the same scene in front of me, but superimposed over itself as a caricature - spotty and vague like a dream. It was then at this point that I became SURE that I wasn't seeing this superimposition but rather 'remembering' it from a dream, as if I had lived this before but in a dream I had recently had but not remembered until now.

From here the superimposition began to lead from the 'here and now' I started out in, veering instead toward the scene in the dream. I became aware that there was something that at least marginally felt 'important' waiting just around the next corner, like when you contemplate massive philosophies and feel you almost have 'It'. There was a woman's presence somewhere nearby in the dream corridor and somehow I knew I had to see it (even though I describe it as feminine the adverb 'her' feels wrong here). But about there it slips away and frustration sets in.

So that was the first. I had several more around this time, then nothing for years. It's hard to say how often they have come back, but they seem to cluster up every couple of years and have never again coincided with drugs except maybe the second to last time I had it when I had done a bit of coke the night before.

It's been at least three or four years now, until earlier today when I had one, in a dream. Kind of a dream within a dream about a dream or some such convoluted thing.

So, help me out. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? Anything even remotely similar? They're scary (esp. if you are driving when it comes on) but frustrating because when they disipate you want more, hoping to get a glimpse of whatever it is that seems to be slipping through the cracks.