I was originally going to call this
I took Ayahuasca and I Pissed Myself
but that would only be pandering to readers who want silly, dramatic headlines. This isn’t something I want to be silly and dramatic about (even though that above part is true). And the “purging” aspect of Ayahuasca that caused this phenomenon is in fact the least dramatic part of the experience. I also considered calling it:
Ayahuasca: I was afraid to shut my eyes.
Which is also true but also misleading because that sounds absurd to all you normies out there–just kidding. relax. But really, this is an experience that happens entirely inside your head, and what was going on in there was much more intense when my eyes were shut, and what was going on was some Guantanamo Bay devised mental torture where my brain was… Oh, yeah, that makes me remember another alternate headline:
Ayahuasca made my brain eat itself
And that sounds sufficiently bizarre, I guess, but what I mean by that is here’s what the medicine did: it took one prominent aspect of my personality, something that commonly occupies my mind, and turned it up to six million to the point where I was thinking in levels, like if you took a tall building and each floor (1st floor, 2nd floor, etc.) was a complete, fully complex narrative of its own, and all those thoughts on all those floors were going on simultaneously, while a headphone jack was plugged into each floor, sending all of it to a pair of headphones, and another part of me (which was walking around completely separately, just observing the phenomenon) had on headphones and was being assaulted by the soundscape of all those thoughts concurrently thinking. Don’t you hate when that happens? I was also going to call this:
Ayahuasca: I Lived My Father’s Dying Days
because the Aya community would really resonate with this. Communing with ancestors and reliving past traumas are very big things among the practitioners, so much so that it is exactly what I expected to happen. What actually happened was something that, in retrospect, I thought was an interesting allegory to both being a infant and reliving the dying days of my Dad, who died of ALS. But this comparison is a fabrication of my post-ayahuasca analytical mind. It’s not like I was aware of embodying my father in the midst of the ceremony. This is an entry point to what I think is the most pressing question of the whole experience–How much of the experience happens after the experience? –an issue i will revisit as soon as I decide on a headline for what is about to become a rather long and weird but EXTREMELY DEEP (attach grain of salt here) series of posts. Oh, and here was my last idea:
Ayahuasca: The Whiplash Cure
and that one is completely sincere.