Synesthesia's Soft Sonata

This account will actually be of two different experiences: my first and second experiences with marijuana. The reason I will include the both in one account is that my first experience was rather bland while the second was beyond extraordinary.

My first time to ever ingest marijuana was at the very end of my senior year of high school. I was 17 years old at the time. I had been in the radio station on the computer for around six hours that day. (My friend C had a job at the on campus radio station.) I was behind on a senior project and spent most of the day catching up.

C and his cousin from Michigan, who was staying at his house that month, dropped by with an apple and told me  to come by later and smoke some weed with them, but this is all beside the point.

On the occasion I aim to explain my friend J came up from Panama City for the occasion. He, C T, Cameron and I spent that night riding around and looking for parties. We found one out at the lake outside of town. When we arrived there were three girls running naked out of the lake- a wonderful start of an evening.

I took one big swallow of Vodka straight from the bottle while we were still there. We got tired of the crowd there, though, being comprised mostly of rambunctious rednecks. So, after an hour or two there we left for Charles' house.

Back at C T' place we were joined by J.J. and his cousin, C M. B mentioned that he had some weed, so we all decided it would be festive to partake.

With B's one-hitter we started to smoke pot in turn, B, C M, then myself. The particular strain of pot that B had, however, was one of the kinds that take much longer to take effect. Because of my inexperience with marijuana as a whole I was actually unaware of strains like this at all. Thinking the weed was just weak, I continued to smoke more and more, until I had smoked around the equivalent of half a gram of what I found out to be an extremely potent creeper.

At the time I had smoked the last of the weed I would smoke that night I began to feel more and more weightless and inebriated. I closed my eyes and began to feel my body slip into a motion that I was entirely pleasant and I did not care to stop. My friends watched as I did this odd dance-type thing while leaning against the truck. Behind my eyelids I began to have visions of something similar to a racetrack, composed of alternating red then yellow arrows, circulating, directing me as to which motion to move. The movements felt almost effortless, circulating in ellipses, then in figure eights.

My sense of time became heavily distorted, lost in movement and weightless euphoria. As such, I do not know how long that entire happening went on. In  any event, the sensation was interrupted every time one of my friends would bring my peculiar behavior to attention; I would open my eyes and it would all vanish and I would explain to my friends that they had "knocked me out of the zone". That "zone", which I came to cherish, I did not fully know at that time and was a brand new thing to me.

After a while longer of these closed eye experiences I slipped into an utterly exhilarating, yet peaceful dream or trance state. I felt myself become a huge red feather, spiraling down in complete blackness. My body reflected this trance state and I began to loop in circles all the way down onto the ground with what my friends later described as "Matrix-like" body control. My body fully prostrate on the ground, my head continued the feather's slow spirals downward with ever decreasing wavelength until I was entirely flat against the ground.

B picked me up and told me he knew the exact thing that I needed; he put me into the driver's seat of C T' truck and turned on Minus the Bear. He shut the door and I closed my eyes again and was immersed in a brilliant world of abstracts, geometry and colors. I certainly do not pretend to remember all of the stages of this exploration into my mind, but of what I do recall are some of the most pristine, beautiful images I could have ever dreamt up.

In the blackness behind my eyelids I began to soar. With the music I flew, disembodied into a world of no boundaries, no beginning or end, no structures whatsoever- an endless expanse of turquoise wherein my body no longer existed; I had become the music flooding my ears.

Speeding through the beautiful blue, the intricate notes of the music began to synthesize before me, some notes as rhombuses, other as pentagons, spheres, hexagons, triangles, cubes and all other manner of two and three dimensional shapes one could think of- and many more no one could imagine. The shapes flew by me just as the notes would hit my ears. Ever onward I ventured into the music and into my mind- every new sound becoming a new sensation- visual, tactile and so on. It wasn't until almost a year later that I learned the term for what I was experiencing: synesthesia.

After a number of songs I transformed, no longer disembodied, but taking on the form of and immense brown eagle. While in this state my wings would also change with the music; beginning as anatomically correct feathered wings, then morphing into undulating red ribbons, later into a series of very razor-like blades shaped in an "x". The shapes continued to speed past me as I flew on and on, eventually coming to rest at the entrance of a cavern in the face of a mountain- the first concrete structure so far in this new world.

I became my skin and bone self again and went into the cave, where a green dragon was waiting for me. The dragon had some girl that I must obviously save entrapped. So, in the fashion one must expect in such a ridiculous fantasy, I slayed the dragon and flew away with the damsel. I knew the whole time how ludicrous and juvenile this was, but had long given up any urge to control my direction in this voyage. It was much the same as when in one of those semi-lucid dreams wherein one knows he is dreaming but has not the wherewithal to control the situation. Indeed, the whole experience was very much like a dream.

The time came when C had to be back home so I got into his car. He backed up only about ten feet when Budzien stopped him to tell him something I cannot remember; I was astonished at first by B's speed, because I felt as though we had backed up at least half a mile. But, the reality of the situation hit me instantly afterwards.

I went into Cameron's pleasantly cool, dark room and lied down on the mattress on the floor and bundled up in covers and continued on my journey.

I closed my eyes and flew into the blue once more, my body gone once again. With no music there were not many shapes, but I was still in an ecstatic state of euphoria. I soared further and further until I came to what I will denote as a "shape"- but it was so much unlike something as mundane as a geometric figure that I am only using the term for lack of any term that could ever truly convey what this thing was or represented. I could best describe as similar to the "POW!" shape made when a superhero punches a villain in a comic book. The shape continued to expand beyond all comprehension, constantly changing its color and multiple aspects of its geometry. I was suspended in awe at the sensation of total supremacy this body exuded. This amazing body instilled in me the sensation that all things, all knowledge and all emotions ever known and unknown were contained within its endless expanse. Suddenly it came to me- that this thing was what people called "God"- the summation of all cosmic energies.

My body was immediately overwhelmed with such ecstasy as that of a full body, soul and mind orgasm. I had entered a trance state of religious transcendence. I opened my mouth and told C, "I see what people try to call God," to which he promptly replied, "Awesome, man."

Soon afterwards I drifted off into sleep. The effects I had experienced were far and beyond what I, or any reliable scholarly source, could contribute to marijuana. My guess is that every condition- my setting, mind set, brain chemistry and the amount I had consumed all perfectly aligned to create that dream state from cannabis alone. Thankfully, however, this was not the last time I would experience these effects from marijuana. I've smoked pot roughly a hundred or so times, and in much, much larger quantities than on that night, but only twice, including this incident, have I gone into this extreme state of trance as a result of marijuana.

note made on 8 april 2010: damn i feel like such a stoner after coming back and reading that last line... a hundred or so times... i've found myself smoking 10 in a day every now and then lol.